Author’s note: In his state of the union address Wednesday, President Bush invoked the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bolster his argument for dismantling a key feature of the New Deal FDR fought to pass: Social Security. Bush further mocked FDR’s legacy with implicit comparisons of his war on Iraq, founded on lies and misleadership and frought with corruption, torture, and imperial hubris, to the struggle of the world against fascism in World War II. Since we know that Bush isn’t too concerned about being fast and loose with the truth, here is a review of an interesting book that provides an honest assessment of FDR’s legacy and our continuing battle to fulfill it.
Constitutional scholar Cass R. Sunstein’s recent book on the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an effortless read and a thoroughly argued account of the former president’s call for social justice. In our era of the ultra right’s continuous attacks on "big government" serving as an ideological basis for dismantling beneficial social programs, Sunstein provides a thoughtful counter based in a long tradition of US legal thought. Sunstein’s point is that FDR correctly viewed the state as a tool that protects both collective and individual liberties and rights by making social benefits universal.
Everyday, capitalists depend on the government to protect their property rights, to subsidize their business ventures, to provide public land, raw resources and necessary labor for their activities, and to safeguard their interests from competition domestically and internationally. Capitalists don’t think twice about this enormous role the government plays daily.
As the basis of this claim, Sunstein points to FDR’s state of the union address delivered in January of 1944. In this speech, FDR called for expanding both legally and culturally our concept of our basic rights. FDR challenged the American people to think beyond the rights listed in the Bill of Rights and include:
the right to a useful and remunerative job
the right to earn a living wage
the right of business owners to be free of unfair competition form monopoly capital
the right to adequate health care
the right to housing
the right to Social Security, social insurance, unemployment insurance
the right to a good education
In a period of war, during which the US had been attacked by a powerful imperialist force, FDR – in a stark contrast to the current administration – connected the heightened concern for security with economic and social justice. FDR unswervingly called for the universalization of the economic benefits of US wealth and productive capacity. He didn’t demand massive changes to existing law in order to protect the wealth and protect the power of the already filthy rich. FDR insisted that national security was bound up with equality and social justice. Despite the contradictory practice of imprisoning 110,000 people of Japanese descent in concentration camps and failing to challenge Jim Crow directly, FDR’s vision remains a powerful force that needs to be put into consistent practice.
According to Sunstein, FDR’s vision was based on a view of the government as a benevolent institution. FDR and his advocates believed that the right wing’s claim that a "laissez-faire" or a free market system is best was simply a cover for the demand that government should protect the interests of corporations and the rich. A recent example of the hypocrisy surrounding the "laissez-faire" philosophy is one of laissez-faire’s biggest boosters, "journalist" Armstrong Williams, who didn’t mind collecting a check for $240,000 from the big government to support his sagging career in exchange for promoting ultra right ideas. Other examples: airline bailouts, campaign finance conributions, Halliburton, Bush's corporate tax cuts, etc.
The "laissez-faire" concept was a myth, FDR's backers argued. Everyday, capitalists depend on the government to protect their property rights, to subsidize their business ventures, to provide public land, raw resources and necessary labor for their activities, and to safeguard their interests from competition domestically and internationally. Capitalists don’t think twice about this enormous role the government plays daily. FDR correctly understood that the corporate influence on the political process through campaign contributions contradicted claims about free competition.
FDR thought, Sunstein argues, that in a democratic society, government had a far better role to play. The state is also responsible for protecting the interests of working people. It should provide services – social insurance, health care, education, jobs, housing and so on – and protect the rights of workers who unfairly face the profit motives of huge corporations and powerful capitalist interests. The main vehicle for worker rights, in this view, was assuring the right to organize unions and also serving as a neutral arbiter in labor disputes. Hence, the Wagner Act and National Labor Relations Board were born.
These developments, of course, drove big capitalists crazy. As a result of a shift in the balance of class power and the movement of resources from capital investment to socially beneficial spending, the programs and institutions that FDR did establish or were created in the wake of his leadership – Social Security, social welfare, public housing, unemployment insurance, jobs programs, and since his time, the GI Bill and other higher education programs, Medicare and Medicaid – have been under attack by monopoly capital ever since.
Since monopoly capital is only a tiny fraction of the population and can’t on its own vote these programs out of existence it developed a strategy of funding and maintaining a constituency on the far right of the political spectrum – using xenophobia, racism, sexism, fundamentalist religious beliefs as a mobilizing tool – with the sole goal of dismantling the New Deal programs. Eventually this constituency succeeded in bringing the far right to power beginning in the 1980s and culminating in Bush’s current administration with his direct attacks on unions, Social Security, public education and more.
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A major drawback to Sunstein’s account of FDR’s policies and philosophy is the persistent failure to recognize the role of the working class and democratic movements behind what FDR was able to accomplish. Surely FDR’s presidency isn’t the tale of a lone figure in history implementing democratic change. This version makes a nice cowboy movie, but bad history. The labor movement, social movements, community organizations and the large and influential Communist Party were the main engines of the social policies and progress accomplished in that crucial period.
Alone, FDR was an elite, snobby, upper class patrician with little sympathy or interest in the needs and desires of working people. But with the powerful social agitation and labor organizing that called for "jobs or wages," for unemployment insurance and health care, housing, the right to organize unions and more during the depths of the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s behind, FDR’s administration took on a whole new character. He was given, not born with, the mantle of a people’s president. Sunstein doesn’t discuss this crucial fact.
The failure to eradicate institutional racism and national chauvinism or would prove to mean that the new programs and organizations would continue to be infested by racism and inequality. To provide one example, racists in the housing programs that emerged from World War II used their authority to move public resources to segregated white communities and to reinforce exclusion and discrimination. Facts like this suggest the revival of FDR’s vision of the universalization of social benefits of our society cannot be blocked or delimited by prejudices or institutionalize inequalities. These too have to be fought if a full realization is to happen. Sunstein’s treatment of this level of that period of history is very limited, perhaps due to his interest in promoting rather than criticizing the man and his vision.
A final failing of the book is the author’s stated belief in the possible ultimate benevolence of the government – or at least the possibility of its class neutrality. Because of this possibility, Sunstein argues, we don’t need socialism. A well-regulated capitalist system is sufficient.
This is where I part with the main ideological direction of the book. It seems clear, given the record of the far right in the last 24 years and its persistent attack on the New Deal and through that on working people, that the state cannot be made a neutral instrument that safeguards the interests of both sides of the class divide. A government that pretends it is neutral will always, inevitably in the end, promote the interests of those who it sees as the largest stakeholders in society. Under capitalism, the predominant opinion is that the largest stakeholders are the capitalists, not working people, despite the fact that they are the vast majority.
In a society with democratic forms and methods of conducting state business, it might take time to bend the state back towards the interests of the capitalists, but the resurgence of the ultra right demonstrates that without more permanent institutions that protect the working-class majority’s power such a shift backwards would always happen. A state that explicitly and thoroughly sides with working people and anti-monopoly minded sectors of the population – workers, small business, small farmers, etc. – by legal design and systemic necessity is necessary for circumventing the ultra right shenanigans we are now fighting to block.
A revival of the popular forces that compelled FDR’s turn towards social democracy – something akin to the phenomenal independent and working class movement that nearly single-handedly elected John Kerry – a the best tool for re-implementing fully FDR’s vision of the Second Bill of rights. A worker-dominated, anti-monopolistic and socialist-oriented government is the best tool for beginning to make that vision permanent.
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever.
By Cass R. Sunstein
New York, Basic Books, 2004.
--Martha Kramer frequently writes reviews for Political Affairs.
