Conservatives’ fresh instructions to history

In the early days of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr. liked to draw stark lines. One such line is right there in the November 1955 mission statement: “Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists,” Buckley wrote.

Buckley helped make support for free markets — what the same document called the “competitive price system” — a foundational element of the conservative movement. It’s not surprising that a movement so dedicated set its sights on the New Deal: the watershed moment of government involvement not just in the private economy but also in everyday life, by which the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression.

It is surprising, however, that the conservative movement became so dedicated. In 1955, the Great Depression was within living memory for most Americans. FDR had died, but Eleanor Roosevelt was still alive, as were many New Dealers. Their hero’s apotheosis was well underway. Before NR existed, Buckley had intuited that an elite-driven consensus was already taking shape: It attributed the Great Depression to free markets run amok and the Depression’s end to the New Dealers’ brilliant and strategic interventions. In 1951, Buckley wondered in God and Man at Yale how the economics department of his alma mater, “which once upheld individual self-reliance and limited government,” had become largely “dedicated to collectivism in various degrees.” Somewhere in those degrees was British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories supposedly inspired the New Deal. The ideological radiation from this consensus mutated politics in its favor.

Yet that didn’t stop the “non-licensed nonconformists” of early National Review from railing against what many of them called the “New Deal revolution.” Senior editor Frank Meyer helped lead this charge. Meyer agreed that opposition to the New Deal ought to be an essential part of conservatism. He believed that the movement’s “crystallization” was “a delayed reaction to the revolutionary transformation of America that began with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.” He castigated the leadership of the Republican Party for trying to make it “as close a carbon copy of the reconstructed Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt as it can force upon its Republican constituency,” and he singled out milquetoast New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as “a New Dealer in Republican clothes.”

Meyer fought against internal pressure in order to get NR to endorse Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Republican presidential primary, in which Rockefeller was his main opponent. The NR editorial endorsing Goldwater complained that “our domestic affairs have continued to be conducted in terms of what may rightly be called ‘depression economics.’” And it saw Goldwater as the first serious and plausible challenge to that regime, given that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had declined to dislodge the New Deal consensus. Of the New Deal’s opponents, Ike once wrote privately that “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

In those days, their number may have been negligible, but National Review wasn’t stupid. FDR’s actions had violated this magazine’s clearly articulated principles. Moreover, despite immense scholarly efforts to paper it over through the years, the historical record has vindicated a jaundiced perspective on the New Deal and all its works.

The case that the ravages of capitalism run amok brought about the Depression disintegrates on contact with the work of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, most notably, and others who traced the Depression to the failures of the Federal Reserve. The Fed, then a new institution, did not exactly prove its mettle when it responded to a crash and subsequent crunch by tightening, not loosening, the money supply. Friedman viewed the Depression as “a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.”

President Herbert Hoover, in many ways a holdover of Progressive Era technocracy, is not what one might today call a “free-market fundamentalist” who did nothing as a recession turned into a Depression. Hoover raised taxes and tariffs, further pioneering a government response he himself described as “the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.” New Dealer par excellence Rexford Tugwell wrote after the Depression that “the New Deal owed much to what” Hoover had begun. That FDR later outdid him does not alter Hoover’s record.

It’s hard to see much logic other than a clear desire to drive the money changers “from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” as FDR put it in his first inaugural, in the New Deal’s ever-shifting array of spending increases, tax hikes, bolstered regulation, enshrinement of special privileges for unions into law, antitrust enforcement, and more. New Dealer Raymond Moley would eventually turn against the New Deal — and write for NR. To him, believing that the New Deal was the result of a “unified plan” was like “believing that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.”

Consider, for example, how a series of economic reforms allegedly designed for the benefit of “the little guy” ended up cartelizing the entire economy in the form of the National Recovery Administration. The NRA, with its price-fixing and collusion between big business and big government, ground underfoot such actual little guys as Jacob Maged, who was fined and jailed for offering to press a suit for five cents less than what NRA codes demanded. It tried similarly to punish the Schechter brothers for a host of alleged violations perpetrated by their modest poultry business; the Supreme Court intervened in their favor. Keynes himself was ultimately critical of the NRA. But the New Deal didn’t just affect chickens. The Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to slaughter pigs as Americans starved.

The central New Dealer claim is that it ended the Great Depression. A corollary is that it prevented the U.S. from backsliding into either communism or fascism. As a hypothetical, the latter is impossible to prove, though it betrays a disdainful mistrust of Americans. As for the former: America’s economic performance during the Depression fared relatively poorly among peer nations during the period, as economist George Selgin demonstrates in False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947. The U.S. even entered a depression within the Depression once New Deal programs came fully into force — with Keynes, again, criticizing many of these programs as executed for their effects on business confidence. An exasperated Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s secretary of the treasury, confessed in 1939 that “we are spending more than we have ever spent and it does not work.” As a discrediting coda: The coming of actual war finally forced something of a truce in the New Deal war on the private economy, though this brought its own forms of big government. But the recession that New Dealers feared would come with peacetime never materialized.

So the economic record of the New Deal is, at the very least, debatable. But its political record is undeniable. Even if one charitably assumes that the New Dealers genuinely were trying to end the Depression, there was a perverse sense in which the worse things got or remained for the country, the better it was for the Democratic Party. There was opportunity in privation. What Amity Shlaes, in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, describes as the “wager of the century” — that a form of mass-scale, federal patronage could secure a durable electoral constituency — paid off spectacularly for FDR. “Tax tax, spend spend, elect elect” was a memorable formulation attributed to New Dealer Harry Hopkins. By 1940, Democrats had formed a political juggernaut — and the balance of overall government spending had shifted decisively in favor of the federal government.

Mere electoral domination proved insufficient for FDR and the New Dealers, however. In his second inaugural, FDR invoked the specter of “unimagined power” to achieve his aims. His threat to pack the Supreme Court, which had ruled against New Deal programs, revealed his belief that his efforts defied the limits of the constitutional order. And when an FDR-cowed Supreme Court began ruling in his favor, most notably in Wickard v. Filburn (1942), it sanctioned an unmooring of government action from constitutional restraint that we are still stuck with. The principle that made Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn’s self-grown wheat, used to feed his own animals, interstate commerce has endured in some form or another all the way through Obamacare.

The ostensible justification for all this was not only that the world had changed, leaving behind the outmoded ways of the Founders. With the Depression, the world had also worsened, making true freedom impossible: “Necessitous men are not free men,” said FDR. But the clear lack of a limiting principle in this logic became quickly evident. Look at FDR’s final State of the Union address. With World War II ongoing, he claimed that those who resisted his effort to have the federal government guarantee the material prosperity of every American would yield “to the spirit of fascism here at home.” Harry Truman, FDR’s last vice president, would liken the moderate Thomas Dewey to Hitler on similar grounds when running against Dewey in 1948.

You don’t have to think the New Deal was a communist plot to notice, as Whittaker Chambers did, that some New Dealers had a hard time distinguishing themselves from communists (in part because some actually were communists). Nor was it difficult to observe that some of its enthusiasts were, at some point, besotted with the Soviet Union. “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” asked Stuart Chase, who gave the New Deal its name. But the transformation of political opponents into fascist enemies bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the way actual communists tended to transmute all opponents of their particular goals into fascists ipso facto. And you don’t need to accuse New Dealers of being communists to be uncomfortable with clear instances of FDR’s weaponizing agencies, such as the IRS and the FCC, against political enemies.

Again, though, as a crude political calculus, the New Deal achieved its goals. To complain about it now may invite unflattering comparisons to those Japanese soldiers who refused to believe that World War II was over. That’s certainly how Eisenhower, who knew a thing or two about winning that war, thought of it. Even the president who, up to now, has been the most philosophically opposed to what the New Deal bequeathed has a bit of a debatable legacy in this regard. Henry Olsen’s The Working-Class Republican cast Ronald Reagan as a defender of the New Deal legacy nonetheless critical of the excesses that followed. Yet Reagan also once accused New Dealers of having fascist sympathies (which, confusingly, some did — albeit in an era before the war and the gas chamber), and clearly opposed the New Deal’s centralization and aggrandizement of federal power. To consider the New Deal acceptable yet to want it to go no further is to deny its questing spirit, which strained against limitation, as what came after it and what it enabled demonstrate.

It is no surprise that the left is still taken with the New Deal: One of its youngest stars staked her career on an environmentalist “Green New Deal,” and one of its oldest began — and ruined — his presidency by asking presidential historians how he might become the next FDR. It is more surprising that, today, some on the right have accommodated themselves to it. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and Rod Dreher, for example, have described themselves as a “New Deal Democrat” and a “Harry Truman Democrat,” respectively. The academic David Azerrad has limply counseled that “however much we may long for a return to constitutional government, the modern administrative-welfare state is here to stay.” Vice President JD Vance recently cited FDR-style economic planning, including during World War II, as an instance “of lawmakers wielding the market to the betterment of our people.” And Vance acquaintance Curtis Yarvin, a dilettantish neo-reactionary, took to the New York Times this year to praise the statesmanship of FDR — no doubt a message with which Times readers were familiar. There is likely some measure of envy in all of this, some sense that a “New Deal of the right” could achieve for Republicans what the original did for Democrats.

That is profoundly mistaken. It’s the sort of thing that Buckley, in 1955, condemned some on the “well-fed right” for believing. And not just because standing for limited, constitutional government is — or at least ought to be — one of the essential items of distinction in this country between right and left. It is also becoming more clear, not less, that this niche approbation is wrong. Some portions of the New Deal have already gone by the wayside, albeit quietly; more may soon. And the very edifice of the engorged state the New Deal made possible is beginning to rot. Even some on the left are realizing, for example, that the bureaucratic mania of the past century makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the government to do even the sorts of things they want it to do.

And while the political legacy of the New Deal has altered politics and created some enduring constituencies, the New Deal coalition in anything like its original form has disappeared. As early as 1968, Frank Meyer observed that “the Roosevelt coalition has been coming apart at the seams.” Meyer wrote this as part of an explanation for why the moment was right for . . . a President Ronald Reagan.

DR’s own words help further explain how the engorged state is beginning to collapse. He opposed the public sector unionization that has led to the enfeebling bureau-sclerosis that now even some on the left lament. He criticized “continued dependence upon relief” as “a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” And during the 1932 presidential campaign, he criticized Hoover for being “committed to the idea that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” It was left to other New Dealers to admit furtively that the program involved an ultimately unsustainable and unconscionable transfer of fiscal obligations to future generations, who will soon prove unable to collect.

William F. Buckley Jr. set his sights on that very program 30 years ago, in another anniversary issue of this magazine. Forty years after authoring the injunction that we stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” in the same mission statement that also condemned the New Deal, he was asked in that issue “to give fresh instructions to history, on the order of: Proceed!” Buckley wondered what it would take “to loose the rein on history.” His answer? “A very careful opening of books once thought settled.” He proposed privatizing Social Security as one example. That Buckley would be willing to target perhaps the most popular single item of the New Deal’s legacy might inspire us to further boldness along the same lines.

Critics of National Review have said that the magazine and those who share its principles suffer from a failure of imagination. But those who see Leviathan as eternal cannot imagine anything so bold and exhilarating as a restoration of proper constitutional forms. Confronting the New Deal properly will require prudence, of course. As Frank Meyer acknowledged after the failure of Goldwater, who confronted the New Deal head-on in 1964, “It has to be made clear that conservatives by their very nature proceed in all changes with caution.” What that will look like requires extensive discussion, debate, and planning.

But however we go about it, this remains a line worth drawing — in 1955, and in 2025.

Written by Jack Butler and published by National Review ~ October 23, 2025