FDR: The First Cheeto in Chief

A buddy of mine sent me the latest David Brooks piece for all the reasons you send a friend a Brooks piece: to dunk on it, him, and his writing. In the intellectual slaughterhouse of elite American institutions a mind as insipid as Brooks’ stands as a feat of oligarchic civil engineering. And his latest intellectual offering fits into his limp oeuvre without fuss. In it, he points to FDR’s presidency, specifically his first two terms during the 1930s, as the mark Biden needs to hit in order to assume the starring historical role in which destiny hints at casting him: bringing “balance” back to America and capitalism after a global cataclysm.

Brooks suggests Biden and Company bone up on the following elements of FDR’s temperament, strategy, and style in the New Deal era:

1. Offer big change that feels familiar.
2. Broadcast pragmatism, not ideology.
3. Even in a crisis of capitalism, embrace capitalism.
4. Get capitalism moving.
5. Embrace expertise.
6. Look for imbalances.
7. Devolve power to Congress.

Some of these are true of the FDR administration, but they don’t particularly strike me as relevant advice for Joe Biden. Has Biden signaled a departure from capitalism? Didn’t Joe Biden, just months ago, promise his donors that “nothing will change” if he’s elected? Has any electorally meaningful American presidential candidate in recent memory run explicitly as an ideologue instead of a pragmatist? (Trump ran as neither, making him a notable exception.) Hasn’t Congress proven itself a political cesspit incapable of compromise even in dire circumstances while many other powers have consolidated into the Executive over the last twenty or thirty years?

Brooks writes for a paper — has he read one?

If any of these are lessons or requirements or whatever, they seem relevant only to a make-believe past of civility, consensus, and true leadership. So what’s this piece doing?

The short answer is that it’s a cope. Things are bad, Americans are taught FDR was the best president ever, and what could be better in a time like this than the best president ever who did the best programs ever that everyone loved and agreed with the whole time he did them?

Brooks wants to assure his readers that everything’s going to be fine because they’ve been fine before. An adult will arrive, you don’t have to worry, and all the leader has to do is make everything the same as it was when things felt good so we can all go back to being Americans and exercise our virtue by buying shit and reading The New York Times and referring to the parts of the world we bomb into oblivion as “bad neighborhoods.” We won’t have to wage culture war or do ideology ever again. Because back then? Back then that stuff never happened.

But that’s not how it happened. FDR was reviled by at least 40% of the country. He had more in common with Donald Trump than he does with whatever Brooks is writing about. What FDR did with radio (speaking directly to the people, circumventing press norms, constantly speaking to the press, etc. etc.) Trump does with Twitter and his rallies. Plenty of people thought FDR was a demagogue because, at the time, other charismatic leaders were working to sentimentally attach themselves to their publics, drawing big crowds in Munich and Rome. FDR represented a substantial break from precedent on the press front that worried parts of the electorate.

And the New Deal? Not only was it largely an unsuccessful mess, but it was also incredibly politically contentious. FDR and his crew were divisive figures. FDR rarely sought bi-partisanship. He didn’t aim to collaborate so much as to dominate, which inspired a partisan acrimony that should look familiar to us today. Take this tidbit from Kiran Klaus Patel’s The New Deal: A Global History:

Obviously, not only the New Dealers polarized the debate; [Huey] Long, [Father] Coughlin as another former ally, Republicans, and members of business groups all did their fair share in making conflict endemic in the 1930s. Personal hatred went so far that some anti-New Dealers despised the president so much that they only referred to him as “That Man.” Hanna Coal executive George M. Humphrey always spelled Roosevelt with a lowercase r, and dinner guests of J. P. Morgan were not even allowed to mention the president's name at all. Even if the political climate in other parts of the world was much more poisoned, and political foes characterized as “vermin” or “rats,” Roosevelt’s antagonistic style was quite in line with the political zeitgeist: joviality and friendliness were only meant for those who accepted charismatic leadership.

Hard not to see the people who refer to Trump as “45” or “Drumpf” or “the Cheeto in Chief” reflected here. FDR was the first Cheeto in Chief.

My point here isn’t that Trump and FDR are the same. That’s obviously not the case — FDR’s general success as a statesman was but one of many major differences between them. Rather, my point is that Brooks’ technocratic, Weberian wet-dream of neutral charismatic leadership is a fiction that scratches a familiar liberal itch: the fear and hatred of politics as such.

Brooks mistakes politics for a war of ideas rather than a struggle over power and resources. So if a leader is nice in the right ways, then everyone calms down and quits waging culture wars, or what have you, and we can go back to that fictitious Eden of permanent consensus he so wishes the past was.

Notice that in Brooks’ piece he makes Lincoln and Roosevelt out to be centrists. He writes, “F.D.R. also demonstrated that the most effective leaders in crisis are often at the center of their party, not at left or right vanguard. Abraham Lincoln took enormous heat from abolitionists. But he’s the one who defeated slavery […] F.D.R. was able to pass so much legislation precisely because he was so shifting and pragmatic and did not turn everything into a polarized war.” I’m not saying Lincoln and FDR were radicals, but where do waging a civil war and politically realigning an entire developed nation-state within eight years fit into technocratic centrism exactly?

Politics is a struggle for hegemony, which means it’s partisan, liquid, active, and relies on dissensus as much as consensus. So, on one hand, Brooks invents a rosy past wherein Roosevelt was a widely accepted pragmatist adored the country over. And, on the other hand, he flattens historical differences to cast Roosevelt in the image of the perfect top-down technocratic he’s longed for his entire career. And Brooks does it because it’s comforting in the way the already-comfortable imagine still greater comfort: if only everyone could just shut up and let them enjoy their comfort in peace.

Brooks has been so coddled that he’s scandalized by political conflict. Why would anyone have to struggle over anything? So he believes in a fanciful, lukewarm, trans- and ahistorical centrism that fits his picture of what’s best. Brooks wants so badly for his vision and the truth to be friends he’ll spend his whole life deceiving himself and his readers to make it appear so.

Sad.