New Deal Role Models

Who compared President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to both Stalinist communism and Adolph Hitler’s Nazi program in the same sentence? Why, none other than FDR himself.

“What we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany,” the squire of Hyde Park privately acknowledged. “But we were doing them in an orderly way.”

“Ah yes,” author Jonah Goldberg observes, “the great defense against the charge of fascism: We’re more orderly!” Goldberg unearthed the Roosevelt gem in his seminal new book, Liberal Fascism.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.