Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
We are all New Deal socialists now
We are all New Deal socialists now
Dec 15, 2025 10:11 PM

President Trump is known for public unveiling his inner thoughts on Twitter. But one of the most ments he’s ever made came recently in a private discussion with lawmakers about trade policy.

According to Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., when senators visited the White Housethey told the president what farmers want is access to markets, not a payment from government. To this Trump replied, “I’m surprised, I’ve never heard of anybody who didn’t want a payment from government.”

Unfortunately, the president is probably right. In 1888, the British Liberal leader Sir William Harcourt declared, “We are all socialists now.” A similar claim could be made in America in 2018: We are all New Deal socialists now.

Currently, there are peting models of New Deal socialism in the U.S. The first is the democratic socialism represented by Bernie Sanders. The second type is the economic nationalism represented by Trump.

Both sides are attempting to be the heir of Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare state nationalism. Sanders is more overt about the connection. “Let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me,” said Sanders in 2015. “It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans.” But many of Trump’s economic policies are similar aligned with FDR vision of “economic rights.” Trump even admitted there was one area where he was aligned with Sanders: “We have one issue that’s very similar, and that’s trade,” Trump said in 2016. “He and I are similar in trade.”

Sanders and Trump—and their supporters—share much more mon, though, than just protectionist trade policy. Each side is collectivist and seeks to use the power of the federal government to advance the economic interest of the group over the individual. And when the individual is economically harmed by these protectionist policies, the federal will “protect” them by giving them “payment from government” (i.e., the profits earned by other Americans and collected by the government for redistribution).

This is why both Sanders and Trump, like FDR, want a federal government that is big enough and strong enough to control the economy. “Franklin Roosevelt’s nationalism was, first, a doctrine of federal centralization,” says Samuel H. Beer. “The principle of federal activism, which some have seen as the principal dividing line in American politics since the 1930s, was introduced by the New Deal.”

New Deal socialist believe free markets and free individuals are secondary to the national economic interest identified by the government. The individual is permitted to act only if it is in the interest of the collective. As Senator Elizabeth Warren has said, “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well-used. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to munity.”

Commenting on Warren’s remark, Kevin Williamson says,

The words “permit it” speak to the divide between traditional conservatives on the classical-liberal model and the (New) New Nationalists on the Roosevelt-Obama-Trump model. This permission mentality touches every aspect of nationalist economic thinking, which is how such meaningless bookkeeping exercises as the calculation of trade deficits and e e to be understood as pressing national concerns. Putting markets under economic discipline is where progressivism, socialism, fascism, and nationalism all intersect, each of those ideas being based on the superstition that the nation has interests distinct from those of the people pose the nation.

The reason Christians should reject New Deal socialism—and ponent parts socialism and nationalism—is because it makes an idol of national economic concerns. Under New Deal socialism we are no longer stewards of God’s resources, vice-regents of God’s creation called to fulfill the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:28). Instead, we are made stewards of the national economic interest, permitted to engage in economic activity with the permission of the national government, and subordinating the interest of real people to the interest of an abstract “nation.”

This is a form of subjugation that no free people should be expected to endure. But because we are all New Deal socialists now, we’re willing to trade our freedoms in exchange for, as our president says, “payment from government.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Christmas Greetings from Rev. Robert A. Sirico
With Christmas just around the corner, we at the Acton Institute would like to pause and share with all of you our warmest wishes for a blessed Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous new year to all of our friends and supporters. Acton Institute President Rev. Robert A. Sirico recorded thispersonal Christmas greeting, and we’re pleased to share it with you now. ...
There is No Free Lunch—or Free Red Tape
It was once mon practice of saloons in America to provide a “free lunch” to patrons who had purchased at least one drink. Many foods on offer were high in salt (ham, cheese, salted crackers, etc.), so those who ate them naturally ended up buying a lot of beer. In his 1966 sci-fi novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein used this practice in a saloon on the moon to highlight an economic principle: “It was when you...
Star Wars Discussion at Watchdog.org
Happy Star Wars day! The new Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens, opened across the US and worldwide today, and I can’t tell you anything about how well it’s doing. I’ve been avoiding Googling it because I’m a huge nerd and I don’t want to accidentally uncover any spoilers. (I haven’t seen it yet.) But I do know that the presales were over $100 million. So even if people end up hating it, it’s already done pretty well. (Not...
Keeping Watch over Their Flock at Night
For this week’s Acton Commentary, we have a Christmas meditation by the Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper. If we should ever be envious, shouldn’t we envy the shepherds out in Bethlehem’s fields? Those men singled out for their exceptionally glorious privilege! The ones awestruck on that holy night by the flood of heavenly glory that no one else had ever seen! Those who saw God’s heavenly hosts swooping and glistening above the fields! The men whose ears were ringing...
5 Facts About Christmas
Christmas is the most widely observed cultural holiday in the world. Here are five factsyou should know about the memoration of the birth of Jesus: 1. No one knows what day or month Jesus was born (though some scholars speculate that it was in September). The earliest evidence for the observance of December 25 as the birthday of Christappears in the Philocalian posed in Rome in 336. 2. Despite the impression given by many nativity plays and Christmas carols, the...
The Economics of Bedford Falls (Part III)
[Note: This is the finalpost in a series highlighting some of the financial aspects and broad economic lessons of Frank Capra’s holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. You can find part one hereand part two here.] Economist Don Boudreaux recently outlined ten foundational lessons that should be learned in every well-taught principles of economics course. Examples of nearly all of the ten lessons can be found in Capra’s Christmas classic, but for the sake of brevity I’ll merely highlight two...
The Most Important (Good) News Story of 2015
From mass shootings to terrorist attacks, political petence to racial unrest, there has been no shortage of bad news stories in 2015. Death, destruction, and divisiveness tend to dominate the news cycle, leading us to despair over the direction our world is headed. But our incessant focus on the negative can lead us to overlook or downplay the positive changes that are happening across the globe. That is especially true of the most important good news story of 2015, one...
Explainer: Christmas 2015 by the Numbers
As the most widely observed cultural holiday in the world, Christmas produces many things — joy, happiness, gratitude, reverence. And numbers. Lots of peculiar, often large, numbers. Here are a few to contemplate this season: $39.50– Average amount U.S. consumers spent on real Christmas trees in 2014. $63.60– Average amount U.S. consumers spent on fake Christmas trees in 2014. 33,000,000 – Number of real Christmas trees sold in the U.S. each year. 9,500,000 – Number of fake Christmas trees sold...
Food prices: financial speculation is a red herring
The discussion is certainly on-going among the 220 opinion leaders who attended and spoke at Acton’s December 3 Rome conference In Dialogue with Laudato Si’: Can Free Markets Help Us Care for Our Common Home? The Institute’s Rome officehad hoped that the “dialogue” would continue well past the conference itself – within the Vatican, its pontifical universities and mass media – afterheated discussion erupted over what is magisterium and debatable opinion in encyclical letters. When discussing environmental issues treated by...
This Christmas, Should You Give Cash or Cows?
During the Spanish Civil War, an American farmer named Dan West served as an aid worker on the front lines. His mission was to provide relief to weary soldiers, but all he was allotted to give them was a single cup of milk. This meager ration led West to wonder if more could be done. “What if they had not a cup,” thought West, “but a cow?” The “teach a man to fish” philosophy behind that question inspired West to...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved