If you’re as lucky as I am to teach college students, an instructive exercise is to ask them to define the New Deal without providing any background information. What have they — coming from a variety of backgrounds, places, and cultures — imbibed about the New Deal in the course of their general education?

When I was in college, at the height of the recession, this question probably would have elicited the names of federal financial institutions that live on from this period — like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) — or on Social Security and the Works Progress Administration, perhaps the most iconic New Deal programs that almost everyone in the United States encounters in some way in everyday life. Inevitably analogizing our own lives to the past, we might have contrasted the auto bailout with the National Industrial Recovery Act, or longed for the wave of sit-down strikes that followed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

The first time I posed the question to students, it was in late February 2019, in the wake of Sunrise Movement occupations of high-ranking Democrats’ offices that helped cement the Green New Deal’s place in mainstream political debate. My students, across multiple classes, clamored to discuss programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. For them, the New Deal imaginary has — even against the backdrop of a supposedly recovered and booming economy — retained its power to shape public discourse around economic inequality and unemployment.