The analogy to FDR will be more impressive the day Obama speaks out against economic royalists, welcomes their hatred, and removes them from his administration. None of which I expect, unfortunately.

I only hope that Obama doesn't return to his pattern of bargaining against himself and mistaking compromise for a principle to be aimed for as a good in itself, rather than a reality of politics to be struggled with for best advantage for actual principles. If he does return to that pattern, he will defeat himself. Meanwhile I will be focusing on movement building to change the political reality to which Democratic officials respond, with a time horizon aimed at 2021 or so, since unlike FDR the current crop of Democratic leaders apparently is incapable of exercising leadership not only to achieve what is possible but to change what is possible.

Only by changing that political reality will we escape 3 decades of failed Democratic strategy which keeps just enough light between them and the Rs to make a short term difference, but otherwise follows the Rs in a relentless move to the right. When I cast my first presidential vote in 1976, I never imagined that people would be telling me I should count myself lucky to be able to vote for a Democratic candidate who was to the right of Richard Nixon on most issues, lest I get worse. Richard F'ing Nixon! Jeez Louise.

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Geoff Ludt is playing his usual game of three card monte. The alignments of the Progressive Era don't track neatly with those of today.

It is true that many Progressive Era self-styled progressives supported eugenics. So did many conservatives. Scientistic racialism (i.e. spurious racial science backed by an ideology that overrated the certainty of scientific knowledge) was promoted by figures like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who were by no means "progressive." Grant's_The Passing of the Great Race_, which apotheosized not just whiteness, but "Nordic" northern European whiteness vs. "Alpines" and "Mediterraneans" (read: Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Jews and Arabs) and more or less wrote Slavs out of the picture, provided the intellectual underpinning, such as it was, for the deeply racist immigration restriction act of 1924.

The opponents of such thought were primarily progressives or socialists, particularly African-Americans like W. E. B. DuBois and their allies. The really strong attacks intellectual attacks on scientistic racialism led by Franz Boas didn't really emerge until the 1920s. This is the same anthropology responsible for the cultural relativism so despised by today's conservatives.

Who pushes such thinking today? With a very few weird exceptions, like Richard Lewontin, who has been an officer of the American Eugenics Society despite being a Marxist biologist who has publshed sharp and scathing critiques of latter-day scientistic racism, it is conservatives associated with the conservative immigration restriction movement, and with the promotion of ideas of biological "racial" differences in intelligence.

Likewise on Prohibition, yes it was pushed by reformers, some of whom were Progressives. But fundamentally it was an Evangelical Protestant movement, and associated with conservative Protestant anti-Catholicism and the rise of the 2nd Ku Klux Klan. There was overlap with Progressivism -- e.g. Woodrow Wilson showing "Birth of a Nation" in the White House in 1916.

But there's the rub -- many early 20th century Progressive reformers were also evangelicals, or came from such backgrounds, beginning of course with William Jennings Bryan. The changes since then provide plenty of examples that look paradoxical from both directions today.

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