Are many of today's Republicans...

Are many of today's Republicans descendants, or the actual people who participated and who payed for Roosevelt's New Deal to bail out America from the Great Depression? And if yes, is that why they are so hell-bent (against all common sense and decency) to erode or siphon off, money from those same social programs, set up during the GD? To get, "their money back."

Official response from submitted

No, too much time has passed for the New Deal even to linger in the minds of most Americans. The New Deal happened first and foremost because millions of Americans responded to the Great Depression by joining labor unions and/or the socialist and communist parties and fighting back. That forced enough corporations and enough of the rich to recognize the risk to the capitalist system of not spending some of their money to help the masses through the Great Depression. In blunt terms, they grasped that they better part with part of their money or else risk losing it all. So they supported the politics of FDR: they provided him with the high taxes and also loans to establish Social Security, federal unemployment benefits and federal jobs. Of course, a portion of the corporations and the rich disagreed, wanted the govt instead to repress the unions, socialists and communists. They raged against what FDR did in the New Deal. And they are the ideological, political and sometimes literally family ancestors of today'r right wing Republicans gathered in support of Trump. They got part of what they wanted in the McCarthyite purges of the decade immediately after WW2 ended and FDR died. But they always wanted to go further, to expunge forever the risk of another period when taxes on them would be raised to help average Americans.


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  • Richard Wolff
    responded with submitted 2017-05-27 16:26:31 -0400
  • Donald Bellunduno
    published this page in Ask Prof. Wolff 2017-05-26 06:56:42 -0400

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