Chronic. The high pace of reforms launched by US President Joe Biden and the scale of his investment plan have prompted talk of a New New Deal – the program President Roosevelt launched in 1933, deep in the country. crisis of 1929. The health crisis linked to Covid-19 and the environmental crisis, after the great financial crisis of 2010, even lead some to speak of the end of the era of neoliberalism.
But to interpret the New Deal in retrospect as a Keynesian stimulus, or as the application of planning principles to the American economy, does not quite correspond to reality: budget deficits were deliberately limited at the start of the New Deal, while planning attempts were thwarted by the Supreme Court and restricted to a few sectors. In many ways, the New Deal was inconsistent, juxtaposing policies with contradictory principles, even though they had in common the powerful idea that more democracy would enable economic recovery.
More importantly: “successful” New Deal policies cannot simply be repeated today, as the context has changed, as have the objectives. But what allows us to understand the historiography of the New Deal is that broad political alliances can provide such impetus that, despite errors, contradictions or shortcomings, a lasting dynamic can be set in motion.
The authors brought together by Romain Huret, Nelson Lichtenstein and Jean-Christian Vinel in Capitalism Contested: The New Deal And Its Legacies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) show us that New Deal reforms were rooted in several critical traditions of American capitalism at the time.
Thus, faced with very large companies, whose emergence is perceived, since the end of the XIXe century, as a threat to democracy, two approaches are possible: that of antitrust laws, which can go as far as dismantling, was favored before 1914; that of regulated consultation (close to European corporatism), advocated by President Hoover, was first taken up by the “planists” of the Roosevelt team, who nevertheless obtained the support of big bosses, like that of General Electric, sharing their faith in technical and organizational economies of scale.
Corporatism and nepotism
But when, in 1935, the Supreme Court annulled, in the name of competition, the National Industrial Recovery Act, which organized this planned concertation, Roosevelt had to respond with the Wagner law [juillet 1935] which protects union life and gives allied workers rights hitherto unknown, making unions both counterpowers and interlocutors for the bosses. This protection of employees will ensure a redistribution of productivity gains for several decades.
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