God save us from effective government.

Like Guantanamo or what the GOP is currently doing (e.g., not giving Garland hearings "because it is too close to the election")?

Government, and political opportunists, can be effective in both good and bad policies/actions.

Obama even had the opportunity to close Guantanamo. Didn't consider it important enough to waste the political capital on. Was more concerned about his team retaining power than doing the right thing.

> Government, and political opportunists, can be effective in both good and bad policies/actions.

Effectiveness is only ever used with bad policies. I don't know that I've even come close to figuring out the mechanism for it, but there is one that inevitably tips effectiveness towards ends malevolent. If you were to plot out historical leaders for how effective they were on some sort of spectrum, and then plot them out for how evil they were, it'd be the same spectrum.

FDR also had to deal with things like state's rights... But why worry about nuance?

The USSR rapidly went from a relatively backwards nation that had been devastated by WW2 to a highly industrialized world superpower. That's a lot of success even if the costs weren't worth it.

Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.

Unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.

Imperial Russia was one of the most powerful countries in the world prior to WW1 and industrialising very rapidly. One of the reasons the Germans went for it when they did was because they knew that any later they could not beat the Russian Empire. To manage to become a “highly industrialised world superpower” starting with the Russian Empire of 1913 is not an achievement.

> Cuba has been hamstrung by US embargoes.

No other countries embargo the US and oceanic transport is so cheap they transport onions to Ireland from Australia at a profit. Cuba is a dump because of its government, not because of the US.

> Unfortunately I’m not knowledgeable enough about Venezuela to say.

Pretty standard communist story. Secret police, middle class and educated flee in their millions, economy collapses.

Same thing, west can not go in and occupy current Russia either, but that does not make the country any less dysfunctional mess comparatively. Same with imperial Russia.

So you're perfectly OK with a government that accomplishes a lot of things that should not have been accomplished, as long as it does so efficiently?

To give just one example: FDR's administration systematically concealed from the American public the true nature of the Soviet Union, which, even before World War II started, had already killed many millions more of its own people than Nazi Germany would kill by the end of WW II, and sent to concentration camps many millions more still. FDR and his administration knew this because FDR had been sending top advisers of his over to the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin all during the 1930s, and Stalin was not at all reticent about explaining his grand plans for sanitizing his country of dissidents. Concealing all this was the only reason why the American public accepted the Soviet Union as an ally in WW II (and even then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had to be whitewashed as a temporary aberration by an otherwise reliable ally, instead of the cynical manipulation that it actually was).

And the result of that was that a war which was started in order to free Eastern Europe from a totalitarian dictatorship, Nazi Germany, left Eastern Europe in the hands of an even worse totalitarian dictatorship, the Soviet Union. In short, the bloodiest, costliest war in human history was a failure, and that failure is directly attributable to FDR and his administration. Oh, it was all done efficiently, yes: everybody was so convinced that it was a great outcome that, after the end of WW II, Eisenhower sat next to Stalin and watched a parade of the Red Army through Red Square in Moscow and told Stalin how great it was, and the New York Times gushed over it. Ok by you?