Harvey J. Kaye: Democrats should recall what made Roosevelt truly great.
[Harvey Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America.]
As we look ahead this Labour Day to the elections of 2008, those of us who call ourselves progressives should hope not only that the Democrats recapture the White House and additional congressional seats, but that those Democrats advance the memory and legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Why Roosevelt? While it's true that most Americans continue to consider FDR the greatest president of the 20th century, three decades of conservative ascendance have taken their toll on our political and historical imaginations. And just as their ideological ancestors did in the 1930s, today's rightwingers continue to accuse Roosevelt and his New Dealers of not simply failing to end the Great Depression, but prolonging it; of hijacking and trampling on the constitution; and of suppressing individual liberty and free enterprise in favour of bureaucratic collectivism.
This very summer - presumably seeking some reason to feel good in the face of the disastrous Bush tenure and dreading the possibility of a Democratic presidency that may bring with it a host of liberal initiatives - conservatives have been hyping Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, the latest literary assault on Roosevelt's presidency.
In fact, the effusiveness of their praise leads one to imagine they fantasise about being in the vanguard of a joint Wall Street and Cato Institute "free market" expeditionary force marching through Washington to the FDR Memorial and toppling the statue of Roosevelt in his wheelchair while chanting Shlaes' fallacious claim that he and his famous Brain-Trusters modelled the New Deal after Mussolini's fascism and Stalin's communism....
Progressives should applaud [[Jonathan] Alter and [Cass] Sunstein [who have recently published books about FDR's personal leadership abilities] . And yet, we should not fail to see how these liberal writers, too, end up contributing to our amnesia, for they often ignore how the American people themselves encouraged and instigated their president to pursue the New Deal's grand experiments of recovery, reconstruction and reform. They fail to address how working people - labour unionists in particular - actually pushed FDR toward social democracy....
Read entire article at Guardian
As we look ahead this Labour Day to the elections of 2008, those of us who call ourselves progressives should hope not only that the Democrats recapture the White House and additional congressional seats, but that those Democrats advance the memory and legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Why Roosevelt? While it's true that most Americans continue to consider FDR the greatest president of the 20th century, three decades of conservative ascendance have taken their toll on our political and historical imaginations. And just as their ideological ancestors did in the 1930s, today's rightwingers continue to accuse Roosevelt and his New Dealers of not simply failing to end the Great Depression, but prolonging it; of hijacking and trampling on the constitution; and of suppressing individual liberty and free enterprise in favour of bureaucratic collectivism.
This very summer - presumably seeking some reason to feel good in the face of the disastrous Bush tenure and dreading the possibility of a Democratic presidency that may bring with it a host of liberal initiatives - conservatives have been hyping Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, the latest literary assault on Roosevelt's presidency.
In fact, the effusiveness of their praise leads one to imagine they fantasise about being in the vanguard of a joint Wall Street and Cato Institute "free market" expeditionary force marching through Washington to the FDR Memorial and toppling the statue of Roosevelt in his wheelchair while chanting Shlaes' fallacious claim that he and his famous Brain-Trusters modelled the New Deal after Mussolini's fascism and Stalin's communism....
Progressives should applaud [[Jonathan] Alter and [Cass] Sunstein [who have recently published books about FDR's personal leadership abilities] . And yet, we should not fail to see how these liberal writers, too, end up contributing to our amnesia, for they often ignore how the American people themselves encouraged and instigated their president to pursue the New Deal's grand experiments of recovery, reconstruction and reform. They fail to address how working people - labour unionists in particular - actually pushed FDR toward social democracy....