Roosevelt the Liberal

Roosevelt was an astute Liberal AND pragmatic politician. Many have tried to down play and even obscure his Liberalism, which, of course, given the period, was different than the post-Civil Rights era Liberalism that many of us see in our mind’s eye when we think of a Liberal. However, Roosevelt was a Liberal, even if his agenda was incremental, and, yes, he was also a pragmatist — the two, Liberal and a pragmatist, are not mutually exclusive.

In The Second Bill of Rights, Cass Sunstein writes:

During his last year, Roosevelt concluded that America’s system of political parties needed to be fundamentally altered. He told his principle speechwriter, Samuel Rosenman, that "the time has come for the Democratic party to get rid of its reactionary elements in the South, and to attract to it the Liberals in the Republican party… We ought to have two real parties — one liberal and one conservative." To this end, Roosevelt started negotiations with Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, stating that with "the liberals of both parties Wilkie and I together can form a new, really liberal party in America." Wilkie responded quite favorably, saying that he was "ready to devote almost full time to this." But both men were dead within the year, and the project was orphaned. [page 16]

Just imagine if their vision had been pursued.

As an observer of politics, to me is quite interesting how Republicans build and build on their brand and figures, while we, Democrats, run away from ours. Republicans have and will continue to spend a lot energy into building shrines for Reagan, because they know that he represents an extension of their brand, a way to reach out and to convert. We, in the other hand, have nearly forgotten the legacy of Roosevelt and how it was during that period that the Democratic party enjoyed its greatest electoral success. Sure, there’s the issue of "big government," "entitlements," "social security reform," and how removed we now are from Roosevelt’s era. The "ideas" that Roosevelt articulated in his Second Bill of Rights still resonate:

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

In the 80s and 90s the Democratic party choose to abandon its storied legacy and, in stead, embraced the corporatist DLC messaging/agenda as the "third way," which they presented as the way forward for the Democratic party. Now, after witnessing how this so-called third way has utterly failed to capture the imagination and hearts of the American people, I would hope that we start to look at the Democratic champions of the past that managed to govern successfully, AND that also managed to build broad-movement coalitions under the party’s banner.