Eric Rauchway, with the invaluable tactical air-support of Paul Krugman, has been engaged in some excellent debunkery of anti-FDR historical revisionism. What I’ve always found interesting about the right-wing anti-New Deal argument is that it usually proceeds along these lines:
1. The New Deal made the Great Depression worse, proving that government intervention and spending doesn’t help the economy.
2. World War II was what really ended the Great Depression.
In other words, what I’ve found fascinating is that without even knowing specifically why the argument is completely ahistorical, one can tell right off that it suffers from a fundamental inconsistency. WWII was the single greatest government intervention into the economy in U.S. history, with upwards of 40% of the nation’s industrial capacity devoted to wartime production (among other things). Like a lot of attempts by ideologues to eliminate inconvenient history, it suffers from what one could charitably call gaping logical holes, noticeable by anyone with even perfunctory analytical skills.
What I also find interesting, though not really mentioned in the recent fracas, is the fact that the fringe libertarians think even Hoover was too interventionist. Among other red herrings used is the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which is one place where the revisionists have at the very least made a mountain out of a molehill (see here for an overview).
Anyway, it’s a fascinating case study. Do yourself a favor and check out the posts.
December 1, 2008 at 2:43 pm |
The worst part about “anti-FDR historical revisionism” is their smugness. God, I cannot stand people who embrace a lunatic fringe interpretation of history and then mock the sane for ignoring it.
December 11, 2008 at 10:51 pm |
[...] accede to fringe libertarian notions of how the economy functions, provides a good example of the aforementioned tactics neo-Liberty Leaguers use to distort the history of the Great Depression: “Well, years [...]