Harvey J. Kaye: The Right’s Rotten History
[Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He serves as an historical adviser to the Four Freedoms Park project.]
Whether or not right-wingers such as Fox News “entertainer and enlightener” Glenn Beck, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and Texas Governor Rick Perry actually uphold Ronald Reagan’s conservatism, they are clearly sustaining his practice of using and abusing the past to reshape popular memory and the politics of the present. In particular, they’re mimicking his efforts to hijack the Founding Fathers and Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Beck and Company have actually broken with Reagan’s perverse “historical labors” in a very significant way.
In their respective books — “Broke“, “Saving Freedom“, and “FED UP!” — Beck, DeMint, and Perry, like their late Republican hero Reagan, celebrate the Founders as freedom-loving, God-fearing, small-government and States’ Rights folk. They variably ignore or downplay not only their revolutionary sins such as slavery, but also their finest revolutionary commitments and accomplishments like the separation of church and state. However, in contrast to Reagan, who did his best (worst?) to try to lay claim to FDR to historically bolster his own political agenda, Beck and Co. portray FDR and the New Dealers as subversives who ruined American life and liberties.
Reagan, himself a former New Deal Democrat, knew how much most Americans loved FDR and continued to revere his name. So he regularly sought to appropriate Roosevelt’s words in his campaigns, even as he set about trying to undo, and suppress the memory of, what FDR and his fellow citizens achieved in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples abound. Recall that to appeal to working and middle-class Americans, Reagan — to the dismay of conservatives such as George Will — enthusiastically cited and quoted both Thomas Paine and FDR in his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican National Convention. And recall that in July 1987 Reagan audaciously re-stated FDR’s Four Freedoms — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear — as “the freedom to work”, “the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor”, “the freedom to own and control one’s property”, and “the freedom to participate in a free market.”...
Read entire article at New Deal 2.0
Whether or not right-wingers such as Fox News “entertainer and enlightener” Glenn Beck, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and Texas Governor Rick Perry actually uphold Ronald Reagan’s conservatism, they are clearly sustaining his practice of using and abusing the past to reshape popular memory and the politics of the present. In particular, they’re mimicking his efforts to hijack the Founding Fathers and Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Beck and Company have actually broken with Reagan’s perverse “historical labors” in a very significant way.
In their respective books — “Broke“, “Saving Freedom“, and “FED UP!” — Beck, DeMint, and Perry, like their late Republican hero Reagan, celebrate the Founders as freedom-loving, God-fearing, small-government and States’ Rights folk. They variably ignore or downplay not only their revolutionary sins such as slavery, but also their finest revolutionary commitments and accomplishments like the separation of church and state. However, in contrast to Reagan, who did his best (worst?) to try to lay claim to FDR to historically bolster his own political agenda, Beck and Co. portray FDR and the New Dealers as subversives who ruined American life and liberties.
Reagan, himself a former New Deal Democrat, knew how much most Americans loved FDR and continued to revere his name. So he regularly sought to appropriate Roosevelt’s words in his campaigns, even as he set about trying to undo, and suppress the memory of, what FDR and his fellow citizens achieved in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples abound. Recall that to appeal to working and middle-class Americans, Reagan — to the dismay of conservatives such as George Will — enthusiastically cited and quoted both Thomas Paine and FDR in his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican National Convention. And recall that in July 1987 Reagan audaciously re-stated FDR’s Four Freedoms — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear — as “the freedom to work”, “the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor”, “the freedom to own and control one’s property”, and “the freedom to participate in a free market.”...