Reviews for The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980

The average rating for The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-17 00:00:00 Bert Reiner This is a valuable but very dry set of essays about politics and economics from the 30's to the 80's. The first half of the book features essays about the economic ideas behind the New Deal and the labor politics of the New Deal. It is boring. The second half of the book, which explains challenges to the New Deal and the collapse of the New Deal Democratic coalition, is much more interesting. The essays by Isserman, Kazin, and Rieder on the New Left's successes and failures and the rise of the Silent Majority are thorough and revealing. This volume suffers from several shortcomings. First, the editing is not great, and many of the essays are borderline unreadable, featuring endless, jargon-filled sentences. Second, the book was compiled in the late 1980's and it has not aged well. The editors and most of the authors equate the collapse of the New Deal political coalition (i.e. the dismantling of the old Democratic Party in the 1960's and the rise of the New Right) with the collapse of the New Deal in general. However, it does not square that contention with the survival of many New Deal and Great Society programs, such as Social Security, that even the most conservative Republicans won't touch. Finally, this volume treats European social democracy as the end point the New Deal was inevitably heading for before more radical reform policies were discredited and abandoned in the late 1930's and 1940's. These writers are really bummed about this without explaining why it would have been a better alternative. This teleological approach to the New Deal is also flawed because it does not consider how the New Deal was an experimental approach to relieving the Depression, bringing about recovery, and creating some kind of regulatory/welfare state. Nothing about the New Deal suggested it was destined or even on a course towards Norway, France, or Germany. The thinkers and policy-makers within the New Deal coalition who thought this way were only one of many factions within the New Deal and probably didn't have the political sway to pull the diverse Democratic coalition (and the liberal consensus of American politics) in a more socialist, statist direction. I'm not sure if this would have been a better route or not, but this volume overstates the likelihood of it happening.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-27 00:00:00 Michael fleming This book is a compilation of essays analyzing the relationship between political and economic policy from the 1930s to late 1980s. I personally find most economic history to be very dry to read unless intertwined with another historical genre. Nevertheless, it was interesting to how various authors associated Reagan and the rise of the Christian-right in the U.S. with the fall of government social policy.