Monday, December 24, 2007

Russian Novelist Optimistic View of American Politics

“It’s as if in the United States, for example, they said that everything has changed, that Roosevelt and Franklin are no longer the right political figures, everything they did was horrible and revolting, and we have a new ideology here now, let’s quickly get used to it,”

Sergei Minaev, Russian Yuppie Novelist, in profile
The Tortured Voice of Russia’s Lost Generation.

It is a nice analogy except that has always been members of the American Right who consider what FDR did in the New Deal was an unmitigated disaster. The New Deal may have saved American capitalism but it allowed in the eyes of its detractors too much share of the wealth for the non-rich. The current Bush era "prosperity" which concentrates the economic gains only in the top 1% is seen in some Republican circles as the rightful return to a pre-New Deal economy.

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