The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate. He wasn't authoritarian, he was operating with the clearest mandate America had until Reagan (not that I agree with the mandate Reagan was handed and followed through on)
The reason he was able to threaten the Supreme Court with packing is that it was a credible threat.
The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it. Several prominent (terrible human beings) Dixiecrats screamed about "Democrat authoritarianism" for (checks notes) forcing southern states to stop being racist as fuck, and the south has been thoroughly republican voters since. Don't worry though, Strom Thurmund insists he wasn't a racist, he is just against being forced to allow black people to get the same legal treatment as white people.
A bunch of racists aren't willing to support welfare and public investment if black people get it. How do you form a coalition between them and black people?
These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans, and they do not care about the rest.
FDR had this support because Americans rallied behind the New Deal because 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. That's the pain it took before America was willing to do socialism-lite.
If you want democrat policy, you need to elect them. Simple as.
> The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate.
FDR directly embedded his staff in Congress and told them what they were going to do, and vigorously attacked anyone who got in the way of his agenda by any means necessary, including using the FBI and IRS against them, denying them federal funds, etc. He also was very effective at bullying the press - look at what went on with radio licenses. He even (via the Black Committee and FCC) conducted mass surveillance on his political enemies.
FDR did have a lot of support in Congress but brutally punishing people is what made him effective. He was certainly one of the most authoritarian Presidents in American history and we should probably thank our lucky stars he was a good one.
> These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans
I really want to know when this was because all the men (white or not) who worked the mills and the mines in my memory were effectively functional alcoholics because life sucked so much.
Its anemoia - nostalgia for a time you didn't live through.
They don't want the actual 50s, they want an illusion of what they saw on TV shows depicting white, wealthy, suburbia.
> The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it.
Odd, that the working class stayed with the Democrats for half a century after your claimed divergence.
It is true that progressive politics played a major role in the shift in the 2010s. But neither is that equivalent to the CRA, nor does it answer the question of why the working class reoriented around stupid bullshit. That latter, deeper issue has to do with the governing and professional classes of the US, which have shifted toward symbolic and procedural issues over broad material wellbeing, mostly because symbolic shit doesn't adversely affect professional classes' pocketbooks that much.
There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.
The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.