Michael Lind: Is It Time To Cancel FDR?

I’m not the only one who has noticed that the Democrats are evolving into what used to be our old foe the Republican Party. Joe Biden is an old school Republican president who is supported by Big Business, Wall Street, upper middle class professionals, utopian dreamers and coastal elites.

Tablet Mag:

“Seventy-six years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving his fourth term in office, died in his “little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia. The anniversary of FDR’s death raises the question: Why hasn’t the Democratic Party canceled him yet?

The political ancestors of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, have already been repudiated for being slaveowners and racists by 21st-century Democrats who have canceled or renamed the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day party dinners. Many contemporary Democrats would like to detach Franklin Roosevelt and his protégé Lyndon Johnson from the older Jefferson-Jackson tradition and honor them as founders of today’s Democratic Party, which celebrates New Deal programs like Social Security, and civil rights, Medicare, and Medicaid from the Johnson era. But separating them from their 19th-century forerunners is not that easy. In fact, Roosevelt and Johnson went out of their way to identify with the tradition of Jacksonian populism that modern-day progressives abhor.

In his second inauguration on Jan. 20, 1937, Roosevelt reviewed the inaugural parade from the Hermitage, a replica of Andrew Jackson’s plantation house that had been built in front of the White House. President Johnson hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office alongside portraits of FDR and Washington. After Johnson, the next president to display a portrait of Old Hickory in the Oval Office was Donald Trump.

Contemporary historians and journalists seldom think of FDR and the New Dealers as latter-day Jacksonians. But the electoral base of the New Deal Democratic coalition from the 1930s to the 1970s remained the generations-old Jacksonian alliance between white Southerners and Northern white “ethnics,” particularly Irish Americans, symbolized by the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960. Until the last generation, college-educated professionals and executives in America tended to vote Republican, while Democrats received most of the votes of the high school-educated working class. The kinds of voters who supported populist candidates from Jackson to Jimmy Carter are now the backbone of the Republican Party.

For its part, the Democratic Party has been transforming itself into the older Republican Party under a new, ostensibly progressive label. …

It is no surprise that the geographic heartlands of today’s Democratic Party are those of the old Federalist-Whig-Republican coalition—New England and the regions of the Midwest and the West Coast that New Englanders settled in the 19th century …”

Where do you even start?

FDR should be cancelled for all kinds of reasons:

  • FDR was a cishet White male
  • FDR collaborated with “white supremacy”
  • FDR’s military in World War II was racially segregated
  • FDR put Japanese-Americans in internment camps
  • FDR kept civil rights activists like W.E.B. DuBois at arm’s length
  • FDR ignored the concerns of the LGBTQIA community
  • FDR’s government denied entry to the S.S. St. Louis

How on earth can you defend much less publicly admire FDR in 2021? How can you get away with saying you want to be a white supremacist like FDR who persecuted the AAPI community?

Note: PC Principal has arrived in South Park from “back East” to talk about how Joe Biden is the new FDR.

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  1. If it wasn’t for the fact that Roosevelt provoked the Axis powers into war I might have been tempted to say he was an OK president. He let Eleanor deal with the colored folks so he wouldn’t have to.


    Just like it always has been? With antiracist idiots not actually knowing jack shit about history, while looking down at dumb racists/color blind people and claiming how “woke” they are. Except they’re not woke. They’re historically and politically illiterate. They’re highly uneducated, but they think they’re not, since they got a degree from a university with professors nearly as dumb as they are (an argument against credentialism).

    It usually takes more woke antiracists who are more knowledgeable, to show the earlier antiracists that the people they praise are indeed racists (this gets them called woke idiots by more reactionary antiracists).

    The most “woke” are “woke racists.” They nearly sit atop the totem pole (only 2nd to those who have been on both sides and moved beyond it).

    Everyone who has any basic grasp of history, knows that FDR would’ve hated these people. Yet here we are. They do the same shit with Lincoln. Or Charles Darwin. Or anyone for that matter. They do it with Churchill or Patton. They just don’t know jack shit. A lot of racists don’t either. But racists don’t control the institutions. Stupid antiracists do.

    Antiracists are some of the most ahistorical morons on the planet. They will selectively cherry pick things about a particular figure they want to appropriate and ignore the convenient things they don’t like.

    They’ll do the same to a time period and factions. Constantly appropriate people of the past, countries, in WW2, and imply they’re the same on social issues, when they think they’re fighting white nationalists, Nazis (which they regard as the same), even conservatives at some points, or bigots of whatever variety. With conservatives they’ll have a different narrative- one where they browbeat and try to link the US to the Nazis (by claiming that Hitler was inspired by the US eugenics and racism) when they want to deal with structural/institutional racism and want to show how bad the US is.

    They don’t know jack shit about what they’re talking about, but they keep talking, spreading ignorance to masses, endorsed by the institutions, do not get shutdown, and gain massive followings.

    This is called ideological historical revisionism.

    Trump gets called Nazi for putting some Mestizos into detainment centers. The US, ***while*** fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japanese (often called “Japs”- an epilate), had Japs in the country (because of racial immigration laws and white nationalist sentiment that still dominated the country) put into internment camps for the entire duration of the war of 3 years from Pearl Harbor with Order 9066. No one thought they were Nazis. No one really protested (save a few). It had massive support. And was predicated under the idea that people can have native loyalties to a country they come from (racially and ethnically).

    No one has a fucking clue about anything.

    It really bothers me they appropriate my grandparent’s generation.

  3. You forgot FDR’s most grave sin against wokeness: Someone in his administration drew red lines on a map, and a combination of those and racist interstate highways (see: Buttigieg, P.) are the only reasons why black people aren’t all Ward and June Cleaver today.

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