Commentators have decried Kamala Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic ticket as an undemocratic “coronation.” In a suggestive article, Mary Grabar, Resident Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), says the machinations of party elites goes back all the way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Presidency. FDR, “a self-identified member of the Hudson River Valley landed gentry,” and his inner circle of Democrat elites, promulgated a triumphant myth of working-class identity that ushered in the age of the common man.
Dr. Grabar has a book forthcoming Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths (2024). In an article that presages the book for the August 3 issue of The American Spectator, she remarks this myth misunderstands a major aspect of the party’s 20th century history. “[T]he truth is,” she observes, “that he lived off of his family’s riches, mostly handed down by his maternal grandfather, an opium-pusher in China. Other sources came from monopolizing coal mines. . . and railroads.”
“Roosevelt’s decision to appeal to Southerners and northern urban immigrants,” according to Dr. Grabar, was “based on political calculation,” and his New Deal “was a creation of. . . elites — bankers, corporate heads, and Wall Street speculators — to make institutional changes to their own benefit.” Little of it went to the poor, and it was “largely a patronage scheme. . . with taxpayer-supported New Deal funds going to party bosses and areas where votes were needed.”
The Democratic party, Dr. Grabar adds, “has been un-democratic” since at least the Roosevelt era. “‘Lunch Bucket Joe’ [Biden] was as unreal as ‘Georgia Cracker Farmer’ FDR. The corporate-controlled Kamala Harris is following suit. We better watch out, Dr. Grabar says, before the “hyper-progressive” Harris “is refashioned into another working-class icon and the party bosses start playing ‘Nine to Five’ as her theme song.”
Dr. Grabar holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and taught at the college level, most recently at Emory University, for twenty years. The author of Debunking Howard Zinn (Regnery, 2019) and Debunking the 1619 Project (Regnery, 2021), she has been published by City Journal, American Greatness, The Federalist, Academic Questions, and other outlets. Her new book is to be published by Regnery this fall.
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