Ira Katznelson’s great book makes notable contributions to debates about the New Deal and US political development but also modern democratic theory. As Katznelson skillfully recalls in Fear Itself, mid-twentieth-century thinkers on both the right and left expressed skepticism about the viability of a system of government in which elected legislatures were expected to play a robust role. In order to defend the fascist “new order” they lauded for having broken decisively with liberal notions of legislative supremacy, rightists like Carl Schmitt eagerly chronicled the apparent decline of liberal parliaments. Communism and its fellow-travelers in the 1930s and 1940s were also partly motored by suspicions about the effectiveness of popular legislatures when confronted with capitalist economic collapse and total war.
Even in the political mainstream, such worries were commonplace. One of Katznelson’s predecessors in Columbia University’s political science department, Lindsay Rogers, suggested in 1934 that legislatures should “reconcile themselves to laying down general principles within the limits of which they will give executives free hands” (cited on p. 116). Many principled liberal democrats exuded similar anxieties.
Katznelson counters by showing how between 1933 and 1952 the U.S. Congress was “recast and reinvigorated as a site of decision and governance” (p. 127). Though at times tempted by authoritarian paths, and only succeeding at the price of costly moral and political trade-offs to southern segregationists who controlled Congress, New Deal liberals sustained “America’s separation of powers and democratic lawmaking as core features of the rule of law” (p. 125). Notwithstanding its complex and messy trajectory, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal provided a powerful retort to those preoccupied with the specter of legislative decline. Although much of Katznelson’s account highlights the New Deal’s compromises with racism at home and dictatorship abroad (i.e., our wartime co-belligerent, the Soviet Union), he celebrates its greatest achievement: Keeping faith with the liberal belief in the paramount role of elected legislatures, Roosevelt’s reforms warded off both economic collapse and fascist aggression.
Much of Katznelson’s story is right on the mark. Unlike its prostrate cousins in communist and fascist regimes, the U.S. Congress was never rendered politically irrelevant; it has survived as a key political player. Yet an occasional lack of conceptual creativity mars the author’s analysis and risks occluding major institutional changes.
Despite Katznelson’s strong claims about Congress’s tenacity, his own narrative provides ready ammunition to those more skeptical of its institutional prowess. As he recounts, during crucial phases of the New Deal, and then again during World War II, Roosevelt relied heavily on the language of wartime and economic emergency in order to gain from Congress massive delegations of highly discretionary authority, much of which—as another midcentury scholar, Clinton Rossiter, noted in a brilliant 1948 study—entailed an “unprecedented breakdown of the constitutional barriers separating Congress and the President” (Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, [1948] 2002, p. 256). While accurately recalling the familiar story of Roosevelt’s crisis government and its reliance on “executive initiative, executive leadership of delegation, an abbreviated legislative process, the delegation of power by statutes, and an expansion of the administrative branch” (Constitutional Dictatorship, p. 256), Katznelson ultimately views such trends as congruent with his overall claims about Congress’ institutional salience. When discussing the emergence of the postwar national security state, he aptly notes that “[b]y delegating immense capacity to the executive branch, Congress effectively stepped aside, just as it had during World War II” when it gave the executive and military “all the means they requested” (p. 421). Yet this concession apparently poses no challenge to his core thesis about the persisting “central role played by Congress” (p. 471).
Katznelson’s rejoinder to those worried about legislative decay is also belied by the book’s analysis of southern political power. Though formally democratic, he notes, much of the segregated South was effectively an “authoritarian and racist political system” (p. 142). So even if one were to endorse Katznelson’s sometimes exaggerated claims about Congress’ institutional centrality, on his own account it was still dominated by figures whose political bases were oftentimes racist and undemocratic. Apologists for dictatorship like Schmitt would have loved this observation: Congress flourished chiefly because of powerful southern politicians, whose racist and authoritarian political bases embodied ideals not altogether unlike those supported by right-wing authoritarians in Europe and elsewhere.
Of course, the empirical issues remain complicated. Let me conclude with a brief conceptual point.
Katznelson’s argument sometimes reproduces an unfortunate analytic oddity from the midcentury literature on legislative decay. Just as Schmitt and others concocted idealized and in fact fictional accounts of so-called classical liberal parliaments in order to view anything inconsonant with them (e.g., modern interest-based legislative bargaining) as indubitable evidence of democratic decay, he analogously takes almost any evidence of congressional influence as support for his strong views about “the central role played by Congress” (p. 71; author’s emphasis). Congress surely did play a role—and sometimes a major one—in the New Deal and beyond. However, by turning midcentury accounts of parliamentary decay on their heads, Katznelson risks leaving us with a similarly partial narrative, in which the period’s decisive institutional trend— the massive growth of executive power and the rise of the administrative state—remains unavoidably part of his story, yet somehow gets pushed out of the analytic spotlight.
Not surprisingly, Katznelson never sufficiently considers other—and perhaps more decisive—differences between the New Deal and its authoritarian rivals, for example, the powerful U.S. Supreme Court (which occasionally checked FDR) and a political culture where civil liberties remained, with the notable exception of the internment of Japanese Americans, basically sacrosanct. Congress’s survival under the New Deal sets the U.S. polity apart from its authoritarian competitors. But so do many other features of our polity. And even that difference relates to another historical contingency. At crucial junctures, Roosevelt was able to rely on massive majorities in Congress, whereas in some similar cases of liberal crisis—most infamously, Weimar Germany—the legislature was deeply divided. If Roosevelt had faced a hostile Congress in 1933, might he not have similarly opted for a more openly extraparliamentary path, as Weimar governments started doing as early as 1930? Fortunately, we will never know.
Katznelson struggles to describe the New Deal’s institutional novelties with traditional nineteenth-century political categories and distinctions (for example “dictatorship vs. democracy”). I agree that such categories often remain both normatively and empirically useful. In the face of the astonishing institutional transformations he chronicles, however, we risk stretching them unproductively to the limit. With similar concerns in mind, Rossiter introduced the concept of “constitutional dictatorship” in order to capture the entire gamut of emergency powers employed under Roosevelt. Although the New Deal Congress never became a mere rubber stamp, in the context of economic and wartime emergencies decision-making power shifted dramatically toward the executive, even as Americans’ constitutional liberties remained pretty much unscathed (Constitutional Dictatorship, pp. 259–60).
Whatever his conceptual framework’s particular virtues, Rossiter was probably right to suggest that we need new language to make sense of the complex and sometimes novel ways in which traditional boundaries between emergency executive power and “ordinary” legislation not only were blurred under the New Deal but have oftentimes remained blurred well after the New Deal has faded into history.
