Just got 'Fear Itself' by Ira Katznelson because it criticizes the New Deal from the left.
I ordered it along with his other book 'When Affirmative Action Was White' which argues that affirmative action in the US was distorted by by southern democrats from its inception in the 1960's into maintaining the status quo and that the racist aspects of Johnson's Great Society have roots in Roosevelt's New Deal which leads into his more recent book.
I have a slim history of the Democrat Party by a Trotskyite publisher which I recall entitles one of its chapters 'The Party of Slavery'. I thought this book by Katznelson might give teeth to that perspective with respect to the New Deal era. I understand that the book is not so critical of Roosevelt as of the Congress which was dominated by southern Democrats who were Roosevelt's main opponents in getting New Deal legislation passed & forged a consensus with Roosevelt which tainted the New Deal. According to this book, a given law was passed only if it was okay with the southerners which is why, for example, farm laborers and domestic servants got passed over by the New Deal.
This made me ponder that the Southern aristocracy largely via the Democrat party in actuality ran the country even though it had officially lost the civil war. I think it also gives teeth to Stalin's declaration back in 1924 that the western democracies are the moderate wing of fascism.
I became acquainted with the Wisconsin school of American historian led by William Appleman Williams which viewed America's cold war anti-communism very critically as that America has always been a virtual colonialist monstrosity non-stop from the British colonial days through to the Cold War, but Williams argued american foreign policy has always been directly connected to its domestic policy. The rich own America and exploit the poor, but an ever expanding empire hides and disguises expiration by giving the exploited the opportunity to escape. This is why a revolution temporarily overthrowing the upper class occurred in France, but not in America. The exploited in France had no where to run and Revolution was much more the only alternative.
The history books by communist party chairman William Z. Foster appear to me to have voiced William Appleman William's ideas a generation before Williams himself (who was considered a radical 1950s and 1960s scholar). Foster was critical of Roosevelt and ran against him for president in 1932. He wrote that the New Deal programs as Roosevelt presented them had a lot of valor, but its effect was to pacify the people who if left to themselves would have changed the American system more drastically. Thus, Foster considered the New Deal a controlled socialism that saved capitalism's ass by preventing what had happened in Russia. Morgan and Rockefeller much preferred to tell a Roosevelt what to do and say to the people rather than have a Lenin kick them out of their houses.
I think Obama and most other recent Democrat presidents are like Roosevelt then. They may be personally inclined to what most people want, but they are willing to and do compromise that by submitting to the desires of other persons who in truth have no interest in democracy at all.
I saw a YouTube video of the author and was partially disappointed and hope the book will be more dynamic than the author's speech. I also get the idea that the more intriguing part of the book about the southern dominated congress is only one third to one half of it, but I'll see when I get home to read it.