Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Ro Khanna Is Making FDR Great Again

The California Democrat is renewing the Democratic Party’s vital connection to Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Economic Bill of Rights.

Joining Senator Bernie Sanders at the Ballots Over Billionaires rally in Los Angeles on October 5, Representative Ro Khanna proudly stated: “We are New Deal Democrats, not corporate Democrats. We are New Deal Democrats, not neoliberal Democrats. We are New Deal Democrats, not Chuck Schumer Democrats.”

Have you been listening to Ro Khanna’s speeches? Standing on the shoulders of FDR, Khanna has taken hold of a century of American history and not only thrown a challenge to the Democratic Party leadership but also begun to stake a powerful claim to the party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

Just as then–New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt did in 1930 when he wrote in the lengthening shadows of the Great Depression and the rising threat of authoritarianism, “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for a generation,” Khanna has made it clear that he, too, recognizes that to effectively confront and prevail against the authoritarian menace that threatens to destroy American democratic life today, Democrats must not only win elections but also pursue determined progressive—indeed, radical-democratic—action when they do.

Speaking at the National Press Club (NPC) this past April, Khanna decried the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a “new Gilded Age” elite and the difficulties working people face to stay afloat. Drawing on not only the best of Franklin Roosevelt but also Harry Truman, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr., he proceeded to project a “New Economic Patriotism.… A new deal for this era. A freedom budget for this century”—indeed, a “21C Marshall Plan” for middle- and working-class Americans. This new New Deal or Marshall Plan would include creating a Work for America program—modeled after FDR’s Works Progress Administration—to help rebuild the nation and guarantee jobs to those who need them; establishing a National Industrial Bank to “invest in the industries that will define the future” and direct such investments in particular to those cities whose economies were most devastated by deindustrialization; and enabling workers to not only more easily organize........

© The Nation