Walter Lippmann and the American Century — 25 Times out of Joint

1. 1. Lippmann initially supported the New Deal, seeing it as a system of free enterprise compensated by government action.
2. 2. Lippmann argued that government responsibility for economic success is now unavoidable, even though he preferred a world without it.
3. 3. Lippmann viewed the Supreme Court's invalidation of the NRA as Roosevelt's greatest stroke of luck, relieving him of enforcing unworkable codes.
4. 4. Lippmann saw FDR's 1935 reform program as a clever ploy to recoup from the NRA defeat and outflank critics like Huey Long.
5. 5. Lippmann feared Huey Long's demagoguery represented incipient American fascism, questioning whether democracy can survive if a dictator wins majority support.
6. 6. By the mid-1930s, Lippmann took a restricted view of free speech, arguing that fascists and communists cannot claim liberty's protections while seeking to destroy them.
7. 7. Lippmann turned against the New Deal in 1935, accusing FDR of substituting planned collectivism for a free economy and demanding the return of emergency powers.
8. 8. Lippmann supported Republican Alf Landon in 1936 as a protest vote, though he considered Landon dull and ignorant.
9. 9. Lippmann led the charge against FDR's 1937 court-packing plan, accusing the president of being drunk with power and plotting a bloodless coup.
10. 10. In 'The Good Society' (1937), Lippmann equated all forms of collectivism—communism, fascism, and the New Deal—as dangerous and incompatible with freedom.
11. 11. Critics accused Lippmann of being a renegade and a tool of Wall Street, but he maintained he was a liberal repelled by totalitarianism of both Right and Left.
12. 12. Lippmann's fear of totalitarianism led him to misread the New Deal as revolutionary rather than reformist, though his criticisms seem overwrought in retrospect.