The Roots of Totalitarian Democracy in the New Deal: Reviewing 'The New Dealers War' by Thomas Fleming

FDR's total war on all the enemies of liberalism prefigured the great struggle civilized people face today.

Brothers in arms.

In Thomas Fleming’s important work, The New Dealers’ War, he recounts a conversation he had with Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, in 1960.

One evening, I asked him what he really thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The eighty-six-year-old ex-president hesitated for a moment, then spoke in a calm, steady voice. “Inside he was the coldest man I ever met. He didn’t care about you or me or anyone else in the world on a personal level, as far as I could see. But he was a great president. He brought this country into the twentieth century.”

As I read this, I could not help but think of a famous line from the film Patton, in which the revered American World War II general, faced with a world without poetry and glory, says, ‘God, how I hate the twentieth century.’ (Later in the film, after meeting the Soviets in Berlin, he wonders what the point of the entire war had been.)

Perhaps only Truman, the only man thus far to have ordered an atomic strike of civilians, which would ultimately make the Far East safe for Mao, could have known the ruthless and sociopathic character of FDR, yet still lauded him for bringing the US into a century of horror and near nuclear destruction.

I thought of FDR and his great modernization and centralization of the American federal state when I read the communique published by the G20 leaders from their latest meeting in Bali, and in particular this statement about pandemic preparedness. (The full communique can be found on the White House website here.)

We support the WHO mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub as well as all as the spokes in all regions of the world with the objective of sharing technology and technical know-how on voluntary and mutually agreed terms. We acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods to facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations. We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalize and build on the success of the existing standards and digital COVID-19 certificates.

Yes, the leaders of the major nations have looked back at the horrors of the covid event and they beam with pride at the wonders of mRNA technology and vaccine passports and just how effective they have been in saving lives and keeping us safe.

But do you expect anything less from these titans who walk amongst us as brother leaders:

For many, it has been an utter shock at what has transpired these past few years.

The West was meant to have defeated fascism and illiberalism in 1945! Why are we being locked up in our houses? Why can we suddenly get arrested if we say the wrong thing online? Why do we need to carry papers that show we have injected ourselves with a totally fake vaccine?

It’s the first assumption which trips us up. If we had a more accurate picture of the deracination, of the revolution which was foisted upon the world by an alliance between Bolshevism and the New Deal, nothing would have surprised us since 2020.

I have written before on the liberal mythology of World War II and its aftermath. I wrote this before reading the aforementioned Fleming work. When I did read The New Dealers’ War, I realised I had been too kind on Roosevelt.

I fear my prior writing gave the impression that Roosevelt may have been duped by Stalin, that American liberalism could be forgiven for allying the West with the Soviets in the face of Hitler’s rise.

No - Roosevelt was not duped. Roosevelt was not naïve. He knew what Stalin was. And the truth was that the impulses which drove Stalin were not unrelated to those which drove FDR and the New Deal.

Fleming’s work is horrifying in how it blows up the old notion of the Good War. It equally shed new light for me on the nature of the Cold War - far from being an icy collision between two adversaries with polar opposite guiding ideologies, it was instead the falling out of brothers as to who would be the junior or senior partner in a new global order of post-racial and post-religious technocrats.

Such knowledge explains why US hostility toward Russia grew after the end of the Soviet Union, why China for so long was welcomed into the heart of western institutions, and why the draconian measures we now face as permanent weapons of the liberal state were so readily adopted by bureaucrats in democracies round the world.

The scope of the book is beyond a simple review by a layman like myself. Instead I want to walk you through some of the core insights to be gleaned from Fleming this historian.

FDR’s closest aide was Harry Hopkins. Hopkins was a social worker in New York whom FDR tapped to be his Secretary of Commerce and then his alter-ego in foreign affairs. They were so close Hopkins lived in the White House. We now know that Hopkins, as the point man for US military aid to the Soviets, passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets.

Hopkins was subject to fierce criticism by opponents of FDR. But as Fleming points out, their criticism probably never went far enough:

If Hopkins’s critics could have read a memorandum he wrote in the White House, they would have fulminated against him even more ferociously. In April 1941, he outlined an apocalyptic vision that seemed to confirm their worst fears. It was entitled: “The New Deal of Mr. Roosevelt is the Designate and Invincible Adversary of the New Order of Hitler.” As Hopkins saw it, the new order of Hitler “can never be conclusively defeated by the old order of democracy, which is the status quo.” There was only one way to beat Hitler: “By the new order of democracy, which is the New Deal universally extended and applied.” Unless “world democracy” backed Roosevelt’s New Deal, they would fail. The peoples of the world were not fighting to preserve the old order “but to build a new one.” Only under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt “was a more humane and democratic world order plausible.” Democracy “must wage total war against totalitarian war. It must exceed the Nazi in fury, ruthlessness and efficiency.”

What was this New Deal universally applied, which was to exceed the Nazis ‘in fury, ruthlessness and efficiency’?