Matt Bai, a thirtysomething New York Times Magazine writer and author of The Argument, a tough, controversial look at the Democratic Party and the billionaires, bloggers and other insurgents on the left who want to change it, has pronounced the same conclusion. Until the Democrats--and liberals and progressives generally--figure out a new governing vision "more contemporary than defending the programs of the New Deal," he concludes, they will remain nothing more than "a slightly dated alternative to the mess that is modern conservatism."

It's not that she'd have been shocked; she'd heard her share of Roosevelt's many opponents declaring him and the New Deal seditious, irrelevant, dead (or worse) ever since 1932. Lest we forget, that first election year The Nation--like much of the "sophisticated" left--backed Norman Thomas, while the Communists were unsparing in their disdain for "capitalism's savior" until Moscow declared a timeout in the mid-1930s for the antifascist Popular Front.

Right-wingers never called a timeout. They attacked Roosevelt far more relentlessly than the left during his lifetime--and have done so ever since. In this, Reagan and Gingrich were exceptions, but in their speeches to bipartisan audiences, not their behavior. Amity Shlaes's recent history of the Depression, The Forgotten Man--billed by Shlaes as a "fresh look" at FDR--assaults his character and policies so unremittingly that a newcomer to this history might honestly wonder how such an ogre ever won public office [see Kim Phillips-Fein's review on p. 34]. And in the just-published Liberal Fascism, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg underscores Roosevelt's indisputable awfulness by telling us that Hitler and Mussolini once spoke well of him and likened their own programs to the New Deal!

(My mother, a kind and refined woman, taught my brothers and me how FDR had firmly but deftly dealt with such critics. "A conservative," the crippled President declared, his trademark grin spread across his face, "is a man with two perfectly good legs, who, however, has never learned to walk forward." She felt that to be comprehensively dispositive.)

But what is it about the New Deal and about Roosevelt that makes the man and the era relevant today?

One frequent shorthand answer I still hear from New Deal supporters rests on policy achievements: Social Security, bank and stock market regulation, government-backed home mortgages, a progressive income tax, a federal minimum wage, guaranteed workers' rights, aid to higher education, private pensions and healthcare plans and a vast array of public works projects still used today--from giant Western dams and the Tennessee Valley Authority to thousands of bridges, tunnels, roads, sewers, water systems, post offices and airports.

A second legacy is still vitally important, but I hear about it less often--perhaps because it's become so commonplace or because its importance has been so steadily derided and confused, thanks to the right's attacks over the past sixty years: the systematic public macromanagement of the economy, through active fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy as well as the steadying effects of government's one-third share in the GDP.

Republicans, for all their "small government," have never rolled back that share and indeed have been significant handmaidens in its increase: government's share of GDP reached its highest post-World War II level under Reagan and is today under Bush larger than it ever was under Clinton--or, for that matter, Truman, JFK, LBJ or Carter (or the New Deal itself). Conservatives may love to hate Keynesian fiscal management, but Alan Greenspan played the part of a monetary Keynesian to their unending delight.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans has been not about government's size but about spending priorities--defense versus domestic programs, in the most naked terms--and about revenue choices (and their consequences), especially the post-1980 GOP's willingness to accept swelling deficits and public debt as the price for tax cuts asymmetrically favoring the few over the many. From Truman through Carter, public debt fell dramatically as a fraction of GDP; since 1981, save during Clinton's second term, it has risen--and now is more than double its 1981 low level, with interest payments on that debt alone costing us far more than all the conservatives' favorite bêtes noires combined--welfare, foreign aid, funding for the arts, etc.

There's a third facet to Roosevelt that is vital for Democrats to celebrate today: he was the last Democratic President truly committed to multilateralism and to a nonmilitarized American presence in the world. It was FDR who pushed through--in the form of the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank--the architecture of internationalism that Woodrow Wilson had dreamed of but failed to achieve. And we know from his wartime politics and diplomacy that he was fully committed, on the one hand, to the decolonization of the world and, on the other, to finding means to engage Moscow after the war, a policy that might have headed off the cold war, or at least its worst excesses.

Yet as I write these words, I also know why people like Stern and Bai can talk about the New Deal as seeming far away and somehow irrelevant.

Young people don't think Social Security will last another generation--at least in a form that will secure their retirement. Bank and stock market regulation? Aren't we in the midst of a meltdown that started with subprime mortgages but whose real scope and scale is still scarily unknown? Why do these sorts of financial crises keep recurring? Didn't a gargantuan stock bubble burst at the start of the century? Wasn't there an Asian--and then Russian and Latin American--financial collapse in the 1990s? Why is it that, from way back in the Reagan years, the words "savings and loan," "Rust Belt," "October '87," "downsizing" and "Japan Inc." recall unhappy memories? The progressive income tax is now much less progressive, the minimum wage in our "world is flat" era looks almost comically ineffectual and neither seems to be doing much about closing the American income and wealth gap.

You see my point. Most of the "New Deal legacy" that people like my mother loved, celebrated and trusted seems to have become fragile, crippled, emaciated, distant--you choose the adjective.

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