Why Is There No Social Democracy in America?

There's something about the New Deal that invites generational revision. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when liberalism still defined the parameters of public policy, historians celebrated the New Deal as the culmination of modern reform—the federal government's relentlessly pragmatic, strikingly successful response to the burdens of an industrial age. The fierce politics of the late 1960s shattered that interpretation. The New Deal was a terrible disappointment, said the era's younger historians, its grand promise undermined by the Roosevelt administration's refusal to confront capitalist power while embracing—even reinforcing—racial, gender, and class hierarchies.1