Roosevelt Conservatism

I call myself a Roosevelt Conservative.  By this I mean that I agree with the social, legal and economic perspective that the two Roosevelt administrations exemplified.  Conservatism is the idea that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past, which can be applied to the present and future, and that we should not embark upon changes without carefully considering their consequences.  Lots of the people who call themselves conservatives today are something closer to radical reactionaries, harking back to a wonderful delusion of the past that never actually existed and determined to implement it no matter what the consequences.  Most are simply naive authoritarians, who subscribe to a narrative provided by authoritarian leadership.  This is neither conservative nor is it responsible.

Both Roosevelt presidents had a vision of government which included, simultaneously, limits on the abuses of big business while simultaneously trying to stimulate all businesses.  Most people are familiar with TR's anti-monopoly agenda.   He was not against business.

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

  He also fought long and hard for the Panama Canal, the National Park system and more.

His cousin FDR pushed through the construction of many bridges, dams and other projects.  These things were all incredibly stimulative of business, and flew in the face of the prevailing conservative policies.  Hoover's austerity had obviously made the depression worse, which gave FDR the election and a mandate to actually try to fix things.  First on the agenda: FDR quickly reversed the collapse of the banking industry. Initially skeptical, FDR eventually embraced the Keynesian economic policy.  Today, essentially all competent economists recognize that this was the right policy, both for then and now.  Unfortunately, there are a few people who call themselves economists who reject this.   In the words of Sinclair Lewis: It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.   Keynesianism consists of a few simple ideas:  The economy needs to grow at a relatively moderate rate, neither too slow nor to fast.  This can be controlled by regulation and through manipulation of the money supply.  The best option is by controlling interest rates, but when this fails (called a "liquidity trap": interest rates are so close to zero that no further stimulus is possible by lowering them), the government needs to stimulate the economy by borrowing money in order to create businesses and hire people.

The Roosevelts also had ideas about law that are eminently sensible: The law is there to prevent abuses.  Killing and stealing for sure, but there are lots of ways to kill and steal that writers of the constitution or the precedents set by common law could never have thought of.  The worst of these are committed by the powerful against the weak.  The law is there not to protect the wishes of the majority or the powerful, but to protect the weak from the strong.  The strong and the majority will generally get their way.  But sometimes they do this to the harm of the weak.  A lot of the time this is unnecessary.  By protecting the rights of the weak, the powerful can get most of what they want without hurting the weak.  But this is only possible if the courts are able to adapt the law to the changing needs of society.

In January 1944, FDR gave a speech called "The Second Bill of Rights."  In it, he said that everyone deserved a living wage, housing, fair competition for their business, medical care, education, and a pension.  We have come close to fulfilling this a few times in America, only to get it snatched away.