"There was endless controversy as to whether the acts of the New Deal did actually move recovery or retard it, and nothing final could ever come of that bitter debate because it is forever impossible to prove what might have happened in place of what did"
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Garrett’s sentence is a scalpel aimed at the loudest kind of political certainty: the claim that history has issued a clear verdict. Writing in the long shadow of the New Deal, he doesn’t merely take a side on whether Roosevelt’s programs helped or hurt. He questions whether the argument can ever be settled on the terms its combatants demand. The key move is methodological, almost journalistic in the strictest sense: the counterfactual is unreportable. You can tally jobs created, prices stabilized, banks reopened, but you can’t run the United States twice - one timeline with the WPA and AAA, one without - and publish the comparison.
That “forever impossible” is doing heavy work. It punctures the comforting idea that policy debates are just evidence disputes waiting for better spreadsheets. Garrett is also, quietly, indicting the way ideology recruits economics. Both defenders and critics of the New Deal wanted more than analysis; they wanted moral clarity. If you can’t prove the alternative world, you can keep fighting as if it exists - turning uncertainty into a renewable fuel source for partisan mythmaking.
Context matters: Garrett, a skeptical observer of expanding federal power, was wary of emergency measures becoming permanent architecture. By framing the New Deal’s effects as fundamentally unprovable, he creates a rhetorical escape hatch: you don’t need to lose the argument to distrust the trajectory. The line isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a warning about how democracies tell themselves they “know” what saved them - and how that knowledge gets used.
That “forever impossible” is doing heavy work. It punctures the comforting idea that policy debates are just evidence disputes waiting for better spreadsheets. Garrett is also, quietly, indicting the way ideology recruits economics. Both defenders and critics of the New Deal wanted more than analysis; they wanted moral clarity. If you can’t prove the alternative world, you can keep fighting as if it exists - turning uncertainty into a renewable fuel source for partisan mythmaking.
Context matters: Garrett, a skeptical observer of expanding federal power, was wary of emergency measures becoming permanent architecture. By framing the New Deal’s effects as fundamentally unprovable, he creates a rhetorical escape hatch: you don’t need to lose the argument to distrust the trajectory. The line isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a warning about how democracies tell themselves they “know” what saved them - and how that knowledge gets used.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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