My students, across multiple classes, clamored to discuss programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. 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.

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. 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. What have they - coming from a variety of backgrounds, places, and cultures - imbibed about the New Deal in the course of their general education? 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.

Review of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, by Naomi Klein (Simon and Schuster, 2019).

On fire by naomi klein