The Birth of Modern Conservatism | Court Packing and the New Deal Reaction

Описание: In this episode, we talk about the birth of modern conservatism in reaction against the New Deal.

The New Deal was broadly popular, but it wasn’t popular with everyone. Some people had real problems with New Deal programs individually, and with the New Deal philosophy of government generally. The New Deal was truly a constitutional revolution providing the government with new powers it had never exercised before and creating a flurry of new institutions and programs unlike anything the federal government had before.

Then there were the inevitable controversies, missteps, blunders and abuses that always happen when people exercise power. The AAA was destroying food at a time in which Americans were going hungry. Roosevelt had instituted a new punishing tax rate meant to target just one man he did not like, John Rockefeller. Yet nothing was as controversial than the implementation of the National Recovery Act.

The NRA had charged powerful corporate and labor interests with writing comprehensive rules managing the details of every industry in America. Naturally, some seized the opportunity to craft rules meant not to benefit America but to benefit their own businesses while punishing rivals. Then there were the private policemen accountable only to those interest bashing down doors at night looking for code violations. Or the NRA posters businesses had to display in their windows like loyalty posters to fend off the threat of government led boycotts. The stories of abuses eventually got bad enough the government had to create a review board under the leadership of Clarence Darrow. Darrow’s reports were so blistering and filled with stories of abuse the administration had to bury them in embarrassment and abolish the review board entirely.

But things really came to a head with the Court-Packing Scheme.

It was inevitably that people would challenge the constitutionality of these New Deal programs in court, and around the middle of Roosevelt’s first term they reached the Supreme Court. It was little surprise when the Supreme Court, following pre-New Deal precedent, started striking programs down. Then in one day in 1935, the Court struck down several New Deal programs—including its crown jewel the NRA.

FDR reportedly now decided the Court was his enemy and the chief obstacle to his New Deal. He put together a bill allowing him to appoint a new justice for every justice over seventy, which would give him a new majority. The backlash in his own party was immense. When the Court suddenly began to switch its votes to moot the necessity of the bill, FDR had to drop it before it passed—giving him the constitutional revolution he sought. But at great cost.

Now a core group of Democrats, thinking the FDR and his New Deal had now gone too far, reached out to anti-New Deal Republicans in Congress. They formed an information coalition dedicated to stopping the New Deal. It was called the Conservative Coalition.

This Conservative Coalition would lodge essentially two arguments against the New Deal. That it was an assault on liberty. And that it was “Unamerican,” essentially meaning it was undercutting traits of character, or virtues, the American republic needed to survive and thrive.

These two ideas, liberty and virtue, were coming together to form another new ideology. That ideology is modern conservatism. The New Deal hadn’t just created one new political ideology. It created two.

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