I like a lot about Krystal Ball and Jimmy Dore, popular pundits who I think I can safely describe as part of the progressive left. But I disagree with one of the main themes that comes up on their shows, which is the need for the Democratic party to return to its ‘FDR Roots’. A closer look at the discriminatory and ultimately ineffective economic policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt reveals why:

New Deal policies discriminated against black Americans: In an interview with The Real News Network’s Paul Jay, University of Houston professor Gerald Horne, while praising some benefits of the New Deal for African Americans, acknowledged that Social Security and the policies of the Federal Housing Administration excluded many black Americans:

PAUL JAY: Let’s start with the New Deal itself. We know that Blacks simply did not benefit from the New Deal programs in the way white workers did. Why don’t we start with that? What are some examples of that? Then we can kind of get into the why and the politics of it.

GERALD HORNE: You alluded to a number of the examples, that is to say, with regard to the Social Security program seeking to exclude categories of workers where Blacks tended to flock, such as agricultural labor in particular. I should also mention that with regard to housing programs, recent scholarship has suggested that New Deal housing programs did not erode Jim Crow neighborhoods. They helped to fortify Jim Crow neighborhoods.

New York Times bestselling author Nick Chiles listed 9 ways the New Deal excluded black Americans, including the following:

The National Recovery Administration, intended to reduce “destructive competition” and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, not only offered whites the first crack at jobs, but authorized separate and lower pay scales for Blacks…

the FHA had an explicit policy of not insuring suburban mortgages for African-Americans…At the FHA’s insistence, developer William Levitt did not sell homes to Blacks, and each deed included a prohibition of such resales in the future…

Though CCC rules forbade discrimination based on race, color or creed, the local relief boards often refused to enroll Blacks, particularly in the South. When they were enrolled, Blacks were almost always placed in segregated camps, not only in the South, but all over the country…

The president disappointed Black leaders by failing to support an anti-lynching bill and a bill to abolish the poll tax. Roosevelt feared that conservative Southern Democrats, who had seniority in Congress and controlled many committee chairmanships, would block his bills if he tried to fight them on the race question. In 1938, liberal congressmen attempted to pass federal anti-lynching legislation to halt the most horrific type of anti-Black terrorism. Southern Senators angrily filibustered, and FDR defied Black leaders and his own wife by refusing to throw his support behind the measure.

Does a modern political movement really want to hold up as its icon someone who passed legislation that discriminated against millions of Americans, and didn’t even have the political courage to support an anti-lynching bill? Maybe if his policies were ultimately economically beneficial, but…

Years of deficit spending produced an unsustainable economy completely dependent on the government: As the following segment from a PBS documentary about the Great Depression explains, Roosevelt cut New Deal spending in 1937 and the economy almost immediately collapsed:

This does not bode well for progressive proposals such as the Green New Deal which seem to rely on the following formula, not dissimilar from the reasoning of the underwear gnomes from South Park:

Step 1: massive deficit government spending

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Sustainable economic prosperity!

Which brings me to my conclusion:

The progressive left does not make the government good, but preserves a corrupt system to the detriment of all. This not only explains the worldwide electoral defeats of left-leaning politicians, but points to a deeper flaw in the political reasoning of the left. In a time of unprecedented global distrust in institutions, leftist policies critically rely on institutional (government) action: taking over the health care industry, passing new environmental regulations, raising taxes, etc. And while the right may take a relatively hands off approach to these issues, I believe there exists a great center of potential political action; namely, confronting the corruption in our government that is causing public policy to ultimately favor a privileged few over the vast majority of taxpayers.

For example, a seldom-talked about reason behind America’s high health care costs is how a private interest - the American Medical Association - determines how much Medicare pays for medical procedures. Rather than address the glaring potential for abuse in this arrangement, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal essentially papered over the issue by giving everyone access to a corrupt system - at the expense of wasting our tax dollars in an unfair pricing scheme.

In a similar way, the ultimate legacy of FDR’s New Deal may not be how it provided work for Americans during the Great Depression, but how it saved a corrupt version of capitalism. Rather than let capitalism fail and creative ideas such as self-sufficient, worker-run cooperative farms flourish, Roosevelt helped crush the populist 1934 California gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair by supporting his Republican opponent, who had agreed to support the New Deal.

Sinclair supporters must have felt betrayed by Roosevelt, just as many Sanders supporters (I hope) feel betrayed by his endorsement of a candidate who promised to veto Medicare for All. But instead of reflecting on how Bernie should have been more like FDR, I think we should be seeking something entirely different.