Presidential Candidates Shouldn't Forget This Simple Truth About America

Aug. 21, 2019

This summer, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Neil Armstrong'southward "giant leap for mankind." The feat was a modern wonder of human ingenuity, and it captured the imagination of an entire planet. Merely a carper would regard the Apollo xi mission as annihilation other than an embodiment of American backbone, intellect, vision and salutary patriotism.

What a divergence a one-half century can make. In a state purported to be reclaiming its greatness, our electric current and would-exist leaders seem to accept an awfully small view of America'south potential.

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Despite the mountainous majesty of President Trump's ego, his skin is newspaper thin and his political imagination is puddle deep. Between Twitter tantrums and grotesque thumbs-up photo ops with orphaned mass shooting survivors, Trump'south formulation of grandness extends only as far as the size of his rallies. Otherwise, he insists, America is full. It is a claim used to back his cruelly xenophobic and white supremacist policies. And information technology is, of course, wrong.

In a country purported to be reclaiming its greatness, our current and would-be leaders seem to take an awfully small view of America'south potential.

In fact, America is facing a dangerous turn down in its productive population, with more than than 80 counties, comprising an aggregate population of 149 meg, seeing a drop in their number of working-historic period adults over the by two years. This is bad news for all fashion of business organisation, and not simply the poultry processing plants of the sort that exploit immigrant workers who face increasingly ruthless persecution past the President's immigration authorities.

Trump's brazen undermining of national prosperity in service of a myopically bigoted agenda is the manifestation of what his opponents discover so repellent about him; his venality, narcissism and nihilistic nothingness. Just for all the boorishness that so outrages his electoral opponents, their responses are discouragingly bereft of a positive vision in their own right.

The recent two-night broadcast of the preposterously overstuffed Democratic presidential debates bandage a light on just how compromised, complacent and uncompelling most of these candidates (not to mention our canis familiaris and pony prove campaign procedure) are. A phase full of indistinguishable stuffed shirts eked in a few unremarkable bromides here and there, without managing to be the least flake inspiring or even memorable.

That is, until Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren confronted the former Maryland congressman John Delaney. Subsequently Delaney repeatedly dismissed Warren's back up for broader social safety net policies like Medicare for All every bit "more than gratuitous stuff" and "impossible promises," Warren shot back, "I don't empathize why everyone goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk near what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for."

It's condom to presume that Warren does, in fact, know why someone would go to all the problem, if that someone is John Delaney, worth $92 million from his stint as a health care financier. The medical industrial complex needs their guy in the arena too. All the same, information technology shouldn't come up equally any surprise that Warren's riposte got the biggest applause of the nighttime. She tapped a vein of popular frustration at the notion that big ideas are necessarily bad ideas, that dramatic policies to improve the lives of ordinary Americans are inherently unworthy of the risk.

For a generation now, centre and working class folks accept been stifled nether the message that their lives don't merit an investment in large ideas and dramatic policies. The austerity program imposed by the Reagan assistants sounded the decease knell of New Deal liberalism, and Neb Clinton's declaration that "the era of big government is over," was the bipartisan hammer driving the nail into its coffin.

Most Americans today have spent the majority of their lives being told that government is incompetent, untrustworthy and an impediment to "freedom." Meanwhile, the corporate powers that benefit from pop antipathy toward the public sector have realized success beyond their wildest dreams making government at one time their tool and their whipping boy.

It'due south a dispiriting situation, but in some dimly lit corner of our collective unconscious marked "History," we know we've been here earlier. In the years preceding the Great Depression, the watershed crisis of the 20th century, the tycoons and robber barons of the twenty-four hour period had seized the levers of federal ability, turning the American economy into their private playground and piggy bank.

When the recklessness of the oligarchy came abode to roost, tens of millions of blameless Americans were plunged into misery, while tens of millions more languished at the brink. As the social fabric of the nation began to rend autonomously, the fissures began to ascend various factions that would strike familiar chords today. On one manus, at that place were the nativists, the Jim Crow racists, the openly fascist gangs preying upon the most vulnerable of their neighbors, and of course, the financial and industrial capitalists themselves, content to see an aggrieved working form divided against itself rather than united against the actual perpetrators of their exploitation and suffering.

Our nation was at the precipice of plummet, and were information technology not for the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who understood that the idea of the nation was nearly more than than lining the pockets of a tiny coterie of bankers, steel magnates and railroad tycoons, it is easy to motion picture America tumbling finally into oblivion.

FDR is of course nearly well-known for his immortal admonition, "The only affair nosotros accept to fearfulness is fearfulness itself," from his first inaugural address, but in fact, he delivered his strongest articulation of his vision for an America truly of, for and past the people 4 years afterwards in Philadelphia.

It was in the summer of 1936 at the Academy of Pennsylvania's Franklin Field that FDR gave his "Rendezvous with Destiny" spoken language, in which he dedicated, justified, and placed in the context of a populist patriotism the radical overhaul of the federal government he'd undertaken in his first term. In the preceding 3 years, FDR's administration had overseen the successful passage of the Social Security Human activity, the introduction of the Works Progress Administration which created thousands of federally funded jobs for engineers, artists, teachers and park rangers (to name but a few examples), codified meaningful labor rights for workers, and raised the marginal income revenue enhancement rate to 75 pct on the wealthiest earners.

In his speech, FDR condemned the tyranny of America's 20th century "economic royalists" who built "new kingdoms upon concentration of command over material things." And he made his prescription patently: "Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could entreatment just to the organized power of government." This entreatment, declared Roosevelt, was necessary to wage and win a war that was "non lone a state of war confronting desire and destitution and economical demoralization. Information technology is more that; information technology is a state of war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to salve a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the globe."

For a generation now, middle and working class folks take been stifled under the message that their lives don't merit an investment in big ideas and dramatic policies.

FDR'southward argument that government could in fact be a forcefulness for human flourishing, a champion of freedom, and a barrier confronting the tyranny of the few over the many won the day, and it largely guided both policy and pop political attitudes for the next xxx years. Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism informed non just the robust social welfare state he built, but the sense of shared purpose and cede that sustained the American effort at dwelling and away into World War 2. Outlasting both Roosevelt's presidency and his life, this political consensus fabricated possible subsequent major social reforms, main among which were the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960's, Medicare and Medicaid, and various anti-poverty programs, all part of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Lodge" rebrand of the New Deal.

What's more, it's no stretch to say that the Apollo missions culminating in the historic lunar landing in 1969 were fueled by the New Deal political philosophy. In what other collective frame of mind could the American trunk politic have supported a authorities-funded effort and then costly, ambitious, grandiose, and perhaps most crucially, non motivated by a thirst for individual profit?

Lest anyone argue otherwise, the big government policies of the 1930s through 1960s were the single most essential catalyst, engine and safeguard of America's hallowed and now-vanishing middle class. (We need only glance at the systematic dismantling of those policies to understand the cause of its destruction.) None of this is to propose that FDR, JFK, LBJ (and yes, fifty-fifty RMN) were pure bastions of wisdom and good censor. Roosevelt's progressive labor policies excluded domestic and agricultural workers (groups that tended to consist largely of black and brown Americans), and his legacy volition be forever marred by his immoral internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. JFK was lukewarm on civil rights, and even as LBJ came to champion the biggest civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, he connected to prosecute a doomed, pointless and unfathomably murderous state of war in Southeast Asia.

Highlighting the shortcomings of the New Deal presidents isn't meant to undermine the magnitude of the governmental intercession into American social and economic life during their administrations, just to dispel any thought that these men were wholly chivalrous, fully enlightened sages. If anything, their great talent was the combined ability to recognize the political tectonic shifts taking identify earlier them and the belief that America could become and remain vital only when it sought to serve a greater, collective good.

FDR was certainly no labor radical or socialist himself; rather, it was the emboldened merchandise unionists, Socialist and even Communist partisans in America who were the foundational architects of New Deal labor policies. They fabricated Roosevelt understand that, without workers, in that location would be no industry, no economic system to save.

And LBJ, who made his political start as a vocal segregationist, was no dyed-in-the wool ceremonious rights activist. On the reverse, he was compelled, if not won over, by the persistent efforts of MLK, Rosa Parks, and the thousands of other sung and unsung heroes of the movement who gave their time, energy, livelihoods and fifty-fifty lives to realize a vision of America that actually measured upwards to its founding principles.

Ultimately, what greatness America has e'er achieved hasn't been to the credit of a few individuals in the highest positions of political say-so. It has always been the result of concerted demands and shared sacrifice of the ordinary folks—young people, immigrants, nurses, teachers, workers—whose toil built and sustains this land. And those ordinary folks, who fabricated America and who go far nifty, are at present fighting the battle of a lifetime. In battling for fundamental rights to educational activity, to housing, to healthcare, to food, and to a sustainable planet, they are simply demanding the critical material conditions necessary to their, and our, collective survival.

Equally we endure the insanity and inanity of the 2022 presidential entrada, we would do well to dismiss the various pretenders determined to tell us what we tin can't do and what nosotros shouldn't fight for. Our side by side president should be 1 who embraces the essential truth that our merely gamble at claiming a meaningful, lasting American greatness depends on a vision that includes all Americans. It should exist no behemothic bound for any worthy leader of this country to sympathize and have that it's not well-nigh them, it's about united states of america.

Ajay Raju, an attorney and philanthropist, is chairman of DilworthPaxson and  founder/board chair of The Citizen.

Photo courtesy Bastian Greshake Tzovaras / Flickr

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/make-america-for-all-americans-again/

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