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[FDR] says bluntly that the basis of the government must change. Government is not a contract, to be legalistically interpreted, nor a covenant where people were to place blind trust in higher powers, with a thin parcel of rights - instead, government is a consensus as to what must be done, and then a process to find the means to accomplish it. This notion - of a government whose mandate came from its ends and not from an explicit list of means - was present in Hamilton's writings, and it even reached Madison in his presidential years. Madison finally saying to his critics that "if ends be as circumscribed as means, throw the document out"
What was created, a new republic, was the Third Republic: Liberal Democracy. If government is to be a consensus, then it must be inclusive. Hence the Liberal Democracy would press farther than many dreamed possible to include. If government was to be a consensus, then it would have to be scrupulously fair in the means it imposed the laws. Thus the clean government measures that had been part of the progressive era became mandate. These two principles - fairness and inclusion - worked. Fairness worked because the crisis of the Depression was one where people were left out of the benefits of the new modern economy. Inclusion worked because they feared the results of trusting it, when it so obviously worked in covert, and unfair, ways.
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The correct lens to see the late Liberal Democracy through is a populist party of decentralization - the Republicans - who were an alliance between the rentier class and the unorganized working class, while the Democrats, analogous to the Whigs of the run up to the civil war, were in favor of a more restrained policy in both foreign affairs and monetary activity.
However, such a cohabitation had a natural limit - namely that the Republican economy did not work, and had to constantly borrow from the future. When the limit of that borrowing was reached, the Third Republic had to fall
As it is now doing.
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