Before 1933, America had experienced depressions, weather-related disasters, civil war, and 'economic dislocation' (generally brought about through practices and excesses of American business) -- but whatever their effects on the population, leaving the markets to resolve the crisis and private charity or Fate to help the broken and the needy was the response of government. Whatever analysis is made of the New Deal, its initiatives changed the relationship, the
expectations, of citizens towards that representative government. This has been Franklin Roosevelt's legacy.
...and all that is what the present group of neoconservatives leading the government would like to dismantle. Whether Bush is just their front for the conservative dream to roll back seventy years of social progress, or not, doesn't matter -- they want to destroy the New Deal, in spirit and in fact. And any comparison between Bush and Franklin Delano Roosevelt will find the Peevish Dullard wanting.
I come to you tonight to answer certain charges leveled against me, and our Party. I consider it a public duty to answer falsifications with facts. I do not consider this an unpleasant duty -- I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight.
Campaign Speech, 1940
More than anything else, FDR's "New Deal" restructured the fundimental ideas of what government's responsibility is to its citizens. Franklin Roosevelt and appointees in his administrations believed -- and made Americans believe -- that the United States Government did not let its citizens fend for itself in the middle of a war, or a crisis. In good times or lean, it was the responsibility of that government to provide public assistance, public works, public succor for those in need, and public structures in society to provide for the elderly, the sick, and people without hope.
In the America of Bush and his ilk, every citizen without means is as disposable as the victims of Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf. The compact between their government and we, the citizens, is different than FDR's -- their response is social Darwinisim at its most brutish and ugly: Your obligation is to us; we have no obligation to you: Fend For Yourselves.
They do not care what happens to you, me, or others in America and beyond. We're not citizens, in their eyes; when in need, we're liabilities, and 'appeasers' or traitors, when we disagree with what they've done and are doing to our country.
For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.
Speech At Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936
FDR was a privileged son of a blue-blooded American family (easily the betters of the Bushes, Walkers, or Pierces that make up the Peevish Dullard's crowd). Whatever else could be said about their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt opened FDR's eyes to the poverty and hardscrabble misery of many in America at the turn of the last century. And when FDR contracted polio, he had to learn personally about despair, and real effort, and hope.
In my opinion, some measure of FDR's journey from priviledge to understanding was the spiritual basis for the New Deal.
Comparisons with the angry ventrilloquist's dummy taking up space in the White House are too obvious. He also came from the same roots of 'America's First Families' and priviledge as Franklin Roosevelt. However, Bush's life has not been about working through personal adversity to compassion and wisdom; none of his public remarks or private effort supports that. Instead, down the years he has shown repeated attempts to avoid confronting his own weaknesses and conflicts -- to make others clean up and offer excuses for his mistakes (Try to imagine the difference between Bush's lack of response to the Katrina disaster, and how FDR might have resolved it).
[The reasons for the Depression are] because rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men... Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
FDR emerged from his personal tragedy still a man, and capiable of error in judgement and human frailty. But he achieved something Bush cannot claim: FDR empathized with the suffering of other people, and because of his compassion forever linked himself with the belief that government should respond to that suffering -- even if it was to offer nothing but a hope that things would be better.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided hope, navigating the United States through the Depression and a World War. He left a legacy of social progress and social assistance, the real image of America as a "shining city on a hill" (not Reagan's cardboard, film-set replica). FDR promoted the spirit of America as a nation unified in it's best ideals; the fact that we are all in this together. That example made this country a spiritual home for everyone who lived in it, and anyone who believes in it.
Bush, Rove, and the rest know that the numbers of Americans who directly experienced the Depression, and the New Deal, is dwindling. They're ignoring that collective American memory. They want it, desperately, to disappear.
But, people who are the children of FDR -- whose parents or grandparents remembered, and who raised us with the understanding that a Progressive social contract between government and The People was a binding reality -- we're still active, and we are still a majority.
The GOP, and the neocon / fundimentalist alliance that runs it, wants to dismantle every single board and nail of the house that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administrations built -- strip it, and sell it for their own gain.
With them -- we're on our own, as surely as if we were trapped in an overheated attic, rising water all around -- a situation, as Bush memorably noted, 'no one could have foreseen.'
For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others;
Jobs for those who can work;
Security for those who need it;
The ending of special privilege for the few;
The preservation of civil liberties for all;
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider
and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.
January 6, 1941 State of the Union Address