Politics & Power Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt is throwing a velvet-rope around the New Deal: you can’t demand collective rescue while clinging to private trench lines. “No government can help” is a deliberately bracing limit statement from a president famous for expanding what government could do. He’s not confessing impotence; he’s policing the terms of legitimacy. If citizens “insist” on prioritizing sectional and class identity, government action becomes politically impossible, not technically unthinkable. The obstacle isn’t policy capacity, it’s social consent.

The phrasing does two things at once. First, it scolds: “sectional and class consciousness” evokes a country atomized into regions, industries, and interest blocs - the kind of fragmentation that turns relief into spoils and reform into grievance. Second, it flatters a larger identity: “general weal” sounds almost civic-religious, a moral category meant to rise above wages versus profits, farm versus city, North versus South. Roosevelt’s rhetorical trick is to make solidarity feel like maturity and faction feel like childishness.

The subtext is also a tactical warning to power centers. In the 1930s, business lobbies, conservative Democrats, and regional machines could stall reforms by framing them as giveaways to “those people.” FDR answers by recoding opposition as selfish parochialism. You can fight him, he suggests, but if you do it in the name of your class or section, you’re not defending principle - you’re sabotaging national recovery.

It’s a message built for crisis politics: unity not as sentiment, but as precondition.