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Maximo Roboto posted:FDR seems more understandable as a blue blooded NY patrician who was canny enough to see where the winds were blowing and was smart/idealistic enough to ape what other countries were doing at the time wrt building a government that can actually do poo poo to get out of the Depression. He interned Japanese Americans because he was about as racist as any other American at the time and that’s the sort of popular outrage reaction that would happen after Pearl Harbor. LBJ’s decision to get embroiled in Indochina, even going forward with the Gulf of Tonkin flimsy pretext, seems out of right field LBJ's war on poverty did not seem to be ingeninue, but America was always an empire and it didn't stop with LBJ. To be clear, LBJ wasn't a leftist but he was more of a determined populist that got results. Also, the voting rights act/civil rights act were heavily influenced by the Cold War and the fact that the perception of the US was dismal in much of the developing world.
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Oct 18, 2020 05:35
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Maximo Roboto posted:Makes sense. So the Marxist view would be then that he was peddling reformist scraps to bolster America for its true war on communism? I guess to me it's still very paradoxical that his populist measures would've been fairly comprehensive (making him relatively quite left compared to all other American presidents), but his commitment to the Cold War undercut all of it. In the end, he was a liberal and an imperialist (from a "Marxist perspective"), don't get me wrong but within the realm of liberals and imperialists, there are variations. He was more of the populist side of that calculation. Just because he was relatively left-wing for the US doesn't really matter into the broader question of political economy because the US really only works one way and that is the expansion of market space.
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Oct 18, 2020 05:56
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