We’ve Saved Democracy Before. FDR’s First 100 Days Made It Possible.

Let’s set the scene: Millions of people live paycheck to paycheck at best, inequality is rampant, and the nation’s richest are calling the shots. Trust in financial markets is cratering, and chaos and uncertainty reign. Feeling burnt by capitalism, working people across the globe are flirting with authoritarianism, lured by the promise that it can deliver for them more quickly and effectively than democracy can.

The scene I’m describing is not—or not just—America on President Trump’s 100th day in office. It’s March 1933, the height of the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt has just taken office. Amid a devastating economic crisis and after years of hands-off, imagination-limited governance, the American people are questioning the very viability of capitalism, and the ability of democracy to manage it. The rapacious plutocrats who defined the Roaring Twenties seem too powerful to be curbed by our weak institutions, and Americans are increasingly looking to fascist Italy and communist Soviet Union for solutions.

One hundred headline-dominating days into his presidency, some have compared Trump to FDR, the first president to use the “first 100 days” framework. The comparison couldn’t be more wrong. One is choosing chaos, cruelty, and corruption. The other brought the competence to contain instability, answer the uncertainties of unchecked capitalism, and rein in grift. One man is undermining democracy. The other sought to preserve it. And in this moment, FDR has a lot to teach those of us who seek to preserve. The greatest lesson: When democracy and authoritarianism compete for popular loyalty, the most important battleground is the economy.

FDR understood that staving off authoritarianism would require much more than general appeals to democratic ideals; he needed to prove democracy could deliver a life of economic security, of dignity, of possibility. Americans’ allegiance to democracy depended on its ability to shape capitalism—to shave off its rough edges, to make it serve public ends. And that allegiance also depended on what FDR called “action, and action now”—showing with vigor that the branches of government could work together to immediately address people’s acute pain.

That was an early inspiration for the last administration, with Joe Biden aspiring to an FDR-size presidency amid the great crisis of his moment, COVID-19. With the 2021 American Rescue Plan, his administration made great strides in remedying people’s pain—driving a record-fast recession recovery and a historic vaccine mobilization, and making vital public investments that kept families and communities afloat. The administration made much-needed investments in our infrastructure and significant advances in building worker power.

But where Biden fell short was not taking the FDR lesson of “action now” seriously or quickly enough in the face of rising prices. While parts of the administration moved swiftly and visibly to address key frustrations—junk fees and overdraft fees, noncompete clauses, the price of hearing aids—it was not a wide or deep enough effort to convince an electorate beaten down by decades of precarity and inequality.

For democracy to deliver in ways it didn’t then and isn’t now, we should look more closely at the roadmap FDR laid down—over the course of his first 100 days and throughout the New Deal more broadly (and, crucially, working hand in glove with Congress).

First, FDR showed that democracy could respond quickly and put people to work in good jobs while building essential infrastructure. Working within the confines of a constitutional order he still acted quickly, putting hundreds of thousands of people to work in a matter of months with agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Second, the Roosevelt administration showed that a democracy could shape markets and curb the worst excesses of capitalism, with the Securities Act of 1933 setting guardrails to prevent fraud in securities markets and the Banking Act of 1933 (also known as Glass-Steagall) restructuring the financial sector, in part to prevent its consolidation.

With his first 100 days, FDR showed that the way we practice democracy matters. Rapid-response actions targeted at visible economic problems rebuilt trust that government could act at a speed commensurate to the pain and instability people were feeling, buying time for longer-term protections that proved essential to democracy’s survival over the 20th century.

In the years to come, FDR would repeatedly show that democracy could deliver not just work but quality work, as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act helped to do, creating a framework in which people’s power and rights on the job could be ensured, and economic power shared. The Roosevelt administration would also build the safety net we still rely on today, from Social Security to unemployment insurance. Americans want to protect these programs from the Trump administration’s attacks for good reason: They keep us whole in our most vulnerable moments.

Amid two genuine emergencies, the Great Depression and a world war, FDR also fell short of our ideals, most egregiously in his incarceration of Japanese Americans. Many New Deal programs deliberately excluded Black Americans. And he played brinksmanship with our courts. But those missteps, grave as they are and much as we must learn from them, don’t take away from what he built. In expanding economic security and opportunity, even if imperfectly, the New Deal staved off authoritarianism and preserved our democratic system of government.

As we knew well before Trump 2.0, and Trump 1.0 for that matter, policymakers lost that thread. The rightward, bipartisan political lurch of the 1970s and 80s led to decades of slower growth, rising inequality, and increasing corporate concentration and power. The Great Recession of 2007–2009 and the jobless recovery that followed left people disillusioned by democracy and willing to take a wrecking ball to any and every system, regardless of the consequences. Across the world, in places like Hungary, we saw people willing to gamble on authoritarianism, just as we saw in the 1930s.

And here at home, the American people are not getting what they bargained for. Rather than getting the economic security they demanded, they’re watching unelected billionaires tear down our public institutions and put the essential pillars of our social contract in their crosshairs. They’re seeing rampant corruption and unabashed self-dealing—from the president’s conflict-of-interest-laden meme coin to Elon Musk’s attacks on agencies that regulate his companies and protect workers and consumers. The American people are angry and scared. Now is the time to show them that a better path is possible.

As FDR said in his 1937 message to Congress, “Ours was the task to prove that democracy could be made to function in the world of today . . .” And he did, not by explaining the merits of democracy but by showing that it was the best system of government to deliver shared growth, prosperity, and power for the American people. He curbed the power of corporations, built the power of workers, and created a safety net for everyone. He did it fast, showing vigor, urgency, and action. And he narrated what he was doing in a way that people could relate to. It’s a lesson we shouldn’t forget as we make the case to save our democracy today.