My father who was born in Holland in 1904, was a naturalized citizen, and an FDR Democrat, has probably rolled over in his grave numerous times. He wouldn't recognize the party that exists today.
Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid conversion from Constitutionalism to the doctrine of unlimited government is an oft-told story. But I am here concerned not so much by the abandonment of states’ rights by the national Democratic Party — an event that occurred some years ago when that party was captured by the socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement — as by the unmistakable tendency of the Republican Party to adopt the same course. […] Thus, the cornerstone of the Republic, our chief bulwark against the encroachment (on) individual freedom by Big Government, is fast disappearing under the piling sands of absolutism.If the Dems were openly like that during FDR’s tenure and obviously so afterwards, how are they different today from what they were then? (FTR, Dean Acheson was once investigated for his ties to the USSR.)
The Republican Party, to be sure, gives lip service to states’ rights. We often talk about “returning to the states their rightful powers”; the Administration has even gone so far as to sponsor a federal-state conference on the problem. But deeds are what count, and I regret to say that in actual practice, the Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, summons the coercive power of the federal government whenever national leaders conclude that the states are not performing satisfactorily. …
— The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), pp. 24-25
The New Deal, Dean Acheson wrote approvingly in a book called A Democrat Looks At His Party, “conceived of the federal government as the whole people organized to do what had to be done.” A year later, Mr. (Arthur) Larson wrote A Republican Looks At His Party, and made much the same claim in his book for modern Republicans. The “underlying philosophy” of the New Republicanism, said Mr. Larson, is that “if a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is the proper function of the federal government.”And Arthur Larson was one of Ike’s cabinet members.
Here we have, by prominent spokesmen of both political parties, an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government. There is no reference by either of them to the Constitution, or any attempt to define the legitimate functions of government. The government can do whatever needs to be done; note, too, the implicit but necessary assumption that it is the government itself that determines what needs to be done. We must not, I think, underrate the importance of these statements. They reflect the view of a majority of the leaders of one of our parties, and of a strong minority among the leaders of the other, and they propound the first principle of totalitarianism: that the State is competent to do all things and is limited in what it actually does only by the will of those who control the State. …
— Ibid., page 15