Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Leadership
& Decision-Making
“Roosevelt’s or Reagan’s America?
A Time for Choosing”
John Marini
University of Nevada, Reno
John Marini a professor
of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is a graduate of San Jose State University
and earned his Ph.D. in government at the Claremont Graduate School. He has also taught at
Agnes Scott College, Ohio University and the University of Dallas. He is on the board of
directors of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political
Philosophy and a member of the Nevada Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission. Dr. Marini is the author or co-author of several books, including The
Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science; The Politics of Budget Control:
Congress, the Presidency, and the Growth of the Administrative State;
and The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College
on January 29, 2007, during a seminar on the topic, “America’s
Entitlement Society,” co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and
the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series.
On January 11, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the text of
his Annual Message to Congress. Under normal conditions, he would have delivered the
message in person that evening at the Capitol. But he was recovering from the flu, and his
doctor advised him not to leave the White House. So he delivered it as a fireside chat to
the American people. It has been called the greatest speech of the century by Cass
Sunstein, a prominent liberal law professor at the University of Chicago. It is an
important speech because it is probably the most far-reaching attempt by an American
president to legitimize the administrative or welfare state, based on the idea that
government must guarantee social and economic security for all.
Thirty-seven years later, in his First Inaugural Address on January 20,
1981, President Ronald Reagan would deny that government could provide such a broad
guarantee of security in a manner consistent with the protection of American liberty.
Indeed, he would insist that bureaucratic government had become a danger to the survival
of our freedom. In looking at the differences between the views of Roosevelt and Reagan,
we can discern the distinction between a constitutional regime—in which the power of
government is limited so as to enable the people to rule—and an administrative state,
which presupposes the rule of a bureaucratic or intellectual elite.
FDR’s New Bill of Rights
When Roosevelt spoke to the nation that January night, he was looking
beyond the end of World War II. In recent years, he said,
Americans have joined with like-minded people in order to defend
ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule. But I do not
think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and
our Allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this
war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.
And what was this “sacred obligation?” Roosevelt continued:
The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each
nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word:
Security. And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by
aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a
family of Nations.
Government has a sacred duty, in other words, to provide security as a
fundamental human right.
Roosevelt was well aware that this was a departure from the traditional
understanding of the role of American government:
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under
the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free
speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and
seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our Nation has grown in size and
stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights
proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a
clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic
security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are
hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. In our day these
economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a
second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be
established for all…
Among these new rights, Roosevelt said, are “The right to a useful
and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The
right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of
every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family
a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an
atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or
abroad; 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.”
The Constitution had established a limited government which presupposed
an autonomous civil society and a free economy. But such freedom had led inevitably to
social inequality, which in Roosevelt’s view had made Americans insecure in a way
that was unacceptable. He had lost faith in the older constitutional principle of limited
government. Rather, he thought that the protection of political rights—or of social
and economic liberty, exercised by individuals unregulated by government—had made it
impossible to establish a foundation for social justice, i.e., what he called “equality
in the pursuit of happiness.” He assumed that a fundamental tension exists between
equality and liberty that can only be resolved by a powerful, even unlimited,
administrative or welfare state.
Rejecting the Founders
The American founders, by contrast, thought that equality and liberty
were perfectly compatible—indeed, that they were opposite sides of the same coin. The
principle of natural equality had been set forth in the Declaration of Independence, which
clearly spelled out the way in which all human beings are the same: They are equally
endowed with natural and inalienable rights. But along with this similarity, the Founders
knew that differences are sown into human nature: some people are smarter, some are
stronger, some are more beautiful, some are musically inclined while others have a
predilection for business, etc. Political equality, which requires the protection of
individual rights, produces social inequality (or unequal achievement) precisely because
of these unequal natural faculties. The preservation of freedom, therefore, in the
Founders’ view, requires a defense of private property, understood in terms of the
protection of the individual citizen’s rights of conscience, opinion, self-interest
and labor. They thought that a constitutional order, by separating church and state,
government and civil society, and the public and private sphere, makes it possible to
reconcile equality and liberty in a reasonable way that is compatible with the nature of
man. Thus the Constitution limits the power of government to the protection of natural
rights.
Roosevelt and his fellow progressives rejected the idea of natural
differences between men, insisting that those differences arise only out of social and
economic inequality. As a result, they redefined the idea of freedom, divorcing it from
the idea of individual rights and identifying it instead with the idea of security. It was
in the cause of this new understanding of freedom that America’s constitutional form
of limited government was gradually replaced—beginning with the New Deal and
culminating in the late 1960s and 1970s—by an administrative or welfare state.
Roosevelt had made it clear, even before he was elected president, that
government had a new and different role to play in American life than that assigned to it
by the Constitution. In an October 1932 radio address, he stated: “…I have…described
the spirit of my program as a ‘new deal,’ which is plain English for a changed
concept of the duty and responsibility of Government toward economic life.” In his
view, selfish behavior on the part of individuals and corporations must give way to
rational social action informed by a benevolent government and the organized intelligence
of the bureaucracy. Consequently, the role of government was no longer the protection of
the natural or political rights of individuals. The old constitutional distinction between
government and society—or between the public and private spheres—as the ground
of liberalism and a bulwark against political tyranny had created, in Roosevelt’s
view, economic tyranny. To solve this, government itself would become a tool of
benevolence working on behalf of the people.
This redefinition of the role of government carried with it a new
understanding of the role of the American people. In Roosevelt’s Commonwealth Club
address of 1932, he said:
The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of government in
terms of a contract…Under such a contract, rulers were accorded power, and the people
consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of
statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and
growing social order. New conditions impose new requirements upon government and those who
conduct government.
But this idea of a compact between government and the people is contrary
to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Indeed, what links the
Declaration and the Constitution is the idea of the people as autonomous and sovereign,
and government as the people’s creation and servant. Jefferson, in the Declaration,
clearly presented the relationship in this way: “to secure these [inalienable]
rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed…” Similarly, the Constitution begins by institutionalizing the
authority of the people: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more
perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and
our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
In Roosevelt’s reinterpretation, on the other hand, government
determines the conditions of social compact, thereby diminishing not only the authority of
the Constitution but undermining the effective sovereignty of the people.
Reagan’s Attempt to Turn the Tide
Ronald Reagan addressed this problem of
sovereignty at some length in his First Inaugural, in which he observed famously: “In
this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the
problem.” He was speaking specifically of the deep economic ills that plagued
the nation at the time of his election. But he was also speaking about the growing power
of a bureaucratic and intellectual elite. This elite, he argued, was undermining the
capacity of the people to control what had become, in effect, an unelected government.
Thus it was undermining self-government itself.
The perceived failure of the U.S. economy during the Great Depression
had provided the occasion for expanding the role of the federal government in
administering the private sector. Reagan insisted in 1981 that government had proved
itself incapable of solving the problems of the economy or of society. As for the
relationship between the people and the government, Reagan did not view it, as Roosevelt
had, in terms of the people consenting to the government on the condition that government
grant them certain rights. Rather, he insisted:
We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And
this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except
that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government,
which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.
In Reagan’s view it was the individual, not government, who was to
be credited with producing the things of greatest value in America:
If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so
much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed
the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done
before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured
here than in any other place on Earth.
And it was the lack of trust in the people which posed the greatest
danger to freedom:
…we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too
complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to
government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing
himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
Reagan had been long convinced that the continued growth of the
bureaucratic state could lead to the loss of freedom. In his famous 1964 speech, “A
Time for Choosing,” delivered on behalf of Barry Goldwater, he had said:
…it doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private
property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold
the deed or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of
life and death over that business or property? Such machinery already exists. The
government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute.
Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place.
Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and
freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this
moment.
Reagan made it clear that centralized control of the economy and society
by the federal government could not be accomplished without undermining individual rights
and establishing coercive and despotic control.
…“the full power of centralized government” was the very
thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t
control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people.
And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to
achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its
legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private
sector of the economy.
Over the next 15 years, Reagan succeeded in mobilizing a powerful
sentiment against the excesses of big government. In doing so, he revived the debate over
the importance of limited government for the preservation of a free society. And his theme
would remain constant throughout his presidency. In his final State of the Union message,
Reagan proclaimed “that the most exciting revolution ever known to humankind began
with three simple words: ‘We the People,’ the revolutionary notion that the
people grant government its rights, and not the other way around.” And in his
Farewell Address to the nation, he said: “Ours was the first revolution in the
history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little
words: ‘We the People.’” He never wavered in his insistence that modern
government had become a problem, primarily because it sought to replace the people as
central to the American constitutional order.
Like the Founders, Reagan understood human nature to be unchanging—and
thus tyranny, like selfishness, to be a problem coeval with human life. Experience had
taught the Founders to regard those who govern with the same degree of suspicion as those
who are governed—equally subject to selfish or tyrannical opinions, passions, and
interests. Consequently, they did not attempt to mandate the good society or social
justice by legislation, because they doubted that it was humanly possible to do so. Rather
they attempted to create a free society, in which the people themselves could determine
the conditions necessary for the good life. By establishing a constitutional government of
limited power, they placed their trust in the people.
Up or Down, Not Right or Left
The political debate in America today is often portrayed as being
between progressives (or the political left) and reactionaries (or the political right),
the former working for change on behalf of a glorious future and the latter resisting that
change. Reagan denied these labels because they are based on the idea that human nature
can be transformed such that government can bring about a perfect society. In his 1964
speech, he noted:
You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or
right. Well I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There
is only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual
freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And
regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our
freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.
In light of the differences between the ideas and policies of Roosevelt
and Reagan, it is not surprising that political debates today are so bitter. Indeed, they
resemble the religious quarrels that once convulsed western society. The progressive
defenders of the bureaucratic state see government as the source of benevolence, the moral
embodiment of the collective desire to bring about social justice as a practical reality.
They believe that only mean-spirited reactionaries can object to a government whose
purpose is to bring about this good end. Defenders of the older constitutionalism,
meanwhile, see the bureaucratic state as increasingly tyrannical and destructive of
inalienable rights.
Ironically, the American regime was the first to solve the problem of
religion in politics. Religion, too, had sought to establish the just or good society—the
city of God—upon earth. But as the Founders knew, this attempt had simply led to
various forms of clerical tyranny. Under the American Constitution, individuals would have
religious liberty but churches would not have the power to enforce their claims on behalf
of the good life. Today, with the replacement of limited government constitutionalism by
an administrative state, we see the emergence of a new form of elite, seeking to establish
a new form of perfect justice. But as the Founders and Reagan understood, in the absence
of angels governing men, or men becoming angels, limited government remains the most
reasonable and just form of human government.
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