The greatest obstacle to a New Deal-worthy response to our current economic crisis is Americans' distrust of government. But what causes that distrust? Is it just bred in the American spirit, from the Founding Fathers? If so, how were FDR and his successors able to overcome the distrust and bring newfound powers of government to bear against an economic crisis? Is it just propaganda carried over from the Reagan era?

Last year, a fresh answer emerged in a couple of articles and now an important book, The Submerged State, from Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler. Mettler showed that Americans distrusted government in part because, unlike in the New Deal era, they don't see or feel what government does. We've created programs that are so complicated, vague, and nuanced -- tax credits and public-private partnerships -- that many of their beneficiaries don't know that they are benefiting from government at all. Mettler's analysis has multiple implications: We have to call attention to the purpose of government and how programs like student loans help to achieve it, but we also need a new approach to the structure of government and a willingness to move decisively and visibly on big public missions.

I reviewed The Submerged State in The New Republic in October, and have subsequently had the pleasure of asking Suzanne some questions about her new book. The answers will appear in a question-and-answer format, expanding on points in the book, over the next few weeks.

Mark Schmitt: In your wonderful book, you show how the "submerged state" programs of the current era, like the tax credit for education savings, are invisible to their beneficiaries, thus fostering their feeling that government does nothing for them. You draw a contrast to older programs like Social Security and the GI Bill that recipients knew about and could feel. Most of the New Deal and Great Society programs were much more visible. How do you explain that? Was it that FDR, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson were smarter about creating programs that people would appreciate? Or were those just simpler times?

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Suzanne Mettler: Social welfare policies created as part of the New Deal and Great Society did tend to feature a more visible role for government, for various reasons. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson benefitted from large majorities of Democrats in Congress, so they more often had the political clout to enact policies with designs they favored. The policies of the submerged state, some of which date back to the early and mid-twentieth century, were typically promoted by Republicans or by conservative Democrats who favored arrangements that worked through market mechanisms rather than government bureaucracies. In addition, submerged policies often emerged as the fruit of compromises with powerful interests -- groups who would only support reform if it channeled funds in their direction. This is exemplified by the creation of bank-based student lending in 1965.

In the period of conservative governance that the United States has experienced since 1980, creating and building the submerged state has become a bipartisan affair. Such designs appear, at least at first blush, to embrace the market-based priorities of this period, the view that the private sector does things more effectively and efficiently than government. In reality, submerged policies are antithetical to genuine laissez faire principles, because they actually intervene in the market and channel government resources to promote particular industries at the expense of others.

In addition, as partisan polarization has escalated, submerged policies have grown more attractive to Democrats because they offer a more politically feasible manner of channeling resources to low- and moderate-income people than the creation or expansion of direct policies. This is the case not only because conservatives are more willing to support them, but also because they encounter fewer procedural hurdles in Congress. They are not subject to the public glare and multiple veto points of normal budget items, and once enacted, they can grow automatically and are not subject to annual appropriations.

Mainstream Democrats have increasingly come to recognize that such policies poll well. This point is explored in fascinating new research by Jake Haselswerdt and Brandon Bartels, discussed recently at The Monkey Cage, and by Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. But contrary to Drum's conclusion that these policies show "how to fool conservatives into spending money," in the longer run it is liberals and moderates who are shown to be the fools for embracing such policies. As I show in The Submerged State, government's role in such policies eludes Americans, including even the beneficiaries. This makes it possible for people to become increasingly indifferent or even hostile to government, not recognizing that it is the source of policies they depend on. In turn, it prevents people from mobilizing to support reforms to address the major social problems that concern them.

Her opponents have smeared her as a racist and classist, but she devoted her life to fighting for equal access to reproductive choice.

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is back in the news this week thanks to GOP presidential candidate and abortion rights opponent Herman Cain, who claimed on national television that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: "preventing black babies from being born." Cain's outrageous and false accusation is actually an all too familiar canard -- a willful repetition of scurrilous claims that have circulated for years despite detailed refutation by scholars who have examined the evidence and unveiled the distortions and misrepresentations on which they are based (for a recent example, see this rebuttal from The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler).

It's an old tactic. Even in her own day, Sanger endured deliberate character assassination by opponents who believed they would gain more traction by impugning her character and her motives than by debating the merits of her ideas. But when a presidential candidate from a major U.S. political party is saying such things, a thoughtful response is necessary.

So what is Sanger's story?

Born Margaret Louisa Higgins in 1879, the middle child of a large Irish Catholic family, Sanger grew into a follower of labor organizers, free thinkers, and bohemians. Married to William Sanger, an itinerant architect and painter, she helped support three young children by working as a visiting nurse on New York's Lower East Side. Following the death of a patient from a then all-too-common illegal abortion, she vowed to abandon palliative work and instead overturn obscenity laws that prevented legal access to safe contraception.

Sanger's fundamental heresy was in claiming every woman's right to experience her sexuality freely and bear only the number of children she desires. Following a first generation of educated women who had proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfillment outside the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition to the resolution of a broad range of personal and professional frustrations.

The hardest challenge in introducing Sanger to modern audiences, who take this idea for granted, is to explain how absolutely destabilizing it seemed in her own time. As a result of largely private arrangements and a healthy trade in condoms, douches, and various contraptions sold under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, birth rates had already begun to decline. But contraception remained a clandestine and delicate subject, legally banned under obscenity statutes, and women were still largely denied identities or rights independent of their relationships with men, including the right to vote.

By inventing the term "birth control," Sanger brought the practice -- and by implication, women's entitlement to sexual pleasure -- out into the open and gave them essential currency. She went to jail in 1917 for opening a clinic to distribute primitive diaphragms to immigrant women in Brooklyn, New York, and appeal of her conviction led to a medical exception that licensed doctors to prescribe contraception for reasons of health. Under these constraints she built a network of independent local women's health centers that eventually came together under the banner of Planned Parenthood. She also lobbied for the repeal of federal obscenity statutes that prevented the legal transport of contraception by physicians across state lines, which were struck down in federal court in 1936.

Sanger sought and won scientific validation for various contraceptive methods, including the birth control pill, whose development she supported and found the money to fund. In so doing, she helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased reproduction and secured the endorsement of contraception by physicians and social scientists. From this singular accomplishment, which some still consider heretical, a continuing controversy has ensued.

Sanger always remained a wildly polarizing figure, which clarifies the logic of her decision after World War I to jettison "birth control" and adopt the more socially resonant term "family planning." This move was particularly inventive but in no way cynical, especially when the Great Depression brought attention to collective needs and the New Deal created a blueprint for bold public endeavors.

Some have falsely charged that Sanger defined family planning as a right of the privileged but a duty or obligation of the poor. To the contrary, she showed considerable foresight in lobbying to include universal voluntary family planning programs among public investments in social security. Had the New Deal incorporated basic public health and access to contraception, as most European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over welfare and health care policy in the U.S. might well have been avoided.

Having long enjoyed the friendship and support of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Sanger also had ample reason to believe the New Dealers would fully legalize and endorse contraception as a necessary first step to her long-term goal of transferring responsibility and accountability for voluntary clinics to the public health sector. What she failed to anticipate was the force of opposition family planning continued to generate from a coalition of religious conservatives, including urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants, that held Roosevelt Democrats captive much as today's evangelicals have captured the GOP.

The U.S. government would not overcome cultural and religious objections to public support of family planning through its domestic anti-poverty and international development programs until the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court protected contraceptive use under the privacy doctrine created in Griswold v. Connecticut. At this time, Planned Parenthood clinics became major government contractors, since there were few alternative primary health care centers serving the poor. Today, one in four American women funds her contraception through government programs, many of them still run by Planned Parenthood -- a number likely to rise under the Affordable Care Act.

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Sanger's eagerness to mainstream her movement explains her engagement with eugenics, a then widely popular intellectual movement that addressed the manner in which human intelligence and opportunity is determined by biological as well as environmental factors. Hard as it is to believe, eugenics was considered far more respectable than birth control. Like many well-intentioned reformers of this era, Sanger took away from Charles Darwin the essentially optimistic lesson that humanity's evolution within the animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement if only we apply the right tools. University presidents, physicians, scientists, and public officials all embraced eugenics, in part because it held the promise that merit would replace fate -- or birthright and social status -- as the standard for mobility in a democratic society.

But eugenics also has some damning and today unfathomable legacies, such as a series of state laws upheld in 1927 by an eight-to-one progressive majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Their landmark decision in Buck v. Bell authorized the compulsory sterilization of a poor young white woman with an illegitimate child on grounds of feeble mindedness that were never clearly established. This decision, incidentally, was endorsed by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin of the ACLU and W.E.B. Dubois of the NAACP, both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.

For Sanger, eugenics was meant to begin with the voluntary use of birth control, which many still opposed on the grounds that the middle class should be encouraged to have more babies. She countered by disdaining what she called a "cradle competition" of class, race, or ethnicity. She publicly opposed immigration restrictions and framed poverty as a matter of differential access to resources like birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low inherent ability or character.

As a nurse, Sanger also understood the adverse impacts of poor nutrition, drugs, and alcohol on fetal development and encouraged government support of maternal and infant health. She argued for broad social safety nets and proudly marshaled clinical data to demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and least educated populations, eagerly embraced and used birth control successfully when it is was provided.

At the same time, Sanger did on many occasions engage in shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families of low intelligence and defective heredity -- language with no intended racial or ethnic content. She always argued that all women are better off with fewer children, but unfortunate language about "creating a race of thoroughbreds" and other such phrases have in recent years been lifted out of context and used to sully her reputation. Moreover, in endorsing Buck v. Bell and on several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to poor women who agreed to limit their childbearing (many of whom enjoyed no other health care coverage), Sanger quite clearly failed to consider fundamental human rights questions raised by such practices. Living in an era indifferent to the obligation to respect and protect individuals whose behaviors do not always conform to prevailing mores, she did not always fulfill it.

The challenge as Sanger's biographer has been to reconcile apparent contradictions in her beliefs. She actually held unusually advanced views on race relations for her day and on many occasions condemned discrimination and encouraged reconciliation between blacks and whites. Though most birth control facilities conformed to the segregation mores of the day, she opened an integrated clinic in Harlem in the early 1930s. Later, she facilitated birth control and maternal health programs for rural black women in the south, when local white health officials there denied them access to any New Deal-funded services.

Sanger worked on this last project with the behind-the-scenes support of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council for Negro Women and then a Roosevelt administration official. Their progressive views on race were well known, if controversial, but their support for birth control was silenced by Franklin's political handlers -- at least until he was safely ensconced in the White House for a third term, when the government rushed to provide condoms to World War II soldiers.

Sanger's so-called Negro Project has been a source of controversy first raised by black nationalists and some feminist scholars in the 1970s and later by anti-abortion foes. Respecting the importance of self-determination among users of contraception, she recruited prominent black leaders to endorse the goal, especially ministers who held sway over the faithful. In that context, she wrote an unfortunate sentence in a private letter about needing to clarify the ideals and goals of the birth control movement because "we do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population."  The sentence may have been thoughtlessly composed, but it is perfectly clear that she was not endorsing genocide.

America's intensely complicated politics of race and gender has long ensnarled Sanger and all others who have sought to discipline reproduction. As many scholars of the subject in recent years have observed, much of the controversy proceeds from the plain fact that reproduction is by its very nature experienced individually and socially at the same time. In claiming women's fundamental right to control their own bodies, Sanger remained mindful of the dense fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in which those rights are exercised.

In most instances the policies Sanger advocated were intended to observe the necessary obligation of social policy to balance individual rights of self-expression with the sometimes contrary desire to promulgate and enforce common mores and laws. She may have failed to get the balance quite right, but there is nothing in the record to poison her reputation or discredit her noble cause. Quite the contrary.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. may have put it best in 1966, when he accepted Planned Parenthood's prestigious Margaret Sanger Award and spoke eloquently of the "kinship" between the civil rights and family planning movements. Here is what he said, since it bears repeating:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist -- a nonviolent resister... She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning.

Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.

Keynes's advice to FDR still holds overwhelmingly true for combatting our own crisis.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt President Library and Museum has put scans up of several important documents that highlight FDR's transition from trying to balancing the budget in the Great Depression to, after the crash of 1937, his ability to see that Keynesian deficit spending could help the recovery. The page that has the resources, plus a history, is located here: FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian.

It includes several campaign speeches by Roosevelt as they evolved over the 1930s, and it also includes John Maynard Keynes's 1938 private letter to President Roosevelt. The Keynes letter is great. He is a model of clarity, wit, and seriousness with a towering intellect on all matters economic.

After the fiscal and monetary contraction that brought on the crash of 1937, liberals in the Roosevelt administration weren't sure what to do. Keynes, in his letter, outlined a five step plan including both what had just worked and what to continue doing until the economy healed:

This is how we should judge our current elites and opinion leaders. How well do they understand this game plan for addressing a massive crisis like the one we are in, and under what economic ideology and rationality are they deviating from it? Right now it is a full-time job trying to convince elites that this is the right program for the country, rather than rewriting federal and state law to businesses' liking and focusing obsessively on the deficit. So little has been learned, and what we've learned has been forgotten.

Keynes also noted that getting the housing market straightened out is one of the best ways to handle the Depression. "Housing is by far the best aid to recovery because of the large and continuing scale of potential demand; because of the wide geographical distribution of this demand; and because the sources of its finance are largely independent of the Stock Exchanges." Getting the housing market right is also an uphill battle for our recession and administration.

Keynes Does the Twist

There's a debate within left-liberal economic circles over the relative importance of monetary versus fiscal policy in dealing with the economic downturn. Often you hear that all the stuff Bernanke is doing, from QE to Operation Twist, is a rejection of what Keynes would advise if he was living today.

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Since we are looking at Keynes' letters to President Roosevelt, let's look at his 1933 open letter to FDR, published in the New York Times. Among other recommendations, he advises the new administration to do two things on the domestic front (my bold):

If you were to ask me what I would suggest in concrete terms for the immediate future, I would reply thus... In the field of domestic policy, I put in the forefront, for the reasons given above, a large volume of Loan-expenditures under Government auspices. It is beyond my province to choose particular objects of expenditure. But preference should be given to those which can be made to mature quickly on a large scale, as for example the rehabilitation of the physical condition of the railroads... You can at least feel sure that the country will be better enriched by such projects than by the involuntary idleness of millions.

I put in the second place the maintenance of cheap and abundant credit and in particular the reduction of the long-term rates of interest. The turn of the tide in great Britain is largely attributable to the reduction in the long-term rate of interest which ensued on the success of the conversion of the War Loan. This was deliberately engineered by means of the open-market policy of the Bank of England. I see no reason why you should not reduce the rate of interest on your long-term Government Bonds to 2½ per cent or less with favourable repercussions on the whole bond market, if only the Federal Reserve System would replace its present holdings of short-dated Treasury issues by purchasing long-dated issues in exchange. Such a policy might become effective in the course of a few months, and I attach great importance to it.

His first suggestion constitutes fiscal stimulus. But his second suggestion is urging the Federal Reserve to replace its short-term bonds with long-term bonds to bring down the rates on the long-term bonds -- just like Operation Twist! Equally interesting, instead of naming an amount of Treasuries to buy, like $800 billion or $2 trillion, Keynes says to hit a specific rate. The Federal Reserve can either set a rate or an amount, and we've been doing QE through setting purchase amounts. Maybe this other way that he suggests, having QE set a target for long-term rates, is a better way of doing QE? He's a pretty smart fellow.

Keynes "terrified lest progressives causes...suffer injury"

Going back to the 1938 letter, I find Keynes' conclusion chilling.

In this letter, Keynes is saying that if FDR didn't handle the recovery correctly the whole New Deal would be at risk. Full employment is hard to accomplish, very hard, but it isn't impossible. And the stakes are higher than just the economic recovery -- failure means that progressive governance and polices are both at "risk to their prestige" from a prolonged downturn. Taking the economic downturn "too lightly" puts all of it -- from responsibly combating global warming, to bringing fairness and justice to those working in the shadows of labor market, to making sure everyone has access to insurance against sickness and poverty in old age, to the rest of the liberal governance project -- at risk. And, as we see the years pass by, it is too easy to lose precious time.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Today's outrage has the potential to be another turning point in American politics.

Frances Perkins, FDR's future Secretary of Labor, was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911. It was a tragic day in our history, one in which 143 workers lost their lives due the indifference of their employers.

Triangle was the culmination of licentious economic behavior. Powerful business interests fought on-the-job safety regulations; exit doors that were kept locked to keep out union organizers also kept workers from escaping the building; proposed fire safety standards were fought tooth and nail, all in the name of economic freedom.

But as tragic as the fire was, it was also a turning point. The tragedy of that horrible fire made Americans begin to truly realize that working people were not merely a means to wealth, but ends in and of themselves, worthy of being treated with dignity. On a political level, it was the singular event that transformed Al Smith and Robert Wagner Sr. from Tammany Hall hacks into champions of reform. It caused the Democratic Party to better live up to its moniker, “the party of the people.” It is why Perkins came to say that day of that fire was “the day the New Deal began.”

Similarly, today we now endure an economy set on fire by this same perverse notion of “freedom.” Freedom? What many on Wall Street call economic freedom is nothing more than anarchy and license. While workers see wages and benefits taken away, the top one percent live lives filled with conspicuous consumption -- and conspicuous waste. True freedom requires discipline, the structure of regulation, laws of oversight that curb and deflect destructive greed. And yet after thirty years of savings and loan failures, fraudulent CDOs, and Wall Street bailouts followed by million dollar bonuses, economic libertarians still want to tear down the very framework that provides order.

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But something has stirred in the American people. We are witnessing protests on Wall Street demanding that this stilted notion of freedom be revisited and revised. Despite what many free market types claim, a healthy form of capitalism cannot survive by being indifferent to the workers who physically build the products or provide the services. As Paul Krugman put it, “…we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.”

Just as it was in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the public is outraged and is demanding change. The rising of a popular movement comes at a moment none too soon. It is an opportunity for the Democratic Party to again turn out its present-day hacks and replace them with advocates of an already proven New Deal capitalism.

Then perhaps one day we will look back at the events of today and be able to say, “that was when the New Deal was reborn.”

Frank L. Cocozzelli writes a weekly column on Roman Catholic neoconservatism at Talk2Action.org and is contributor to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. A director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, he is working on a book on American liberalism.