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Wrestling With the New Deal
The programs Roosevelt put together may not have met a Platonic ideal of modern progress, but they saved American democracy itself.
AP Photo
When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America.
In 2014, an up-and-coming writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates made a landmark case for reparations in
The Atlantic, which took aim at, among other targets, one of the most revered figures in the liberal pantheon: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Detailing the failures of New Deal housing policy for Black America, Coates told readers that âRooseveltâs New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.â