The Change We Wish to See

Grant Resick

Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired the nation to come together and institute a progressive agenda to meet the seemingly insurmountable challenges of his day. The power of FDR's rhetoric and the policies that he helped to enact lifted the nation out of the rut it was in and made the American people believe that our nation could be great again. It is time for a new generation of Americans to pick up Roosevelt's mantel of change and rediscover the power of progressive politics.

Like the days of the great depression, the challenges that America faces are grim. The world has been torn by conflict; our economy stands on the edge of a knife and the specter of global warming looms threateningly on the horizon. We as a nation must once again stand together against the rising of a bitter tide and place our faith in the knowledge that change is possible if only we are willing to meet the challenge. To do this requires a re-conceptualization of what it means to be an American.

Sadly, for many people in the United States, citizenship has become a passive term. All too often the idea of being an American is an allegiance without passion, a coincidence of birth that is bereft of any significance deeper than geographic location. If we as a nation are to have any hope of successfully confronting the challenges we face, it is essential that our definition of what it means to be an American be expanded and enriched.

It is critical that citizenship not be a static identity. Rather, it must be continually renewed by participation and active self-identification. As Gandhi put it, "we must be the change we wish to see". We cannot afford apathy and inaction any longer. As the American people have receded from the political scene the void has been filled by special interest and bitter partisanship. How can we expect to change the world for the better if we leave the instruments of power to those same forces and individuals who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo? What is needed is a progressive construction of the idea of citizenship.

Americans need to take responsibility for the maintenance of our government and communities. Although important, voting is not enough. Politicians can affect legislative change, but without the active participation of the American people special interests and political compromise will always get in the way of pure considerations of the public good. The mere act of paying attention is a major step in the right direction. Politicians are far less likely to pursue self-interested legislation (or to fail to act on important issues) if they know that the American public is carefully watching their every move. Far too often 'bad' policy is passed under the radar of public attention, so, rather than decrying the undo influences of lobbyists, citizens must become a lobby unto themselves. However this alone is insufficient.

Real change cannot come from the top down alone; it must rise up from the bottom as well. If we are to make real change in our nation, the American people must be enlisted in that effort. A new progressive notion of citizenship must include a renewed emphasis on volunteerism and community service. Quite simply, FDR passed the New Deal, but it took the hard work of the American people for his vision to become reality. Accordingly only by becoming actively involved in the functioning of our government and communities it is possible to make the change that we wish to see become a reality.

When and How?

John West

The New Deal was glorified trial and error, brainstorming at its best. The policies themselves were hardly dogmatic or ideological. But, for the first time, the government committed itself to protecting the nation's most vulnerable. The policies themselves were often inconsistent and piecemeal, but government became a home for our collective conscience. President Roosevelt united the nation under a moral imperative to protect the weakest, to ease the injustice and political trauma of the Great Depression.

The ethos of The New Deal is gone today. "The era of big government is over," President Clinton proclaimed, and, with a stroke of his pen, stripped welfare from its moral underpinnings. Social Security, one of the last tangible policies of the New Deal era, has been divorced from the spirit of Roosevelt's vision. It is little more than a check and a political punching bag.

Believing it politically necessary, the Democratic Party bought into the seemingly inexorable conservative paradigm shift in American politics. Third-way politics, triangulation, and moderation are the guiding principles of our "progressive" elected officials.

And, so, while our elected leaders were busy jumping into Grover Norquist's bathtub, New Orleans was drowning; while the balkanized and bickering political confederacy we call the progressive movement was playing for their single-issue constituencies, our environment burned.

The ethos of the New Deal has been replaced. But there is no inexorable, deterministic slant to the right, no reason why we must subjugate our values to Conventional Wisdom. We allowed the Democratic Party to kowtow to conservative values; we allowed our spines to bend. Our single-issue obsessed progressive institutions have traded their relevance for shortsighted pandering and squabbling. We have accepted the premises of the debate and forgotten that values are malleable and minds can be changed.

If we reject the conservative framework, we can replace it with our own. If we argue that government has a responsibility to the most vulnerable, we can make the debate about the methods government will use to fight injustice, rather than about how small government should become. If we take this stand, not only will we fulfill the moral imperative of the New Deal, but we can, once again, build a progressive electoral majority.

The conservatives learned this lesson well. It was Barry Goldwater's challenge to the compact of the New Deal that led to the eventual conservative framework of American politics. As George Will wrote, "it took 16 years to count the votes [of the 1964 election], and Goldwater won." We need to, and can, begin a similar shift.

The ethos of the New Deal is only more prescient and pressing today. Across the country and around the world, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and everyone else is standing around wondering what the hell happened. The cold waters of untamed capitalism and catastrophic climate change are rising ominously. It will be the most vulnerable among us who will drown first. It will be their families uprooted, the remains of their lives brought--memento by memento--from the mold and flood-water stained homes.

If the moral code of our private life is one of fairness and justice, than surly the code of our collective civic consciousness must reflect those values. This is the essence of the compact of the New Deal. We have a responsibility to the people whose lives will be destroyed if we do not act. The only question left is not should we accept the mantle of the New Deal, but when and how we will begin.

A Neo-Deal

William Alexander Organek

Since its founding, America has been a country with a political philosophy based largely on negative rights - those rights that are best served when government checks itself against interfering with its citizenry. The Founding Fathers incorporated these rights into the Constitution, and this country has always cherished the liberty of the individual. Yet, negative rights have a limiting constraint, both from a philosophical and an economic perspective: the individual is sovereign only insofar as he can exert control over whatever affects him. That is, once things are out of the control of the individual, it is up to society, through the government, to assist the individual.

When the Great Depression hit, most Americans were unprepared; worse still, when President Herbert Hoover attempted to alleviate their suffering with negative rights-based policies, they became even worse off, because the causes of their suffering were out of their control. But, under New Deal Programs such as Social Security and the WPA, the government helped restore to the people control over their lives. While these programs ran contrary to the country's negative rights philosophy, they were welcomed because they were not handouts. Instead, they were positive rights - rights which the government actively provides - which helped Americans begin to lift themselves up again.

Today, America is again at a similar crossroads: the world has simultaneously become more complicated and integrated, once more wresting control of our lives out of our hands and subjecting us to the whims of global economic and political forces. Now, for instance, economic resurgence and pollution in South and East Asia can cause economic and environmental problems at home. Our lives are no longer in our control; therefore, the government has a responsibility to intercede on our behalf, ushering in a new era of positive rights. However, the government must understand that any positive right is necessarily an abridgment of the liberty of at least some of its citizens, and that the New Deal was successful because it was not a handout; therefore, the government should seek to strike a balance between positive and negative rights.

To address globalization, the government should institute a broad-based, multi-field job retraining program that will help prepare citizens for a globalized world with skills that are resistant to global economic changes. While no government can turn back the tide of globalization, ours has a responsibility to enable its citizens to succeed in this new world. For climate change issues, the government should guarantee, as a positive right, a clean environment by supporting, both domestically and internationally, the creation of a cap-and-trade system which rewards innovation and hard work. Since the environment is a public good, it is up to the government, with the help of the free-market, to ensure that it remains clean and safe. Through simple programs that create positive rights, but are not handouts, the government can put Americans back in control of their lives. FDR offered a New Deal to all Americans; in today's world, we need a new New Deal for ourselves and the whole world.

A Modern Government

Max Rose

The world from which FDR's New Deal was borne is no more. No longer can individuals expect that American industry will bequeath them steady employment and a gateway to the consumer middle class. The positions open for those without a college education, once a bastion of America's industrial prowess, are rapidly depleting.

As global warming remains unaddressed and evermore dire, our prison population increases to frightening levels, and our educational system lags farther and farther behind our competitors, new challenges confront us all. And thus, as all Americans must adapt to these new international circumstances with all of their abounding uncertainties, dangers, and possibilities, it is imperative that the United States puts forth a new social contract; one predicated on the same New Deal responsibility of the government to protect its citizenry not only from foreign foe, but also from the inevitable evils of our society's faceless turbulence.

Today's challenges, however, mandate that the government guarantees a security net composed of education and training initiatives. A new educational system, one that fosters creative innovation, prioritizes achievement in the math and sciences, and opens the doors of our nation's universities and colleges to all who are willing, must be at the foundation of this new system. The most potent resource of the 21st century is a nation's intellectual capital. There is no policy that can shield the American worker from the vital importance of attaining an education. Likewise, there is no protectionist agenda that can halt the movement of certain middle class jobs abroad. The politics of the New Deal have the potential to inspire a new generation of politicians and activists to establish a system whereby the American people will come to expect advanced education and training from their government, and will demand it if is eliminated.

The politics of the New Deal were transformative because they were smart and pragmatic. The consensus was reached that there is both a moral and pragmatic imperative for the government to protect its citizens from the pitfalls of a free market economy. Today, that same line of thought must be employed to institute a dramatic expansion of green corps jobs initiatives. These jobs are profound in their capacity to holistically address many dire challenges facing us today, most notably global warming, public safety, gross societal inequities, and the consequences of our globalizing economy.

The 21st century social compact must call on the government to move beyond petty political diatribes, and acknowledge that the "inescapable network of mutuality" propounded by Martin Luther King Jr. from his Birmingham City jail cell 45 years ago rings truer every day. Our communities, cities, states, and world will become safer and more bountiful with every individual that enters our university's doors rather than our penitentiaries, and our Earth will become healthier with every individual that moves from the unemployment line to the green jobs training center. Especially with Social Security, the New Deal set the precedent for acknowledging this deep interconnectedness. We must build upon this notion, and embrace the universal benefits of a modern government that is dedicated to preparing and training all of its citizens for a world more competitive, unpredictable, and impermanent than ever before.