re: FDR was an awful president and MacArthur was an awful general.

quote:

---

Communists and socialists.

No one in their right mind would agree.

---

May be. But conservative policies were dead worldwide in the mid 1930s. It was only a question of what kind of economic intervention you were going to get. FDRs were a lot milder than some other possible alternatives. While western democracies were struggling, Germany and the USSR seemed to have the Depression licked. It was smoke and mirrors, but most people didn't recognize that. Factions in the United States were looking to authoritarian solutions on both the left and right for a way out of the Depression. Without the New Deal, we may have gotten one of them, or maybe just a quasi civil war, as splinter groups fought for their brand of dictatorship.

You can argue until the cows come home about whether Roosevelt's policies actually worked, whether they set us on a slippery slope, etc. That's not the point. The point is they prevented something much worse.