Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, is famous for helming America through The Depression & WW2, and was the progenitor of many social programs, including Social Security. Because of this, he's often derided by The Right as the archetype of socialism. An alternate, and more accurate, interpretation is that he was actually Capitalism's savior. During a time when Marxism was successful and fashionable, FDR undercut the growth of The Left by adopting their rhetoric and co-opting its leaders, which is where the claim that some of his cabinet members were Marxists comes from.

At the time, Big Labor was entirely Marxist, 15% of the voter population were Communist sympathizers, and the rest of the Western World had already capitulated or were leaning in that direction. FDR was a master negotiator who adopted just enough socialist ideas for liberty and capitalism to survive. It wasn't until a decade later that a concerted effort was made to push back against Marxist ideology, culminating with McCarthy-style black-listing in the 1950s. Unfortunately, there's now been a complete flip: the Marxists are getting back in control and are doing the black-listing. The time is ripe for another FDR.