Editor:
Over the past couple of years, I’ve written a few letters addressing the problem of the Democratic Party’s radical departure from its traditional principles of advancing the interests of working people, best exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (the real one, not the green thing which is a pathetic mockery). The building of great projects — the Grand Coulee and Hoover dams, the Tennessee Valley Authority and California’s Central Valley Project — put millions of Americans to work in productive jobs that upgraded the living standards of all.

While President Trump has made hints of doing something in this direction, proposing $2 trillion for infrastructure back in March and April, he gets no support from the austerity-minded Republicans in the Senate, and Democrats who might be sympathetic wouldn’t be caught dead showing agreement with Trump on anything.

Help out of this predicament has come from a most unlikely source. On June 30, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a speech of a most extraordinary nature, entitled, “Build, build, build.” Breaking with the Thatcherism of the Tory Party, he said, “too many parts of this country have felt left behind,” and laid out a new program of government involvement in building a new platform of infrastructure, education, health care and transport. “It sounds like a New Deal and all I can say is that if so ... that is what the times demand.”

Perhaps this intervention from overseas will jolt some here in the U.S. to their senses.