It is 1932 in reverse. That is what some Republicans were predicting prior to last Tuesday when they proclaimed that their party could gain as many seats in the House of Representatives — 97 — that the Democrats gained in 1932.

They had a very good night but fell short of that goal. What you will likely see in the coming months is that their real goal is a substantive reversal of the 1932 election.

The election of 1932 was a battle between two visions for economic growth. On one side was the philosophy of Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. They spent 11 years perfecting their brand of economics, which called for government to stimulate economic growth by helping the wealthiest Americans earn more money. Government was to otherwise get out of the way of big business and let it do its thing.  This meant cutting taxes for the wealthy and scorning the very thought of meaningful regulation.

By 1932, these policies had dragged the nation into the worst depression of the 20th Century. The Republicans said it was all part of the normal business cycle, and that we just needed more of the same to get through it.

The Democrats, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had another vision. They believed the marketplace would only work for everyone if the opportunity of the marketplace was open to everyone. The role of government was to empower middle-class workers with the tools they needed to get ahead and to safeguard against abuse of the system. 

That meant bringing an end to child labor, establishing a minimum wage, giving workers the right of collective bargaining, and creating the Social Security system to provide a safety net for retiring workers. With the economy at a standstill, the government injected money into public works projects to provide economic opportunities for workers, and to build an infrastructure that would fuel the economy for the long term.

To make sure that the most powerful could not unfairly deprive others of opportunity, reasonable regulation was needed to ensure honest and, therefore, truly productive capitalism. That meant new regulations on banks and financial markets to protect family savings and investments.

It was not, and is not, about socialism.

It was, and is, about capitalism safeguarded by the values we all cherish: ensuring that, although success is not guaranteed, the opportunity to succeed is available to whomever is willing to work hard, and making sure the fruits of one’s labor cannot be destroyed by others’ greed.

This sounds familiar because we are having the same debate that we had in 1932.

A Democratic administration inherited one of the worst economies since the Great Depression. The Republican Party fought hard to turn back the clock after just two years, and will claim that this election gave them a mandate to do so. Expect them to fight to preserve George Bush’s tax cuts for people who make more than $200,000. Expect them to tell people, in the wake of a recession caused in no small part by corporate abuse of the banking and financial markets, that they need less government oversight.

But let us keep these arguments in perspective.

Preserving tax cuts for those who are doing best is one way to prime the economic pump. Another way is to eliminate those tax cuts to help pay down the deficit and to help pay for President Obama’s tax credit that reduced the amount of money taken out of paychecks every week. Decreasing regulation is one way to spur business development. Another way is to make certain that government does a better job of keeping the system honest so that the mistakes of the few do not imperil the economic well-being of the many.

The Republican claim to the mantle of lower taxes and less government creates a false choice. Tax cuts are great. The question is what is affordable, and whether  tax cuts should be used to reward wealth or to reward hard work. And we all want government to leave us alone, but time has proven that we need government to take reasonable steps to prevent abuse.

This election should leave no question that the Democratic Party has to regain its footing and refocus on the core values that made it strong. At the same time, we must all endeavor to remember the lessons of the past.

At the heart of the matter is the question of whether we are strongest when we build our economy from the top down, or from the middle up.

The next time anyone hears the Republican Party talk about 1932, or how it has “new” ideas for the economy, think about what history tells us about its answer to that question.

Ted Small is chairman of the Androscoggin County Democratic Committee.