Blocking Bad Ideas

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

The above quote summarizes the recklessness with which the New Deal was foisted upon a nation in crisis.  Ever since the New Deal, the one thing no politician can bear to be accused of is "doing nothing".  So even if the said politician has little idea what to do, he will assemble a crack team, the "Brains Trust" FDR called his, to provide a rationale to "do something".  John T. Flynn, in his classic The Roosevelt Myth, took a different view of the so-called Brains Trust.  In the section called "Trial and Error", Flynn aptly described the actions of Roosevelt's brainiacs as, "The Dance of the Crackpots".  One of Roosevelt's crackpots, Rexford Tugwell, wrote a book about the great Grover Cleveland entitled, Grover Cleveland: A Biography of the President Whose Uncompromising Honesty and Integrity Failed America in a Time of Crisis.  From the subtitle alone we learn most of what we need to know about Mr. Tugwell.  

Contradicting Obama's inaugural speech assertion that in times of crisis we have looked to our founding documents for guidance, we have Tugwell, the main architect of the New Deal:

"The Constitution was a negative document, meant mostly to protect citizens from their government.... Above all, men were to be free to do as they liked, and since the government was likely to intervene and because prosperity was to be found in the free management of their affairs, a constitution was needed to prevent such intervention.... The laws would maintain order, but would not touch the individual who behaved reasonably.

To the extent that these new social virtues developed [in the New Deal], they were tortured interpretations of a document intended to prevent them. The government did accept responsibility for individuals’ well-being, and it did interfere to make secure. But it really had to be admitted that it was done irregularly and according to doctrines the framers would have rejected. Organization for these purposes was very inefficient because they were not acknowledged intentions. Much of the lagging and reluctance was owed to constantly reiterated intention that what was being done was in pursuit of the aims embodied in the Constitution of 1787, when obviously it was done in contravention of them."

So to the extent that the legislative agenda of the post-FDR era has been shaped by the premises of the New Deal, we have been in "contravention" of the aims of our founding documents.  Obama continues Tugwell's duplicitous tradition.

Grover Cleveland's greatness can  at least partially be measured by his enemies; Tugwell was the kind of enemy of which heroes are made.  Grover Cleveland summed up his own accomplishments as "blocking the bad ideas of others".  Today we could use a president like Grover Cleveland with the guts to stand up and boldly block the continuing stream of bad ideas that come from Washington, D.C.