WASHINGTON. Surprise! It looks like a fractured Democratic Party is rallying, or trying to, around Vice President Joe Biden. Many of his party’s fringe candidates dropped out of the presidential race ahead of Super Tuesday’s slate of Democratic primaries, throwing their support Biden’s way in hopes of avoiding a crushing sweep by neo-Bolshevik Bernie Sanders. Are the avoiding a Sanders / Roosevelt New Deal Re-Deux?
Super Tuesday delegate count. NBC News screen capture.
The FDR/Sanders vision Sanders, who serves Vermont in the US Senate as an Independent, insists his brand of socialism is a logical continuation of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. ##### “We rejected the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler,” Sanders told a New York audience, “We instead embraced the bold and visionary leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt… Roosevelt led a transformation of the American government and the American economy.”
Rejected the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler? Well, not really. ##### Bernie Bros. and Bernie Sanders’ Socialism: America’s way forward?
FDR’s interior secretary, Harold Ickes, admitted that his boss’s New Deal policies
“were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.”
“Party of the little guy” goes after the little guy
Jacob Maged of Jersey City, New Jersey.
Jacob Maged of Jersey City, New Jersey, was a victim of FDR’s transformed New Deal economy. Price controls imposed under Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act (NRA) threatened to put his tailor shop out of business. Undercutting prices set by his larger competitors is what kept him up and running during the Great Depression. The Polish immigrant charged 35 cents to press pants. The NRA’s Cleaners and Dyers Code fixed the price at 40 cents. For his economic crime against FDR’s mega-state, Maged was fined $100 and sentenced to 30 days in jail. The old New York Herald Tribune noted that one would have to “go to the Fascist or Communist states of Europe” to find similar actions imposed upon the individual. ##### Is any part of America ready for a Sanders-ista government?
The judge vacated the fine and release Maged after he served three days of his sentence. He then gave Maged “* little lecture on the importance of cooperation as opposed to individualism*,” The New York Times reported. But the US Supreme Court later declared the fascist economic policies of FDR unconstitutional in the [*Schechter Poultry Corp. vs. United States*](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/495/) ruling of 1935. As Supreme Court historian David P. Currie noted of the Schechter case, ##### “It can hardly have escaped the Justices that apart from its limitation to business there was little to distinguish what Congress had attempted from the \[Bundestag’s\] 1933 legislation authorizing Adolf Hitler to govern Germany by decree.”
Bill of Rights, American exceptionalism reared its lovely head at a critical moment in world history. The Supreme Court upheld constitutionally protected individualism against the forced, state-imposed “cooperation” of democratically elected authoritarian government. ##### “The chains of the Constitution”
The FDR/Sanders’ authoritarian vision for America is made possible by the forgetfulness of today’s Democratic Party oligarchs and cowardly, tongue-tied Republicans. Recently, Joe Biden, desperate to assume the mantel of Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, told a group of Texas Democrats: ##### “We hold these truths to be self-evident… all men and women created by… go… you know... you know the thing.”
The “thing” forgotten by Biden and most Democrats is called individual liberty – a “self-evident Truth” protected from the tyrannical whims of government [democratic or otherwise], by, as Jefferson once said, “the chains of the Constitution.”
Thomas Jefferson.
******************************************************************************************
*Top Images: President Franklin Roosevelt. Photo: The National Archives. Inset, Sen. Bernie Sanders. Photo: Michael Vadon via Wikipedia,* [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US\_Senator\_of\_Vermont\_Bernie\_Sanders\_in\_Conway\_NH\_on\_August\_24th\_2015\_by\_Michael\_Vadon\_(20715416790)\_(cropped).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Senator_of_Vermont_Bernie_Sanders_in_Conway_NH_on_August_24th_2015_by_Michael_Vadon_(20715416790)_(cropped).jpg).
