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It’s easy enough to decry Donald Trump’s attempted takeover of the Federal Reserve as yet another swerve toward authoritarianism. He is breaking with decades of precedent and allegedly the law to attempt to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden-era appointee to the bank’s board of governors. It appears to be part of his campaign to demand lower interest rates, which is a lousy policy when inflation hasn’t quite cooled. Trump has done little otherwise to bring prices down. His aggressive tariff regime, certainly, will punish many families — especially when it’s not coupled with a new industrial policy or jobs program.

If Trump has, in almost every instance since taking office in January, shoved up against the boundaries of presidential and constitutional powers, behaving like the voracious strongman he is, liberals should be careful to conflate his designs on the Fed as the equivalent of any of his other disturbing maneuvers, like dispatching the National Guard to major cities or menacing immigrants. The Fed is decidedly not a bastion of liberalism and not, objectively, all that democratic. It doesn’t actually make much sense for Democrats, or the left broadly, to cheer on an independent board of Wall Street–aligned technocrats to manage the economy free of the executive branch or even Congress. The concept certainly would have been alien to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who loomed over the Fed for the entirety of his presidency and ensured his chair was ideologically aligned with the New Deal.

What’s strange about the age we currently inhabit is that, on its face, there is nothing terribly conservative or right wing about the expansion of federal power. The New Deal era was the apotheosis of big government fighting for the common good. Of course, Trump himself is a reactionary executive, and much of his abuse of executive authority is so unsettling because he’s been bent on defunding and destroying the social safety net as well as terrorizing vulnerable populations. Trump has enthusiastically fired commissioners of independent agencies, from the Federal Trade Commission to the National Labor Relations Board, often with no congressionally authorized law allowing him to do so. But should the left bemoan an agency in government losing its independence? Shouldn’t a Democratic president, if elected, get to flex his or her muscle over the government? Popular elections do exist for a reason.

The Fed was founded in 1913 as a sort of strained compromise among agrarian populists, regional bankers, and Wall Street financiers. Conservatives demanded a system controlled by private New York banks, while populists argued for the power to be concentrated in the West and South. The result was a kind of decentralization: 12 separate Federal Reserve banks, along with a board overseeing them in Washington. The board existed as a judicial body, and the 12 regional reserve banks were supposed to facilitate the flow of local credit. The concept of a central bank controlling interest rates wasn’t emphasized at all, and bank supervision was far more important.

During the Great Depression, under Roosevelt, the Fed was restructured, but there was no chance a powerful and deeply ambitious president would allow a financial institution to conduct itself free of executive control. If FDR didn’t have the legal authority to fire board members, that didn’t much matter. Marriner Eccles, the chair under Roosevelt, regulated banks and conducted monetary policy at the direct behest of the president. Eccles was a committed Keynesian and would not have remained Fed chair if he wasn’t. Both men worked closely together and Eccles was a vital champion of New Deal economics. Even afterward, from the 1950s through the ’70s, the president, Congress, and the Fed would work together, sometimes in conflict, to regulate the banks.

The great shift came at the dawn of the neoliberal era at the end of the ’70s. Fed independence, as we understand it today, was born. Paul Volcker, Jimmy Carter’s Fed chair, aimed to tame inflation, break labor unions, and fully financialize the banking system. He hiked interest rates dramatically and fought, along with his conservative successor Alan Greenspan, who pioneered the concept of “too big to fail” before it came into vogue, with the Fed beginning to bail out banks that had behaved recklessly.

In 2008, the Fed eagerly bailed out Wall Street, but instead of 2008 serving as a great pivot point in the history of the Fed — the chair and board members reflecting on their very structure and priorities and how they permitted such a financial disaster to unfold — the opposite took place: The mandarins grew drunk on their own authority. Fed “independence” became cherished, as if it were written into the Constitution itself. Joe Biden wouldn’t even let his officials comment on interest rates.

Democrats yearn for the professional managerial class and economists to manage the Fed free of any presidential oversight — a technocracy of elites who care, first and foremost, about propping up Wall Street. The progressive wing of the party hasn’t questioned this arrangement. Trump himself is wrong for the right reasons; his takeover of the Fed won’t usher in any grand era of financial regulation, and he wants low interest rates only to stave off a further erosion in his popularity. If Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans want to save the Fed from undue presidential meddling, they should demand a greater role for Congress. Why not place FTC members and Cabinet secretaries on the Fed board instead, making the Fed accountable, in some form, to the will of the electorate? The left shouldn’t fear so much democracy.

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