Eighty years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced the New Deal, American liberals remain enthralled by it. While conservatives pose as defenders of a lost moral order, liberals harken back to FDR’s promise to overcome “fear itself,” dedicating a broken nation to the dream of ending economic insecurity. Today, such insecurity is pervasive, a situation that conservatives contend is natural and liberals blame on right-wing insurgents who tore down the state that FDR built.

In Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, Ira Katznelson challenges the liberal narrative of defeat from without. Expanding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the New Deal, Katznelson argues that the American state that rose to global dominance between 1932 and 1952 contained within itself the racism, violence, and anti-labor politics that liberals tend to blame on barbarians beyond the gates. Where previous histories of the New Deal emphasize Roosevelt, the new bureaucracy he helmed, and the social movements that swept him into power, Fear Itself turns our attention to Congress. There, the vast majority of members were Democrats, and the majority of Democrats hailed from the Jim Crow South. According to Katznelson, these populist, racist, and deeply patriotic men were the engineers of modern American liberalism. It was southern Democrats who took the lead in the New Deal’s “radical moment,” when American government checked an unprecedented crisis of capitalism with innovative experiments in economic planning and unionization. The Solid South also led the charge against German and Japanese militarism, laying the groundwork for a successful American war effort in the years before Pearl Harbor.

But if southern Democrats cleared the way for American liberalism’s march to victory, they also locked that liberalism in what Katznelson calls a “southern cage.” White supremacy constrained the American welfare state’s egalitarian potential and fostered a bellicose, paranoid, and opaque national security apparatus. Born in the “southern cage,” the modern United States is strangely schizophrenic: it is both a “state of procedures,” in which public institutions are too weak to check private economic power, and a “crusading state,” in which public institutions dole out overwhelming violence with little democratic oversight.