In Defense of FDR
FDR, the conquering hero of the 20th-century center-left, has faded into vague disrepute among the 21st-century center-left.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
December 03, 2025
One of the more peculiar ideological developments of the 21st century is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the conquering hero of the 20th-century center-left, has faded into vague disrepute among the very people who would have enthusiastically voted for him in his own day.
It used to be that FDR was controversial for his macroeconomic policies. But a more reasonable appraisal has emerged with time: Roosevelt mostly blundered about economically because he was clueless about macroeconomics, but then almost everybody was in the 1930s. Unlike Herbert Hoover, however, who froze up as the Depression worsened, giving markets the jitters, FDR at least kept energetically flailing away with one scheme after another, which was good for morale.
When Roosevelt’s name does come up now, it tends to be in connection with his transgressions of redlining, not abolishing Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, not letting in Jewish refugees, and failing to prevent the Holocaust.
In other words, the upper-class WASP FDR is deplored as a racist for not doing more for the kind of people who tended to vote for him in large numbers, such as blacks and Jews.
Thus, these days you hear constantly about Adolf Hitler but seldom about the man who beat him: FDR.
Read the whole thing there.
The decision to inter Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor may appear disgraceful in retrospect, but it prioritized the security of the nation over solicitude to a suspect group. Which makes more sense--the Japanese internment, or George W Bush after the 9/11 attack declaring Islam "a religion of peace" and doubling the number of Muslim immigrants? A sane nation would have put an immediate moratorium on Muslim immigration and perhaps deported most of those here. As severe as that would have been, it would have been far less cruel and pointless than our disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. We have lost the will to make the hard choices that a civilization needs to routinely make in order to survive--look at the resistance to the deportations of illegal aliens, even those who are criminals.
It seems to be a perpetual feature of leftist politics that heroes turn into insufficiently revolutionary figures with the passage of time. In this case it's especially absurd considering how consequential FDR was across all fronts.
However, the issues identified as modern disappointments are essentially race and identity issues and reflects the shift of the political left from being primarily concerned with economic fairness to being largely concerned with what it considers racial justice. To me this is one of the biggest political inflection points in our history. It meant that our oldest and most powerful political party went from pursuing policies that largely dealt with economic incentives in an effort to move the needle between broad income-based classes to being obsessed with trying to engineer racial class outcomes against the 1,000 MPH headwind of human biodiversity.