HILLARY NEEDS TO RE-SET THE NATION’S CONCEPT OF AMERICA’S “FREEDOMS”

...FDR’s Four Freedoms Park in New York City

It’s time to drop the Reagan/Bush concept of the nation’s “Freedoms”.

I have been reading up on FDR these last weeks and specifically to understand what became known back then as FDR’s “Four Freedoms”.  It all started just before the Second World War when FDR asked the American public to recognize his four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  The last item was in reference to fear from a global war.

Now historians have said that depending on the specific era, the concept of “Freedoms” have different meanings.  America’s founders referred to the then freedoms as freedom from political autocracy, and freedom from British royalists that were given special privileges from the crown.

Where I’m going with all this is that I was reminded of these freedom’s when I heard that Hillary Clinton was unveiling what she called her “vision of the country”, and she was doing so in a speech at the FDR Four Freedoms Park in New York City.

The point is that this nation had basically followed FDR’s lead for his freedoms for many years after his presidency.  In fact, many historians said that it wasn’t until Ronald Reagan’s presidency that FDR’s “New Deal” freedoms were finally replaced with Reagan’s definition of “freedoms”.

Reagan’s “freedoms” meant that: freedom is centered only in the nation’s markets. 

·       Americans must be free from government interference.

·       It is the entrepreneur, not the citizen, that is the central freedom focus.

·       Government is the threat and is not to be trusted; the best thing government can do is to get out of the way.

With the glaring exceptions of global intervention and having a bloated military, conservatives always argue that freedom entails: economic privatization, deregulation, limiting government’s reach and capacity.

In other words for the conservatives:  Government Bad / Privatization-Deregulation Good!

FDR and the Democratic party have always said that government is not the enemy, but government is there to do those things that the average American is unable to do.  This is why the Democrats have always supported Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance and now Obamacare for everyone having affordable health care coverage.

This is definitely in line with FDR’s concept of the Four Freedoms, and is diametrically opposed to Reagan’s concept of “freedoms”.

After living under the so called Reagan “freedoms”, and doing so through both of the Bush eras, with a short break for Bill Clinton’s “The era of big government is gone,” which in many ways was just another version of Reagan’s “don’t trust government”. We then got President Obama that had inherited the GOP sponsored, “worst recession since the Great Depression.

After Wall Street’s excesses had blown it up, Obama’s government then had to save the nation’s economy. But Obama’s approach was not to challenge the conservative limits on what their “freedoms” meant.

 

Unfortunately, under Obama’s modified Reagan freedoms, the banks got saved but homeowners didn’t. Oh, and the rich recovered, but working families didn’t.

The conservative notion of “freedom” once more resulted in an economy serving only the top 10%, and thanks to the conservatives on the US Supreme Court, we are also left with a politics totally corrupted by big money.

This is where Hillary seems to be at the cross-roads for possibly bringing back a lot of the freedoms that FDR brought us over 80 years ago.

If Hillary is smart, she will challenge the old “Reagan freedoms” directly, head-on.

As one liberal writer recently wrote: “The greatest threat to freedom now is posed by the entrenched few that use their resources and influence to rig the rules to protect their privileges. She [Clinton] would do a great service for the country — and for her own political prospects — by offering a far more expansive American view of what freedom requires, and what threatens it.  Clinton should make it clear to Americans that in a modern, globalized world, we are in the midst of a fierce struggle between economic royalists and a democratic citizenry. If we are to protect our freedoms, citizens must mobilize to take back government from the few, to clean out the corruption and to curb the oppressive power of the modern day economic royalists.”

So, my advice to Hillary is the following:

·       Focus on getting the people back to work and fixing this nation’s infrastructure.  Doing the former, could help with the later

·       Continue supporting the freedom of religion by enforcing the division of church and state.  (That includes keeping same-sex marriage & Roe vs Wade)

·       Give all Americans an opportunity for a good, free, public education from Pre-K to at least two years of community college.  Also paid maternity leave and affordable day care.

·       We must stop policing the world, and get non-distributor drug users out of American prisons.

·       Support the equality of women in the marketplace and deal with the rigging of the elections by the GOP suppressing the vote

·       Do whatever it takes for helping with today’s income inequality, starting with the US tax code.

Hillary must make it clear as to who is standing in the way of the American voter and what her bolder views are for the continuing the Great American Experiment.

This is not the time to be shy or to not take on what we have been living with that needs to change.

The nation needs to hear about and to follow through on some things that have not been presented since FDR presented his Four Freedoms in the late 1930’s.

Copyright G.Ater  2015