It is nearly impossible to speak truth to power when the present occupant of the White House (and his predecessors going back at least through Reagan) is already obsessed with expanding power and wouldn’t know truth if it hit him between the eyes. Truth is falsified at its inception when power takes on absolutist proportions and pursued in its own right. Cynicism, hegemony, mere acquisition, are notable examples defining a unified core of meaning and understanding, not just characterizing Trump, along with a fascination with domination and cruelty, but also his supporters and, if we were being frank, the majority of Americans, Democrats included.
In an unrelieved political-ideological landscape of haute-capitalist authority and values, the New Deal stands out in American history as the exceptional fragment of a contrived, artificial Exceptionalism (the national mythology) penetrating the epistemological foundations of the society. That bad? Worse still: a quasi-fascist State, in which FDR and the New Deal become a democratic moment of struggle against the forces of wealth, status, vast resources of capitalist accumulation, in Webster’s, control, authority, and influence over others. Interpenetration, the mutuality of interest between business and government, capitalism and the State, defines the course—lines of development—of present, and no doubt future, American nation-building. The contrast with the New Deal could not be more striking, even though the earlier political-social formation was not socialist, and signified the potential malleability of capitalism itself (capable of being altered or shaped by outside forces or influences, in this case, government, adapted to democratic ends).