Despite the many virtues of Barrack Obama's presidency people have not shared equally in economic growth. Income and wealth inequality are still near all time-highs and also he trend of galloping monopolization of business. But this wasn't always the case.
New Deal is a series of program enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938 and a few that came later. It includes both laws passes by the Congress as well as a presidential executive orders during the first term of President Franklin Roosevelt. The programs were in the response to the Great Depression and focused on what historians refer to as the three R's-Relief, Recovery and Reform.
The New Deal produced a political realignment which makes the Democratic Party the majority and as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of nine Presidential Term from1933 to 1969.
The first and greatest error was on the part of the fading New Dealers, who struggled to adapt to the changing politics of civil rights, and generally supported the Vietnam War. The New Deal coalition infamously included Southern Democrats, and thus had to make its peace with American apartheid. With the rise of the civil rights movement, this became politically untenable, but many New Dealers failed to pitch their politics to the new reality. As Stoller notes, the post-Watergate majority quickly removed the famous finance skeptic Wright Patman from the chair of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, in part because he was a Texas Democrat who had supported segregation.
There is a great historical cycle here, which has occurred several times in American history. Neoliberal worship of markets is rooted in the ideology of classic economists like David Ricardo and Adam Smith; it is highly prized by business and conservatives for its political implications. Yet such a system delivers most of its benefits to the very rich and causes frequent financial panics - the worst of which, the Great Depression, dealt a smashing blow to the credibility of classical ideology.
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