New Geography

Tag: New Deal

  • Public Investment, Decentralization and Other Economic Lessons from the New Deal

    The first lesson to be learned from this earlier era is that a large middle class requires an economy that generates a broad base of jobs paying middle-class wages. The New Dealers were not opposed to “rigging” the labor and financial markets to achieve this result. New Deal progressives believed the economy should exist to serve society, not the other way around, and that the government has a duty to shape the economy to meet middle-class aspirations. A high-wage, middle-class society would, in turn, be good for the economy: living wages would not only ensure adequate demand for the economy but in so doing would spur new investment and productivity growth, creating a virtuous circle of rising living standards.

    The belief of New Deal progressives in an economy that could create good middle-class jobs stemmed in part from their resistance to large social welfare subsidies to individuals, on the grounds that this would encourage an unhealthy dependence on the state. Moreover, even though they favored progressive taxation, New Dealers were skeptical of a society dependent upon the permanent redistribution of income. The principal goal of many New Deal programs was not to relieve the conditions of poverty -although they often did so – but to build physical and human capital that would allow people to escape permanently from poverty.

    Thus New Dealers emphasized government programs that expanded education, spread property ownership, invested in America’s common physical and knowledge capital, and seeded the industries of the future. It was not perfect, in large part because it preceded the civil rights revolution and thus left out millions of African-Americans, but it did build the largest and most secure middle class America has ever known.

    Today we see the consequences of a much different way of thinking about the economy and society. Over the past two decades we have been told that globalization is an immutable force and that we must bend to its demands, embracing the agenda of free trade, financial deregulation and less progressive taxation. The best we can do, we’re told, is to let globalization run its course and compensate the losers, even though no amount of new social welfare measures could compensate for the loss of millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs. Thus, without any real debate, America’s political elites have chosen for us a highly stratified, low-wage society with great costs to our middle-class way of life and to our productive economy.

    The second New Deal principle is about achieving a high-wage economy and at the same time more widely distributing the capital and skills for wealth creation. The principal policy tool the earlier generation used was massive public investment and public building. The public investment programs they pursued not only created many new middle-class jobs but also laid the foundation for a more productive economy, which led to even more middle-class jobs.

    Agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s and ’40s were followed by even more extensive public investment initiatives in the postwar years. From 1950 to 1970, the government spent more than three percent of GDP on public infrastructure alone. It built everything from highways to schools, power systems to parks.

    Throughout the New Deal era, public investment was America’s way of enacting industrial policy. It was understood that public investment paid for itself many times over. The GI Bill alone generated returns of up to $7 for every dollar invested. And because it generated returns to the economy and society, New Dealers in the postwar period were not afraid to raise taxes or to borrow in order to ensure adequate levels of public investment. And borrow they did, even though the national debt was a much larger percentage of GDP than it is now.

    For the past few decades, however, we have made a very different choice. As concerns over the budget deficit have grown, and as tax-cutting mania has taken hold, we have cut back on public investment. Since 1980 we have devoted less than 2 percent of GDP to public infrastructure and have allowed federal spending on basic research and development to decline as a percentage of GDP as well. As a result, a backlog of public investment needs – clogged roads and ports, collapsing bridges and levees, uneven broadband access, an antiquated air traffic system, an undersized energy infrastructure – has begun to cut into our economic growth and undermine our efficiency.

    A third principle of middle-class America that the New Deal offers us relates to the concentration of power and capital. Earlier progressive reformers distrusted such concentrations. Not only did they threaten democracy, they also warped the economy and distorted consumption and investment. Government therefore must be a strong countervailing force to big business and oligarchic power, and must be organized so that it cannot be captured by one economic group at the expense of another or the general public.

    The New Dealers were particularly concerned about the power of Wall Street and the financial community. They feared a national credit system that was dependent on Wall Street bankers, whose interests were not always aligned with the needs of homeowners, farmers and small and medium-sized producers. They therefore sought to democratize capital by creating myriad credit institutions that would ensure that all regions and sectors of the economy had access to capital. They created a variety of federally subsidized credit programs to enable people to construct homes and start businesses and to allow states and municipalities to build schools and modernize infrastructure. It was here that the New Deal was most creative – combining a strong federal state with the local and regional decentralization of capital and the local and regional control of these programs and institutions.

    As with other first principles of a middle-class America, we have seen a reversal of priorities over the past few decades, as big financial institutions have again asserted their influence over the economy and economic policy. The new power of Wall Street has been evident in its successful push for financial liberalization and deregulation, in the emphasis accorded the deficit and concerns about inflation as opposed to full employment, and until recently in Washington’s preference for a strong dollar, which favors financiers over real producers. This triumph of Wall Street over Main Street has been responsible in part for the hollowing out of the tradable-goods sector and for the asset bubbles and predatory lending that have wreaked havoc on the economy. Indeed, one of the first things the New Deal would have us do is re-regulate the financial system and put the interests of the productive economy over those of Wall Street.

    In all these respects, whether it be high wages, public investment or the decentralization of financial power, the New Deal succeeded because it changed the way the economy worked. And it did so by marrying progressive reforms with Americans’ preference for independence, whether from government subsidy or big-business paternalism. This is the enduring lesson of the New Deal.

    Sherle Schwenninger directs the New America Foundation’s Economic Growth Program and the Global Middle Class Initiative. He is also the former director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program.

  • The New Deal at 75: An Inspiration, Not a Blueprint

    Whatever your political perspective, Americans need to admire the New Deal for, if nothing else, its ambitious agenda. In a way unparalleled in the 20th Century, the New Deal left us a legacy of achievement – one that we can still see in big cities like San Francisco and small towns like Wishek, North Dakota.

    The great genius of the New Deal lay not in ideology but in its pragmatism and practicality. People were out of work so it created jobs. The country’s infrastructure, particularly in the rural areas, was primitive, so it took on the task of modernization.

    In some ways, this paralleled what was also being done under the Communists in the Soviet Union as well as under Fascists in Italy and under the National Socialists in Germany. This has led some conservatives, such as “Liberal Fascism” author Jonah Goldberg, to conflate the New Deal legacy with fascism. But this assertion is belied by the fact that we still live under a democratic and liberal political structure, one that by the 1980s had turned to oppose much of that legacy.

    Yet I believe that even Ronald Reagan – himself once an avid New Dealer – would admit that the New Deal did much to expand America’s middle class. It did so not by promoting redistribution and welfarism or by moral cajoling – characteristics Mike Lind identifies with the more elite Progressives – but by practical actions that gave people the tools with which to build their own individual prosperity.

    Economically speaking, it is also true that the New Deal failed to recreate prosperity (at least until the onset of the Second World War). But it cannot be denied that it literally brought light to large parts of the country – particularly the Southeast and the rural Great Plains – into the 20th Century. Among the New Deal’s great accomplishments, as Andy Sywak discusses, are its public works.A partial list of these accomplishments include:

    • 22,428 road projects
    • 7488 educational buildings
    • Over 7000 sewer, water and other public buildings
    • Employed over 3,000,000 workers earning who helped support 10,000,000 dependents
    • Employed 125,000 engineers, social workers, accountants, superintendents, foremen and timekeepers scattered in every state and community

    Ultimately, notes scholar Jason Scott Smith, the New Deal touched intimately the lives of more than fifty million out of a total U.S. population in 1933 of 125 million. Yet its legacy went well beyond the Roosevelt years, extending from Roosevelt and Truman all the way to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and, even to some extent, Richard Nixon.

    As Sherle Schwenninger points out, The New Deal created the basis for the great, and widely shared, national prosperity of the post-war period. Through infrastructure spending, housing programs, the GI Bill and government-funded scientific research, the New Deal directly and indirectly helped make the United States the premier power on the world scene and by far its strongest economy.

    America remains the preeminent country in the world, but there is a great, widely held belief that this status is slipping as other countries – China, Russia, Brazil, India – enact what amounts to their own New Deals. Our once vibrant middle class is under siege, our infrastructure is aging and even “progressives” seem more interested in promoting avant garde cultural values than in economic growth, upward mobility or maintaining technological excellence. Even in the field of conservation, a core value of the New Deal and progressive traditions, the focus is increasing less about preserving resources and open space for people, and more about how to preserve and insulate nature from the ill-effects of human carbon-based life forms.

    Yet if we can be inspired by the New Deal, we can not simply repeat it. For one thing, our crisis today is less palpable and immediate, making it all but impossible to mobilize resources in the same way. At the same time, the public sector, small at the onset of New Deal, has already swollen to gargantuan size. The power of organized public employees, largely a non-factor in the 1930s and 1940s, threatens any government initiative by siphoning off too many local and federal resources due to their often extravagant demands in everything from salaries and work rules to pensions.

    This can be seen in the morphing of the New Deal legacy in large cities including the greatest of all, New York. Under Mayor Fiorella La Guardia, a maverick Republican of the Theodore Roosevelt stripe, the city built new parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, roads, and sanitation systems with an almost messianic fervor. At one time, New York City was receiving one-seventh of all funds dispersed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

    Yet La Guardia’s expanded city government, notes Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel, still operated under an efficiency-oriented progressive administration. La Guardia and his parks commissioner, Robert Moses fired political appointees and dismissed incumbents, leading some public employees to identify him with the Italian dictator Mussolini. Rejecting narrow ideology, La Guardia famously claimed: “There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets.”

    La Guardia’s successors, in New York and elsewhere, did not stick to this moral and administrative rigor. The share government workers in New York’s workforce expanded from 10 percent in 1950 to over 17 percent in 1970s but with increasingly little accountability. If a new New Deal means a large expansion of the unionized public workforce, in New York or elsewhere, it will be largely doomed.

    So as we admire the achievements of the New Deal, we also need to keep in mind the shortcomings that grew out of its success. That we need a new powerful commitment to infrastructure and economic growth is undoubted, but in pursuing this we need to make sure it does not serve primarily the public employee lobbies and the well-organized rent-seeking private interests.

    New solutions, such as tapping abundant capital resources from both here and abroad, need to be tried out. And given the overconcentration of power already in Washington, and the spread of technical expertise to states and regions, a greater emphasis on locally based initiatives may work better this time around.

    Yet in the end, American still requires some form of broad initiative to overcome its current doldrums. This requires the same kind of bold, innovative and pragmatic spirit characteristic of the New Deal that three quarters of a century later remains its most useful legacy.

    Joel Kotkin is the Executive Editor of www.newgeography.com.

    Other New Geography New Deal articles:

    The New Deal & the Legacy of Public Works
    New Deal Investments Created Enduring, Livable Communities
    Progressives, New Dealers, and the Politics of Landscape
    Public Investment, Decentralization and Other Economic Lessons from the New Deal
    Emerald City Emergence: Seattle and the New Deal
    Excavating The Buried Civilization of Roosevelt’s New Deall

    Other New Deal sites:

    New Deal Network (sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute)
    New Deal Cultural Programs
    California’s Living New Deal Project

  • New Deal Investments Created Enduring, Livable Communities

    Growing appeals for more public infrastructure investment make two critical claims: that this would help stimulate the economy in the short run while making our country more productive over the long run. Unlike tax rebates and other short-term stimulus, a major infrastructure investment program can have powerful effects on community life beyond boosting spending at the local Wal-Mart.

    I thought about this recently when I visited my boyhood hometown of Wishek, North Dakota. Wishek is a small, farming town of 1,200 people nestled in the gently rolling hills of the central Dakotas, about 17 miles from the South Dakota border. Its population is made up largely of people who trace their origins to German immigrants from Russia. These people previously were recruited by Catherine the Great to farm the steppes near the Black Sea.

    Seeing a greater opportunity in North America, these Germans started to arrive in 1885 to homestead the Dakotas’ deep sod prairie – a glacial moraine of earth and rock. They were lured by the romantic thrill of developing a “Territorial Empire” that later became the states of North and South Dakota.

    This dream was widely realized by the 1920s but all but dried up and almost blew away during the drought-ridden thirties. That dream would have extinguished if not for the enlightened programs of the New Deal — from soil conservation to loans for farmers to the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

    Growing up in Wishek during the 50s and 60s, you rarely heard about the New Deal. Life was good, pretty much everything you might imagine small town childhood to be in Middle America. The pace of life was easy; everyone knew everyone and almost everything about anyone. The fortunes of the community rose and fell with farm prices, sometimes fluctuating wildly from year to year. Kids roamed freely on foot and in cheaply fueled cars and there were ample opportunities to participate in almost every facet of community life. With a k-12 school population of about 500 to 600, any child or young person who wanted to could play some kind of role in sports, arts and music, or church related activities.

    Unknown to me — and not widely discussed by the 1960s — was how many of the community’s best and most used facilities were constructed by the WPA. During the drought years of the mid-‘30s, the city park was enlarged and developed with a children’s playground, clay-surfaced tennis courts and a light skating rink paid for by WPA. Later a $6,000 bond issue was floated to build a pool that was designed by WPA engineers and is still in use today. Then in 1942 a new auditorium — a truly landmark building for the community — was completed for use by the school district. The auditorium continues to be used today as a civic center for community and family events including Wishek’s premier regional event the annual Sauerkraut Days.

    This investment strategy in community infrastructure was played out across North Dakota. Elwyn B. Robinson, in his classic “History of North Dakota,” recounts the massive investment in North Dakota:

    “In North Dakota the W.P.A. alone, between July 1, 1935 and June 30, 1942, built 20,373 miles of highways and streets, 721 new bridges and railroads, 166 miles of sidewalks, 15,012 culverts, 503 new public buildings, 61 additions to public buildings, 680 outdoor recreation facilities, 809 water wells, 2 irrigation projects, 39 sewage treatment plants and 9 water treatment plants. It reconstructed 1,002 bridges and viaducts, 2,180 public buildings and 1,721 culverts.”

    To be sure, today is not the “dirty” thirties of the Dust Bowl. It is also far different from the serene place of my boyhood in the 50s and 60s. Some of the old infrastructure needs maintenance while other infrastructure needs have changed significantly. A proposed wind farm just south of town, for example, has been delayed because of the lack of electric transmission capacity throughout the region. In addition, like many rural communities the major employment base is now in manufacturing and health services, pointing to the increasing and essential importance of broadband telecommunications, roads and air service that permit link places like Wishek with the national and international economy.

    Yet if we look about us, the legacy of New Deal endures to this day. It provides clear evidence of the impact that infrastructure investment can make on even the smallest of communities. Much of the current discussions about infrastructure investment too often focus on the giant projects and national implications. However, the case for a renewed investment agenda can be made most persuasively by pointing out what such investments have done for local communities — city or small town — in the past. And what they might have failed to become if there had never been a New Deal.

    Delore Zimmerman is CEO of Praxis Strategy Group and Publisher of www.newgeography.com.

  • The New Deal & the Legacy of Public Works

    Almost completely ignored in the press this year has been the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. Social Security, public housing, school lunches, deposit insurance, labor relations standards and banking regulations are among its many enduring legacies. On this anniversary, it is worth looking at the public works programs that constructed roads and buildings that still exist in every county in America.

    In a nation where a quarter of the adult population was unemployed, the immediate goal of the New Deal was to provide temporary relief for Americans who were destitute and put them back to work. The failure of the Hoover Administration to either curtail the Depression or inspire people created a political climate for dramatic action.

    During FDR’s first 100 days – called the “First New Deal” by historians – a truly impressive list of legislation was passed. Prohibition ended, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created eventually bringing electricity and development to an impoverished area of the South, and controls were placed upon industrial practices, Wall Street, labor relations and farm output. The Civilian Conservation Corps, which ended up planting two billion trees across the country, was founded. A historian would be hard pressed to find a more energetic first 100 days of any administration.

    Yet one of its most far-reaching accomplishments was the Federal Emergency Relief and National Industrial Recovery acts which created the bureaucracy to institute public relief by funding large-scale public works. Under the system, states applied for grants from the federal government. Over the next ten years, the government would spend nearly $9 billion dollars though the Civil Works Administration (CWA), Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

    The depth and social unrest created by the Depression provided motivation for New Deal officials to act quickly and decisively. The official who was the center of the action was Harry Hopkins. A hyper-competent social worker who had created a program to deliver services to mothers with dependent children in New York City and founded the American Association of Social Workers, Hopkins jumped into his role as head of federal relief with tremendous vigor. After a five-minute meeting with Roosevelt on his first day of work in May of 1933, he was dispatched to a cockroach-infested building on New York Avenue where, by the end of the day, he had dispensed with $5.3 million in aid to eight states. In a year’s time, Hopkins had created a jobs program that spent a billion dollars and provided badly needed jobs to over three million people during the cold winter of 1933 (the average wage was $13 a week). He spent money quickly – perhaps too quickly, some maintained – but his focus was to respond to FDR’s demand to quickly create jobs and alleviate misery in the country.

    But Hopkins was not a welfare statist. His career as a social worker had taught him that individuals did not want to be “on the dole,” living off the largesse of the state. By finding work for unemployed breadwinners, Hopkins believed he could keep families strong and enable them to retain their pride despite the hard times.

    This psychological aspect should not be underestimated. The Depression was more than a huge decline in GDP, vast unemployment and lost industrial output – it was a great identity crisis for a nation that placed great value on self-sufficiency and self-reliance. Look at New Deal art (another achievement of the New Deal are all the beautiful murals still in existence created by government funded artists) and you will see a glorification of labor. Frescos from San Francisco to New York depict colorful scenes of men hard at work.

    Today bureaucrats stress cost-effectiveness ratios, but New Deal reports were most concerned with how many jobs a project provided. Conservative critiques of the New Deal for a mixed record of achieving economic growth often miss this critical point. The official report of WPA projects in San Francisco, for example, lists as its main achievement how “the program contributed to the continuance of the normal standards of living of the working man’s family in San Francisco and maintenance of the courage and morale of the ordinary citizens through a most distressing period.” Expenses for projects are listed not just in dollar amounts spent but also in the number of “man hours” provided to workers.

    When Roosevelt ran for re-election the first time in 1936 (“Four Years Ago and Now” was his campaign slogan), he could claim six million jobs had been created in the last three years. He could point to a doubling of industrial output and the creation of a Farm Credit Administration that on an average day saved 300 farms from foreclosure. Still, eight million people were still out of work in 1936 and the public works programs, historically audacious they were, did not solve many of the nations entrenched economic and social problems. Roosevelt himself did not want his public works programs to compete with private industry or to create dependency on the state.

    Yet, looking back at the WPA and its companion public works agencies, the list of lasting contributions to the nation’s infrastructure are indeed impressive: 78,000 bridges, 650,000 miles of roads, 700 miles of airport runways, 13,000 playgrounds, hundreds of airports built and 125,000 military and civilian buildings were constructed. The roads and public works constructed by the WPA and PWA ended up being lasting infrastructure investments.

    However, perhaps the New Deal’s most enduring achievement was creating a sense of unity at a time of unparalleled economic crisis. Whereas the nation had previously elevated Horatio Alger -style self-reliance, the New Deal tapped into the creative industrial potential both of common unskilled laborers and thousands of skilled and creative workers. It created a sense of pride among millions who for the rest of their lives could point to public buildings they helped design and build, as well as the roads they laid out and paved.

    The 1930s produced the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, La Guardia Airport and the San Antonio River Walk. Besides some luxury high-rises, high-tech sports stadiums with retractable roofs and edgy art museums, what great things have we achieved lately?

    Andy Sywak is the articles editor for Newgeography.com.

  • Progressives, New Dealers, and the Politics of Landscape

    One of the greatest ironies of our time is the fact that today’s leading progressives tend to despise the very decentralized landscape that an earlier generation of New Deal liberals created.

    Franklin Roosevelt and his successors from Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson sought to shift industry and population from the crowded industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. They did this through rural electrification based on hydropower projects, factories supplying the military and federal aid to citizens seeking to buy single-family homes in low-density suburbs.

    This is precisely the environment – which brought so much opportunity and improved living conditions to so many – that today’s progressives so often despise. Since the 1960s, environmentalists, for example, have waged a campaign against the great dams that symbolized New Deal economic development policies. Artificial lakes that generate electricity for millions of suburban homeowners and businesses, and have brought an end to devastating, cyclical floods, are condemned by progressives for having wiped out local fauna and flora. And it goes without saying that the middle-class swimmers, picnickers and motor-boaters that enjoy government-created lakes on weekends are… well, vulgar.

    Similarly, the defense plants that the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy-Johnson administrations scattered throughout the country are often lambasted as emblems of the fascistic “military-industrial complex,” part of a wicked “Gun Belt.” In fact, industry is increasingly seen as undesirable by today’s Arcadian progressives, who appear to believe that it would have been better to leave the farmers of rural America as quaint specimens of authentic folk life.

    But nothing riles the progressives of today than the low-density, single-family home suburbs made possible by New Deal liberal homeownership policies. Since the 1950s, intellectuals on the left have been bemoaning the alleged cultural sterility and conformity of the suburbs. Now anti-sprawl campaigners allege that the suburbs are also destroying the planet.

    So the question is: How did the American left, in a short period of time, come to repudiate the New Deal and the American landscape it created? The answer is simple: today’s center-left, which calls itself progressive rather than liberal, is not the heir of New Deal liberalism. It is the heir instead of early twentieth century elite Progressives, who were shoved aside and marginalized during the heyday of New Deal liberalism.

    The original Progressives were overwhelmingly professionals and patricians of old Anglo-American stock in the Northeast and Midwest, many of them the children of Protestant clergymen, teachers or professors. They despised the nouveau riche of the Gilded Age, but also tended to view European immigrants and white and black Southerners as benighted primitives.

    Their vision of the ideal society, influenced by the Hegelian Idealist culture of Bismarckian Germany, was one in which a university-trained elite ran everything with minimal interference by ignorant voters and crass politicians. As heirs of the moralistic Northern Protestant Whig and Republican traditions, these Progressives also had a strong interest in the social engineering of private behavior, from prohibition to eugenic sterilization.

    From Reconstruction until the Depression, Progressive moralism and elitism alienated European immigrants and rural Southerners and Westerners alike. This benefited the industrial capitalists of the dominant Republican party. Franklin Roosevelt created a powerful, but fundamentally unstable, Democratic majority by adding many former Republican Progressives to the old Democratic coalition of Northern white “ethnics” and white Southerners.

    Yet in the process Roosevelt helped undermine many of the signature initiatives of the progressives, starting with the repeal of Prohibition, a policy loathed by German and Irish Catholic voters. It signaled a repudiation of the Whig-Republican-Progressive ambition to use the federal government for moral reform and social engineering. (FDR’s tactical appeasement of Southern segregation had a similar tactical logic).

    Another goal of Progressives, economic planning, died with the collapse of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) in the first Roosevelt term. Jettisoning the Progressive dream of a planned economy run by technocrats, the Roosevelt administration instead focused pragmatically on state-capitalist public infrastructure projects like the Tennessee Valley Association (TVA) and the Lower Colorado River Association (LCRA).

    Plans for an all-powerful executive civil service subordinate to the White House – a progressive reform that FDR unwisely favored – were rejected by a Congress jealous of its prerogatives and suspicious of executive power. Finally, nanny-state supervision of the poor, another Progressive theme, found little sympathy among New Deal Democrats, who preferred universal social insurance to means-tested public assistance, and preferred employing the able-bodied poor in public works to what FDR called “the narcotic” of the “dole.”

    The New Deal ultimately left little of the old Progressive project but created what could be considered a Golden Age that lasted until the 1970s for the white lower middle class majority. Progressive intellectuals and activists, however, sensed that they had been marginalized. Over-represented in the prestige press and the universities, they increasingly denounced what they saw as the vulgarity of the New Deal’s constituency.

    The assault on the suburbs was one of the most powerful expressions of this discontent. It was led by two figures. One was Jane Jacobs, the romantic chronicler of dense urban life, and its villain in New York’s highway-building Robert Moses. A rival school, headed by Jacobs’ enemy Lewis Mumford, sang the praises of planned “organic” villages – “highwayless towns” connected by “townless highways.” The Mumfordian strain of Progressive planning is represented today by the New Urbanism, with its hyper-regulated low-rise pedestrian communities.

    The resurgent progressives also clung to their vision of a society in which an enlightened, nonpartisan elite governs the ignorant masses from above. The Civil Rights Revolution, and the era of judicial activism that followed, permitted progressives to transfer power from the elected political class to the federal judiciary. By the 1970s and 1980s, federal judges were regulating practically all aspects of American life. Social engineering schemes like busing for racial balance and race-based affirmative action, which “color-blind” New Deal liberal opponents of segregation like Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson opposed, now became critical pillars of progressive ideology.

    The New Dealers had been ardent conservationists, but their conservationism focused not only on nature but also the well-being of people. New Deal soil conservation and agricultural productivity policies allowed the amount of land in cultivation to decline, freeing up vast tracts of land for wilderness or habitation. Farmers, middle class suburbanites and nature all gained.

    This approach is repudiated by most contemporary progressives, who know nothing about farms except that they are cruel to livestock. By the 1970s many progressives abandoned liberal conservationism for radical environmentalism, which seeks to protect nature by separating it from humanity and industry. Radical environmentalism tends to shade into misanthropy, as in the proposal by two New Jersey environmentalists to turn much of the Great Plains into a human-free “Buffalo Commons.” (Curiously, nobody seems to have proposed evacuating New Jersey in order to create a “Migratory Bird Park.”) The radical Green goal of “rewilding” North America by creating “wildlife corridors” from which humans are banned repudiates the New Deal liberal vision of allowing working-class Americans to enjoy the scenery of national parks.

    So in every respect except racism and opposition to immigration, today’s progressives are genuine heirs not of the New Deal liberals but of the capital-P Progressive economic planners and social engineers of the early twentieth century. Even their social base is the same as in 1908 – college-educated professionals, particularly those in the nonprofit sector and education, like public school teachers and academics.

    This class – enlarged ironically by New Deal liberal programs like the G.I. Bill and student loans – has been increased in number by upwardly-mobile Americans to whom mass university education imparts a blend of the worldviews of old-fashioned Northeastern progressives and the old Bohemian left-intelligentsia. This enlarged college-educated professional class has allied itself with African-Americans and Latinos in the identity centered post-McGovern Democratic party.

    With perfect symbolism, the two bases of the alliance of white progressives and nonwhite Democrats – college campuses and inner cities, allied against the middle-class and working-class suburbs – correspond to the alternate urban utopias of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs respectively, if we consider the college campus to be a Mumfordian paradise.

    With good reason, then, today’s progressives despise the suburban, middle-class America created by yesterday’s New Deal liberals. Today’s progressives may invoke the New Deal, but they are the heirs not of mid-century liberals like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson but rather of the Progressive social engineers who believed that enlightened elites should alter both the built environment and human behavior to meet their social goals. Some things never change.

    Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of “The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics” (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics” (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and “What Lincoln Believed” (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest.