We have not forgotten the promise of the Four Freedoms—the promise of “Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, Freedom from fear.” Indeed, despite all the efforts by conservatives and the corporate elite to deny, erase, or rewrite that promise—the promise that Franklin Roosevelt and our parents and grandparents proclaimed, fought for, and made the promise of America—we not only still remember it. We yearn to realize it all the more.
We yearn to be like our parents and grandparents. We yearn to renew America’s purpose and promise and reinvigorate America’s strength and prosperity. And yet we have seemingly forgotten how we might do so. We sense that we, too, “have not yet fully explored the democratic way of life,” but seem to have forgotten that “Democracy is never given. It must be taken.” Even as we continue to erect monuments to honor our parents’ and grandparents’ courage and sacrifices, even as we deliver tributes and memorials declaring our eternal gratitude for all that they accomplished and afforded us, we fail to remember what really made those whom we call the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader great.
So, we need to remember. Now, especially, before all those men and women have passed away, and before we allow all that their generation achieved to pass away with them, we need to remember how a President and people—in the face of powerful conservative and corporate opposition, and despite their own faults and failings—saved the United States from economic destruction and political tyranny and turned it into the strongest and most prosperous nation in history by mobilizing, harnessing the powers of democratic government, and making America freer, more equal, and more democratic than ever before.
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In 2008—having endured more than thirty years of concerted class war from above that has laid siege to the democratic achievements of a generation, returned America to the inequality of the late Gilded Age of the 1920s, and led to an economic crisis that threatened nothing less than a new Great Depression—we voted to redeem and reaffirm the promise of the Four Freedoms. We not only elected the first black President in American history, Barack Obama, a young Democratic senator from Illinois who preached the “Audacity of Hope,” who ran on a platform that included subjecting corporate power and practices to greater democratic scrutiny and regulation, protecting and enhancing workers’ rights, and enacting a national health care program, and who spiritedly told his fellow citizens, “Yes, we can!” We also elected an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to enact that agenda and help prove him right. And we did it so decisively that politicians and pundits envisioned the President-elect and his party bucking history and gaining even more congressional seats in the midterm elections of 2010—just as Roosevelt and the Democrats had strengthened their hold on Congress in the 1934 midterm elections.1
It was not to happen.
It definitely did seem as if we were on the verge of a new Age of Roosevelt—that we would launch a “new New Deal” to tackle the nation’s unfolding economic crisis, widening inequalities, and continuing industrial and infrastructural decay—that we would undertake reforms and initiatives that would propel democratic politics and possibilities for years to come—that we would once again progressively advance the Four Freedoms. Even before the 2008 campaign, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi affirmatively answered the question of whether Democrats had any ideas for the nation with just three words: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Presidential candidate Obama himself not only spoke admiringly of FDR, but also, often and proudly, of his “Greatest Generation” grandparents who had donned uniform and overalls to serve the nation in World War II. And following the November elections, magazines both political and popular were running cover stories projecting the newly elected President Obama as nothing less than the Second Coming of Roosevelt.2
A sense of that arrival was evident in the discomfiture of pundits and critics. Seemingly anxious about what it all portended, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham essentially advised the Democratic candidate on the eve of his presidential election victory that he ought not to push his agenda too far or too fast, for “America remains a center-right nation.” Even more anxiously, right-wing scribes reiterated their absurd claim that “the New Deal made the Depression worse” and intensified their attacks on the promise that FDR pronounced in 1941. The snide dismissal of the Greatest Generation’s achievements was transparent in the archconservative South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint’s declaration: “Socialists are now marching under the banner of a new secular-progressive style of freedom: the freedom from responsibility, the freedom to behave destructively without moral judgment, the freedom from risk and failure, the freedom from want, the freedom from religion, and the freedom to have material equality with those who work and accomplish more.”3
But most important—just as the Right feared—the majority of Americans wanted democratic action and many of us were ready to go into action. You could feel it in labor councils, community centers, and college classrooms across the country and you could actually see it that January at the Presidential Inauguration when 2 million Americans in all their diversity turned out to witness history and listen for their marching orders.
For all that, however, no new New Deal, no new progressive politics, no new democratic surge ensued. Yes, there were significant accomplishments. President-elect Obama firmly endorsed and made possible massive bailouts of not only the supposedly “too-big-to-fail” banks, which stabilized the collapsing financial system, but also the stalled automobile industry, which kept General Motors and Chrysler from going out of business and laying off their workers. Once in office, he and the Democratic-controlled Congress quickly enacted an $800 billion stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which funded an array of “shovel-ready” public-works projects around the country, rescued many a state and local government budget, and saved possibly 2 million jobs. And in the ensuing months, he went on to seek and ultimately secure passage of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”), health care reform that dramatically expands health care coverage to millions of previously uncovered Americans.4
Nevertheless, instead of a new Age of Roosevelt, the country witnessed the startling rise of the “Tea Party,” a right-wing populist movement of mostly white, middle-class, “mad as hell” middle-aged men and women handsomely underwritten by billionaire reactionaries such as the brothers David and Charles Koch and heavily promoted by the FOX News cable network and a cohort of conservative talk-television and talk-radio figures. These Tea Partiers and their benefactors and publicists virulently opposed Obama’s health care plans, forcefully pressed for lower taxes and less government, and ardently promoted “pro-life and traditional family values.” And the strength that their movement gathered not only propelled the Republican Party even further to the right, but also to an astounding comeback in the 2010 midterm elections—a comeback that saw the GOP win control of the House, pick up six seats in the Senate, and secure six new governorships and seven hundred seats in state legislatures. All of which enabled an “I told you so” chorus of politicians and pundits to start chanting, “America is a center-right nation”—“Obama went too far, too fast,” and, indeed, “he asked too much of Americans.”5
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Obama did not ask too much of Americans. He asked too little.
It was not just, as many an exasperated leftist argued, that Obama was always too quick to compromise—as he did in the fight for national health care by both secretly negotiating with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and dropping the plan to create a “public option” in deference to conservatives of both parties, and as he did again in the contest over the question of the federal deficit by appointing a high-profile National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility co-chaired by the “deficit hawks” Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Nor was it simply, as more moderate liberal critics sadly lamented, that the “silver-tongued” Obama had failed to “master the persuasive powers” of the presidency, speak like a populist, and offer “broad and convincing arguments.” Rather, it was that he never engaged his fellow citizens’ energies in the process of redeeming the nation from the political and economic devastation wrought by more than three decades of conservative and corporate ascendance.6
Even as the “Great Recession” was doing its worst, even as millions of Americans continued to lose jobs and homes, even as poverty increased and inequality widened, Obama failed to respond in the fashion he had promised. Even as the Right and conservative rich were mobilizing to halt the renewal of the fight for the Four Freedoms, the president issued no call to action—no call to mobilize and demand a truly universal national health care system—no call to mobilize and push Congress to rescind the Bush administration’s massive tax cuts of the early 2000s that were making the rich all the richer and the nation all the poorer—no call to rally in favor of greater federal spending on public needs, public works, and job creation. For all of his expressed admiration and appreciation of FDR and the Greatest Generation, Obama forgot, or, like too many another recent Democratic president, simply turned his back on what made them great.
Despite his campaign promises—and as ready as Americans were to act—he did nothing to engage them in the labors and the struggles of recovery, reconstruction, and reform, nothing to empower them to organize workplaces and communities to challenge the “economic royalists” of our day, nothing to call them forth to fill the public squares and spaces and press Congress and himself to act before the Tea Partiers did. Even after the electoral debacle of November 2010, he not only still refused to call for popular democratic action, he also failed to honor his campaign promise to march, or at least stand, in solidarity with workers to protect their rights—most blatantly so in the spring of 2011 when tens of thousands of Wisconsin workers and their fellow citizens turned out over and over again at the state capitol building in Madison to protest and try to block the stripping of public employees’ collective-bargaining rights by the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, and the GOP-controlled legislature.7
At the same time, Obama compromised all the more with the now-strengthened Republicans by making “deficit reduction” a foremost priority of his presidency, and turned the social-democratic legacy of FDR and the Greatest Generation into a bargaining chip in his dealings with the GOP’s congressional leadership. In a major address on the federal deficit question at George Washington University in April 2011, he stated that “any serious plan to tackle the deficit will require us to put everything on the table.” Three months later, in his national Weekly Address of July 2, 2011, he repeated the conservative mantra “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do” and then echoed the neoliberals of the 1970s: “We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.” And that same week he urged congressional Democrats who were resisting such deal-making “to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for tax revenue.”8
Still, the majority of Americans did not turn to the right. We may have been disappointed, but we had no intention of handing the country over to conservatives and reactionaries. While the Occupy Wall Street movement that erupted and spread across the country in 2011 never reached the scale of the Tea Party, it expressed the views of far more Americans when it challenged the power and wealth of the “One Percent.” And in 2012, we not only reelected the President, but also increased the number of Democrats in both houses of congress. In fact, while the GOP retained control of the House of Representatives due to redistricting, half a million more Americans cast their votes in congressional races for Democrats than for Republicans.9
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One cannot help but recall Max Lerner’s lament of 1948: “What we did once we can resume. The tragedy lies in the waste of our experience, in the waiting while all the old blunders are committed over again.”10
But we do not have time to lament.
We need to remember—and we need to act.
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We can neither reelect Roosevelt nor prevent the passing of a generation. But we can still attend to their words and actions. We can recall FDR’s argument: “These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.” We can embrace his challenge: “A true patriotism urges us to build an even more substantial America where the good things of life may be shared by more of us, where the social injustices will not be encouraged to flourish.” And just as our parents and grandparents did—to the point of pushing FDR himself further than he would otherwise have gone—we can recognize that “Democracy is not a static thing. It is an everlasting march,” and “it is time for the country to become fairly radical for a generation.”11
Moreover, we can do far more to honor our parents and grandparents than once again proclaim our eternal gratitude. We can restore to them their democratic lives and achievements and recognize them for who they were—the most progressive generation in American history.
Even more than that we can honor them by remembering who we are. And in so doing we will see that to truly honor them we must not simply defend and secure their memory and legacy, but also redeem the promise of the Four Freedoms and make the United States stronger and more prosperous by mobilizing, harnessing the powers of democratic government, and making America freer, more equal, and more democratic than ever before.