AOC Amplifies FDR's Forgotten Warning
Finally, a few top Democrats are explicitly arguing that working-class economic populism is needed to stave off authoritarianism and defend democracy.
In 2021, Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney and I published a desperate plea. In a Rolling Stone essay, we implored Democrats then in power to heed Franklin Roosevelt’s long-forgotten warning about the link between economic hardship and authoritarianism. Five years later, it appears that at least one prospective Democratic presidential candidate understands the warning - and is using her platform to amplify it.
Back in 2021, many liberals had gone back to brunch, assuming that the “democracy crisis” was over and that Trump would never reemerge. In our Rolling Stone piece entitled “Democrats’ Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy,” Gibney and I were sounding a discordant alarm after completing Meltdown. That audio series traced how Democrats turning hope and change into more of the same created conditions for Donald Trump’s 2016 ascent, and which posited that the same thing could happen again. The key passage in our essay was here:
Americans keep voting to change this crushing dystopia and yet they continue being force-fed more of the same…Such betrayals from both parties have been telling more and more of the country that democracy is a farce…
The way for Democrats to combat that disillusionment is to learn from their party’s history during the Great Depression…
The year before a fulminating Nazi rally in a packed Madison Square Garden in New York, FDR warned that the global rise of fascism was the result of democratic governments doing the opposite of the New Deal and protecting an economic status quo enriching a tiny handful at the expense of everyone else.
“Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership,” he said in a 1938 radio address. “Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.”
Our essay was widely circulated, but was not internalized by Democratic Party leaders. They seemed intent on insisting that the Biden-era economy was great and that critics were ingrates, rather than channeling the public’s understandable rage at corporate abuse and economic suffering. Instead of mimicking FDR’s 1936 reelection campaign by casting themselves as unhappy with the economy and welcoming the hatred of oligarchs, Democrats seeking another presidential term allowed themselves to be portrayed as apologists for the problem, and allowed Trump to depict himself as the solution.
And now here we are mired in a democracy crisis being engineered by an authoritarian — just as Roosevelt warned.
But this is not the end of the story. In the last year, at least two prominent national Democrats seem to have internalized Roosevelt’s warning, and made it the prism through which they perceive politics.
First came Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who capped off his anti-oligarch, pro-working-class primary campaign with a victory speech quite literally invoking FDR’s warning:
When we no longer believe in our democracy, it only becomes easier for people like Donald Trump to convince us of his worth, for billionaires to convince us that they must always lead.
As FDR said, democracy has disappeared in several other great nations, not because the people dislike democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness. In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.
New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two. We can be free and we can be fed. We can demand what we deserve. And together, we have built a movement where everyday New Yorkers recognize themselves in our vision of democracy.
And now today comes Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In an appearance at the Munich Security Conference that has the chattering classes buzzing about a 2028 presidential bid, she too channeled Roosevelt’s warning. She suggested that her party had betrayed working-class politics, and that ending such betrayals are required to stave off the continued march toward authoritarianism:
After I was elected…there was this closed, door meeting of many high ranking Democratic Party officials…They derided many of the populist demands that I had run my campaign on. And I had defeated a 20-year Democratic incumbent that was part of Democratic Party leadership, and they said, $15 minimum wage at that time, way too high, too severe. The idea of tuition free public colleges and universities, too far. Expanding health insurance and Medicare, too extreme. And these are all the things that I as a waitress had campaigned on and had been major pain points in my life.
And then they said, we have to listen to working-class people more. And I think that that encapsulates much of the betrayal that the working class in the United States had felt…
The United States right now is experiencing a political pendulum. And depending really, the party that is seen most as betraying the working class tends to be the governing party in this moment right now that happens to be the Republican majority. But really, what we are seeing over the last eight years, I think, has been a growing recognition that, of those past errors (that) include military interventionism in the Iraq War (and) that include a recognition of NAFTA as a failed policy for many rural and working-class communities.
And now I think we are moving in this direction of increased recognition that we have to have a working-class, centered politics if we are going to succeed, and also if we are going to stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.
AOC came back to this same theme at another moment:
There is a level of market concentration and corporate concentration where a massive company can get so big that consolidated power can rival that of nation states. So it is of utmost urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.
What’s new here is not the moral case for working-class economic populism and all of the attendant policies that AOC mentioned. That moral case has been there for decades — we’ve long known that too many people are suffering, and that such suffering can be alleviated.
What’s new and newsworthy here is that finally we have some new Democratic leaders are making FDR’s political argument that working-class economic populism is not just morally right - but also necessary for both Democrats’ electoral success and for the defense of democracy itself.
It’s taken way too long for that argument to be understood, embraced and amplified at the highest reaches of the Democratic Party — but better late than never.
They have to do much more than talk about it. We need action. Look at the talk on the campaign trail of Obama and Slick Willie. We need someone like Mamdani who actually walks the walk. Someone like FDR was, not a Clinton or Harris who trot out onstage with the Cheney family.
Thank you. I have been boring my friends and relatives talking about FDR and the “malefactors of great wealth”.FDR was not a coward. He knew that the oligarchs hated him. He said he welcomed their hate. Contrast that with today’s Democrats ,who seem to be more interested in fighting yet another culture war than delivering economic justice.