Jason Scott Smith's quite right to point out that in a Very Short Introduction some things get less attention than others, and in my book one thing that gets less attention is the role of the New Deal as a political vehicle for the Democratic Party.

But there's a good reason for that! The Democratic Party in the 1930s (perhaps as now) had the luxury of knowing that in response to the economic crisis, good policy was good politics. Roosevelt had been elected to do a job for the country, and if he did it he would be rewarded -- as indeed some research suggests he was in the most basic sense; states with "robust income growth" went proportionately stronger for Roosevelt in 1936. Maybe the voters were simply asking if the New Deal (whatever it was) had, in the crassest sense, been a good deal for them.

In promoting recovery, New Dealers invested heavily in public works, and here again good politics was good policy. If you wanted to put money into infrastructure in 1930s America, where would you put it? In the relatively underdeveloped South and West -- especially the West, where the federal government owned lots of land and so could build improvements more cheaply. If these regions happened to be ones where Democrats needed to shore up political support for the New Deal, then that was a bonus.

Building up the economies of the South and West returns us to the subject of countervailing power -- for decades, federal intervention in the economy, in the form of tariffs and subsidies, had favored the manufacturing interests and banks of the Northeast; now, the South and West could get a compensatory share of federal largesse. So the concept of using countervailing power to balance the scales didn't extend only to unions, it applied also to regions -- and even to individuals.

The Social Security Act too can be seen as an example of helping people to help themselves, as Julian puts it -- assisting workers to save for retirement and insuring them against cyclical unemployment, Social Security provided American workers a slightly greater degree of independence from their employers. And in the bargaining between employer and employee, independence equals power.

Which observation points toward an answer to Julian's question: where are the Obama policies for countervailing power? The most promising one I see is that of providing universal healthcare. If Americans knew their ability to get medical care no longer depended on their employers, they'd be more secure in bargaining with their bosses, more mobile in the job market, quicker to seize entrepreneurial opportunities.

And this observation gets us to Mark's question, or concern: not all policies that promote countervailing power need necessarily promote the 1930s vision of unionization -- policy goals like universal healthcare can foster countervailing power by increasing employee independence and mobility at the same time.