Given that the Right relies almost exclusively on smears, character assassination, and revisionist history, you shouldn't be surprised to get a big yawn when you try it once again.

A glaring telltale sign of revisionist history is that it waits until most of the participants are dead and can't contradict it. It's telling that the Right had to wait four decades before it could even start to gain some traction in its attempt to portray FDR and Progressivism as the opposite of who he was and what it is.

A big reason nobody's impressed, at least those of us who've been around for a while, is that you're trying to convince us that the sky is chartreuse. FDR's reforms and the Progressive philosophy quickly became the American mainstream, in no small part because it produced results. In two decades the United States went from an economic basket case to an economic powerhouse. In two decades, the United States went from an isolationist backwater to the leader of the Free World. In two decades, the American worker progressed from a wretched serf living on the edge of starvation to the confident and self-assured icon of middle-class prosperity.

Techie, FDR created the American middle class. When FDR took office, America and the rest of the world was divided mostly into rich and poor, haves and have-nots, workers and bosses...the middle class then was a thin slice in the middle consisting of shopkeepers and lawyers and doctors and other individual entrepreneurs. The idea that you could work for another person and still achieve financial comfort and security was unheard-of. Still fresh in everyone's mind was Henry Ford unleashing his company troops on striking workers and killing many and maiming many more. That was the reality then, and FDR changed it, and changed it for the better.

It's absolutely inconceivable that you, like Archie Bunker, could be nostalgic for the way things were before FDR, and the way they would have continued had he not won the election of 1932. Had Hoover had to the opportunity to continue to sit on his thumb, the Depression would have dragged on long enough to leave the United States too weak to fight Hitler and the Japanese. But even leaving out the military threat, it's a truisim of economics that the earlier you start making money, the more money you make; that the longer the United States delayed its economic recovery, the worse off we'd be today. The United States could not have achieved everything we've achieved since FDR without the strong base he gave us.

As to the assertion that FDR was authoritarian, that's just too silly for words. FDR had to resist the calls for him to assume a dictatorship. He could've been a tyrant if he'd wanted to, and he would've been welcomed as a tyrant by the American people at the time, but he chose not to. It takes a big person to resist the temptation of absolute power, and that makes comparisons with Nixon particularly ludicrous. Nixon had power and hungered for more; FDR had power and refused more. The difference is like night and day.