Jonathan Alter: Biden is first president since LBJ "who can rightly be called FDR’s heir"

For America to “own the future,” as the president promised last month, he needs to do amid the pandemic what Mr. Roosevelt did amid the Depression: restore faith that the long-distrusted federal government can deliver rapid, tangible achievements.

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Just as Mr. Roosevelt understood that the laissez-faire philosophy of the 1920s wasn’t working anymore to build the nation, Mr. Biden sees that Reagan-era market capitalism cannot alone rebuild it. 

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Whatever the future holds, Mr. Biden and Mr. Roosevelt are now fused in history by the size and breadth of their progressive ambitions.  Jimmy Carter took office when liberalism was fatigued; Bill Clinton said “the era of Big Government is over”; Barack Obama was forced to conform to the mantra of deficit hawks. Mr. Biden was lucky enough to have been elected when what the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history” are spinning left.  He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson who can rightly be called F.D.R.’s heir.  Soon we’ll know if he squanders that legacy — or builds on it.

~ Jonathan Alter, "How F.D.R.'s Heir is Changing the Country," The New York Times, April 12, 2021