Who was the better president: Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What I find ironic about this whole situation is that scholarly opinion Reagan’s job as president has risen considerably since his term ended, while opinion among the general left has declined. Probably due to considerable frustration and hatred towards the right from the modern left, and they ascribed Reagan as being the father of the modern right.

The "scholars" also think Woodrow Wilson was a top-ten president. I have learned to not pay attention to a single thing they say.

Don’t let your superiority complex get too ahead of you, John.

I don’t think they rank Wilson in the top 10, but upper half, yeah. Although if you’re just gonna say FDR won us WW2, you might as well say Wilson won us WW1, so.

Somebody with your policy orientation might not approve of this, but the vast majority of Americans see victory in World War II as both much more significant historically and much more imperative morally than victory in World War I.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

particularly since unlike in the Civil War or Cold War there weren't really any important domestic constituencies who supported surrender,

lol

a total victory for neoliberalism

lol

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

particularly since unlike in the Civil War or Cold War there weren't really any important domestic constituencies who supported surrender,

lol

Completely seriously, who? The US entered the war with one pacifist opposed in the whole Congress, and I don't think there was ever any movement like the Copperheads or anti-Vietnam activists, who could routinely win elections in many parts of the country, even if they were minorities nationally, during those conflicts.

You're right, but what makes this so disingenuous as an attempt to downplay FDR's role in World War II is that there were powerful constituencies opposing rearmament and aid to the Allies BEFORE Pearl Harbor. The idea of ignoring this entirely in favor of focusing on the relative lack of domestic opposition from December 1941 onwards is, in fact, very funny to me.

a total victory for neoliberalism

lol

This is one where there can be more discussion just because 'neoliberalism' has so many distinct meanings and connotations, but 40 years on it seems clear that all attempts at moving past essentially early-1980s fiscal policies have met with defeat, and they are adopted by more countries than reject them.

This depends on what you mean by "moving past" and "essentially". Obviously we're not going to completely restore a pre-1980 approach to fiscal policy, because the material conditions of the 1970s no longer exist and are unlikely ever to exist again. But key elements of what we think of as "Reaganite" economic orthodoxy, like cutting social spending for the sake of cutting social spending and treating free trade as such an obvious good that one would almost literally have to be insane to oppose it, are more contested--verging on discredited--now than they have been in a generation. So your argument here feels a little like saying that the mid-twentieth century involved a total victory for Keynesian interventionism, because what came after 1980 did not look much like what came before 1930. Of course it didn't. Why would it have?

A president who actually halted the growth of the welfare state and fatally wounded global leftism would be among the all-time greats, of course,

lol

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm not sure what I have a harder time taking seriously, the assertion that opposition to involvement in World War II was "nonideological" in nature or the idea that when the average person thinks youth political movements they think of crypto bros. The average person in your circles, maybe, but the average person in my circles is a lesbian Catholic with socioeconomic views similar to those of early-period Fidel Castro and I would never claim that that's representative of the wider world.

That leaves the observation that current leftist movements are more focused on identity issues than on class these days; this is true, but the key point is that the exact same thing has happened on the right. Do you honestly think there's any appetite any more for the Tea Party style of astroturfed pro-austerity Randian #populism that drove right-wing politics in the first half of the 2010s?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I guess nothing is 'nonideological', but it seems like the most important ideological strain was pacifism/noninterventionism, with some sort of vague German- or Italian-American pride distant seconds based on 1936/1940 swings? Sympathy for fascist dictatorships in the US seems by all accounts to have been incredibly marginal by the mid-1930s, though before the Abyssinian war there was a decent amount of support for Mussolini.

Outright sympathy for fascism was on the downswing by 1936ish, sure, but there was still a ton of anti-British and antisemitic sentiment among communities like (for example) Irish Catholics; plus pacifism and noninterventionism are themselves ideological positions, just not of the kind that people usually accuse others of when they discuss this subject.

I don't think Catholic lesbians are unimportant or anything,

Neither do I; otherwise I wouldn't be friends with so many. Nevertheless, their numbers are small and they are not representative of either Catholics or lesbians, demographically or ideologically.

but I think polling shows something like 40% of young men either having bought cryptocurrency or intending to? (Something like 25% of young women, I think; massive age gap). Doing this only really makes sense if you subscribe on some level to a fairly ultra-libertarian view of the world in which the government's authority to have a monetary policy at all needs to be abolished. Not that 40% of people would agree with every corollary of this, but that they're willing to act on the recommendations of this sort of thought is eyebrow-raising. At this point you're doing better than typical midterm turnout.

Sure, but is this kind of technoanarchism really "neoliberalism" in the sense that this conversation began as a discussion of? Certainly the crypto thing is clearly being advanced primarily by the political right (not surprising since what motivates the whole enterprise basically the classic hard-right terror of fiat money taken to such an extreme that even CO2 emissions are perceived as a preferable backing for currency to sovereign debt!), but the #gamestonks thing is much harder to pin down. It's only self-evidently right-wing if you adopt the MUH SIZE OF GUMMIT framing where whom fiscal policy is intended to benefit and why is unimportant and all that matters is a one-dimensional line with Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler both on the left and Friedrich Hayek and Murray Bookchin both on the right.

Also, your initial claim wasn't "a significant minority of young people are interested in crypto, whereas almost no old people are", it was "when the average person thinks 'young people politics', they think crypto". The latter claim is much further out on a significantly weaker limb than is the former.

Yes, absolutely, have you stopped to consider the rhetoric that someone like Boebert or MTG used in their primaries? (Or anyone really successful at small-dollar donations on the right, who is almost always Paulist or Paulist-adjacent.) In GOP primaries the people with the fewest ties to national machines are the people most committed to spending cuts at all costs and privatization of Social Security. I don't think the original Tea Party movement was remotely astroturfed, and the main astroturf on the right comes from national media promotion of 'identity'-based movements like Spencer's: authentic expressions of right-wing sentiment in the US are almost invariably focused on cutting government size.

By contrast on the left the focus on identity seems to encounter much less resistance.

The entire rhetoric of the party at present is focused on how the present inflation/economic troubles is caused by the Democratic government's spending bills, and the entire rhetoric last year was about the inevitable economic troubles that would be caused by a Democratic government's spending.

A great deal of this I think depends on one's preexisting perspective. (Which is to say: of course you, a Republican base voter motivated by economic ultra-dryism, perceive economic ultra-dryism as very appealing to Republican base voters!) I can assure you that people outside the Republican base do not interpret Boebert and MTG's prominence as a vindication of the same tendencies in conservative politics that you're saying people within the base interpret it to vindicate. I also don't know where in the world you're getting this idea that the Republican Party's messaging last year revolved around low spending; the then-incumbent Republican President signed trillions and trillions of dollars of classic Keynesian emergency deficit spending, send out UBI-inspired low-four-digit checks with his own signature on them to try and capitalize politically on having done so, and ran against a definition of "socialism" that was basically a slightly more sophisticated variant of the "socialism is when video games have lesbian characters; the more lesbian characters they have, the lesbianer it is" definition. This was a President who first came to power by running a buzzsaw through the more conventional slash-and-burn fusionist campaigns everyone else ran in the 2016 primaries, instead focusing on Perot-derived heterodox messaging on trade! I guess if you focus less on the Trump campaign than on the campaigns downballot Republicans ran then your interpretation makes a bit more sense, especially since the "wokism" on the other side was mostly limited to downballot campaigns too and yet has come to dominate perceptions of where the Democratic Party is going, but you still seem to be seriously underestimating the degree to which protagonism around Trump has dominated your party over the past five years.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The decades that followed were nothing short of hell for millions of people. No such consequence existed for Wilson.

Didn't it, though?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I guess nothing is 'nonideological', but it seems like the most important ideological strain was pacifism/noninterventionism, with some sort of vague German- or Italian-American pride distant seconds based on 1936/1940 swings? Sympathy for fascist dictatorships in the US seems by all accounts to have been incredibly marginal by the mid-1930s, though before the Abyssinian war there was a decent amount of support for Mussolini.

Outright sympathy for fascism was on the downswing by 1936ish, sure, but there was still a ton of anti-British and antisemitic sentiment among communities like (for example) Irish Catholics; plus pacifism and noninterventionism are themselves ideological positions, just not of the kind that people usually accuse others of when they discuss this subject.

Well, yes, but I thought this discussion was about the importance of fascist sympathizers in US politics during the 1930s. I think the answer is that sympathy for Mussolini existed before 1935 or so but afterwards became marginal, and by the time Hitler had been in power for several years virtually no one really saw him favorably. 'Pacifism' and 'noninterventionism' are indeed ideological positions, but they're ones I'd imagine you'd have a great deal of sympathy for, and I think they're necessary in every society to some degree, even if 1941 is a great testament against their absolute versions.

The discussion started as a disagreement about whether FDR's WWII leadership involved overcoming significant domestic opposition. I'd argue that prewar pacifism counts as such opposition, even though, yes, mutatis mutandis I'm sympathetic to pacifism in most other historical contexts.

*snip*

I'm almost positive this is primarily a definitional dispute at this point--as well as, of course, what each of us would like to be true! Now that you've conceded (in my reading of the post in question) that postwar social democracy was in a certain sense irreversible--because the more right-wing socioeconomic assumptions we're living under now still looking nothing like the Belle Epoque except in certain statistical measures--I'm happy to concede that the same is probably true of neoliberalism in the sense that whatever ultimately does replace "Reaganism" is obviously not going to just roll it back wholesale. Some elements of neoliberalism are pretty clearly turning out to have more staying power than others; you yourself have admitted that right-wing economic orthodoxy in its fullest sense is so jarring and offputting to people who aren't true believers that we find it genuinely difficult to imagine any normal person (i.e. non-extraction corporation, tech zaibatsu, and/or investment bank shareholder) being motivated by it, and I suppose I should probably likewise admit that people definitely these days definitely tend to think of social relationships mostly in terms of financial or allegorically-financial transactions to which democratically accountable regulation is some sort of unacceptable hindrance. (However, you'll note that this particular depravity is by no means a solely neoliberal assumption; strict-observance Marxism makes exactly the same descriptive assumption in tandem with different normative assumptions, or possibly vice versa. And in that sense, as well as arguably a few others, Marxism won just as Keynesianism and neoliberalism did!)

I've enjoyed this exchange a lot too. It feels like the good old days!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I guess nothing is 'nonideological', but it seems like the most important ideological strain was pacifism/noninterventionism, with some sort of vague German- or Italian-American pride distant seconds based on 1936/1940 swings? Sympathy for fascist dictatorships in the US seems by all accounts to have been incredibly marginal by the mid-1930s, though before the Abyssinian war there was a decent amount of support for Mussolini.

Outright sympathy for fascism was on the downswing by 1936ish, sure, but there was still a ton of anti-British and antisemitic sentiment among communities like (for example) Irish Catholics; plus pacifism and noninterventionism are themselves ideological positions, just not of the kind that people usually accuse others of when they discuss this subject.

Well, yes, but I thought this discussion was about the importance of fascist sympathizers in US politics during the 1930s. I think the answer is that sympathy for Mussolini existed before 1935 or so but afterwards became marginal, and by the time Hitler had been in power for several years virtually no one really saw him favorably. 'Pacifism' and 'noninterventionism' are indeed ideological positions, but they're ones I'd imagine you'd have a great deal of sympathy for, and I think they're necessary in every society to some degree, even if 1941 is a great testament against their absolute versions.

The discussion started as a disagreement about whether FDR's WWII leadership involved overcoming significant domestic opposition. I'd argue that prewar pacifism counts as such opposition, even though, yes, mutatis mutandis I'm sympathetic to pacifism in most other historical contexts.

I think this is becoming a definitional dispute; it seems like we can agree that there was some opposition before Pearl Harbor to helping the Allies, and extremely little after Pearl Harbor, and that most of the opposition was motivated by pacifism with sympathy for fascist ideology being minimal although existent, and that the key event which changed people's minds was Pearl Harbor. At this point I think we're just disputing the meaning of 'significant' and this might just be a difference in idiolect or something.

Or in historiographical emphasis. I'm (as I'm sure you know) very interested in American Catholic history, and Catholics were a component of FDR's coalition where he really did have to put work into manufacturing consent for WWII rather than just waiting for the IJN to do the heavy lifting.

This isn't quite the point I was trying to make; I think in 1965 the failure of postwar social democracy was still somewhere past the horizon, such that only a remarkable genius could have anticipated that neoliberalism will soon arrive. The lesson that can be learned from this is just that the future is unpredictable, and just because a replacement to neoliberalism can't be foreseen doesn't mean it isn't coming. At the same time, I think a radical shift to our political economy in the near-term future towards much greater competitiveness in society is much likelier than one away from it, which I don't really think I can imagine. (Except the emergence of some sort of very dreary authoritarian government which also monopolizes industry, which I guess I can imagine, but probably isn't what people who dream about less competition are dreaming of!)

Okay, so we're not conceding the same point so much as conceding different points of each other's arguments: you're conceding that potential future threats to neoiberalism, or the absence thereof, simply can't be foreseen with certainty, whereas I'm conceding that no major shift in the economic and social environment can just be rolled back and rendered irrelevant in retrospect.  I think much of the rest of our sharply different understanding of where the country is right now can be accounted for by different emphases on these points plus, as we've already agreed on, our very different social environments and circles of friends and acquaintances, and that keeping this in mind would be a good aid to mutual understanding the next time we have this kind of conversation.

(The Catholic lesbians are just the most numerous example, btw; there are all sorts of other atypical combinations of religiosity and LGBT/nerd culture/organized labor culture/whatever group identity among my loved ones.)

As for the "size of government" point, I think there's something to that, but I think it's more basic than Americans' political views or even "the American mind" writ large--I think that most people, when faced with most power structures, want to give those power structures enhanced ability to help them (minimum wage; middle-class entitlements) and diminished ability to harm them (taxes; RTW repeals to the extent that RTW is understood as a state regulation of employment contracts that seems less intrusive than it is because it's designed to favor management. Sociocultural libertarian winning issues like weed legalization could also fall under this). You and I might, for different reasons, both see this attitude as frustratingly short-sighted and inconsequent, but people can't exactly be blamed for it, now, can they?

(These are very broad claim and I can bring up lots of reasons I think this if I am pressed, but I hope you won't disagree that modern libertarianism is utopian and modern leftism is not just not utopian but very pessimistic about society.)

Yes, which is one reason among others why I don't understand late-60s nostalgia on the left at all. The period was objectively devastating to the left's long-term ability to convincingly imagine and argue for a better society.

Yes, of course -- my world-view is very materialist! On other forums I've occasionally edgily defined myself as Marxist or alt-Marxist, though this usually just confuses people and I stopped doing it after like a month. I've read several of Marx's works and it's easy to recognize much of his influence in my thinking, though any 21st-century figure who identifies as Marxist would find my beliefs, uh, bad.

One could even argue that "everyone is a little bit Marxist" in this way, just as "everyone is a little bit classical liberal" in that we all accept individual conscience as a given when talking about free expression, or even (going much further back) "everyone is a little bit Jewish" in that we all accept some sort of connection between law and social ethics as a given when talking about crime and punishment. I think going forward a very strong case could emerge for adding both "everyone is a little bit social-democratic" and "everyone is a little bit neoliberal" to this list, but adding only one or only the other would indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the twentieth century and what the events thereof established about the way developed societies function.