What Should Democrats Learn From FDR?

By Thor Benson | November 14, 2025 | 12:57pm

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New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani cites Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of his inspirations. Former President Joe Biden also saw FDR as a role model. Many progressives say Democrats need a leader like FDR right now to fight fascism and defend the working class. Some closer to the center say Democrats need to learn from FDR’s large coalition.

There’s a lot that can be learned from the most consequential president of the 20th century. There are also always things people misremember about American history. So what should Democrats take out of FDR’s playbook?

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Eric Rauchway, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Davis who focuses on the New Deal era, told Splinter that sometimes more moderate Democrats misunderstand FDR’s legacy.

“There have been any number of Democrats of the Obama era and later who accepted what I think is kind of a pinched and apolitical view of the New Deal, which seeks to measure its success only by speedy recovery,” Rauchway said. “New Dealers explicitly rejected the idea of going back to the way things were and said their goal was what Roosevelt called either ‘permanent recovery,’ i.e., recovery with structural change so similar catastrophes couldn’t occur again, or of course ‘reform.’”

In terms of fighting fascism, Rauchway said FDR worried that authoritarianism might take hold because of a grassroots movement by a demagogue or an elite-driven takeover of the government. Different aspects of those two things could also work in tandem.

“Roosevelt’s solution to both was to institute a program demonstrating that government was, to the extent possible, representative and fair, in providing widespread benefits,” Rauchway said. “You can see this idea as early as the ‘forgotten man’ speech in the spring of 1932, and you can see it in the determination that the New Deal would have something in it for all sections, classes, occupations—that relief and recovery would come across the board, insofar as it was possible.”

In a speech in Syracuse, New York in 1936, Rauchway said FDR kind of “needled” the rich and explained that what the New Deal was doing was keeping them from losing everything. FDR described an old, wealthy man wearing a silk hat who fell off a dock. Another man saves him from drowning, but the silk hat floats away.

He said that was FDR saying the New Deal “saved them from revolution by making them a tinge less elite.” As for FDR’s coalition, Rauchway said things are quite a bit different today than they were back then.

“The Democratic Party of the 1930s was still more or less the Democratic Party of the late [1800s]—a party reliant on the votes of the white segregationists in the South, and on the ethnic/Catholic working classes of the North,” Rauchway said. “And if they could add enough western states, they could form a national majority… Is the Democratic coalition today anything like that? It’s really hard to see it; you’d have to move to a level of abstraction where you said ‘this element is generally intolerant of that element, and Democrats hold them in tension.’”

Democrats can certainly learn from FDR’s ability to sell his ideas and accomplishments. Rauchway said FDR was always pointing out the positive effects of his policies, whether it was “a school, a bridge or the Social Security Act.” When Democrats do something good, they should probably tell people about it—repeatedly.