Franklin Roosevelt, the “Third New Deal,” and the transformation of partisanship

Abstract

This article focuses on Franklin Roosevelt's influence on the Democratic Party. It brings to light the significant, but underexamined “Third New Deal,” the controversial program Roosevelt pursued during his second and third terms. Shortly after his landslide 1936 re-election, Roosevelt pursued three polarizing initiatives: the Court-Packing Plan, the 1937 executive reorganization bill, and the 1938 “purge” campaign. These measures, while far from completely successful, began an important transformation that replaced the decentralized, patronage-based party system, which had dominated the 19th century and remained regnant through the first three decades of the 20th century, with an executive-centered partisanship, which subordinated parties to the ambitions of the White House. Roosevelt's assault on existing partisan practices—most notably, the unprecedented “purge” campaign—imposed his personal brand on the Democratic Party. More broadly, his profound influence on the Democratic Party led to what Max Weber called the “routinization of charisma,” whereby the disruptive leadership of a charismatic leader is displaced by a “mechanism of rules” that transcend “personal authority.” The deinstitutionalization of the Democratic Party was part of a broader objective to build an executive-centered administrative state that Roosevelt and his political allies considered a more effective means to pursue their partisan objectives. Ronald Reagan's presidency signaled that Republicans, no less than Democrats, embraced executive-centered partisanship. Eventually, as became all too clear during the presidency of Donald Trump, the fusion of executive prerogative and partisanship resulted in a “personal president,” as Theodore Lowi termed it, and a plebiscitary politics that denigrated political parties as collective organizations and threatened to turn political parties into cults of personality.