Modern Progressives are becoming more open about their aims. What else would prompt an organization claiming to seek “pragmatic solutions” to publish a paper that calls for the creation of “a truly universal and comprehensive social welfare state” little more than a decade after President Clinton promised “the end of welfare as we know it?”
The New America Foundation has done just that with Steven Attwell’s Freedom from Fear. Attwell has blogged on Roosevelt’s second bill of rights, which undermines the original.
Roosevelt’s speech assumed that we had secured the rights to free speech even during election season or on the internet, to life even if it is cheaper for us to die, and to warrantless searches even at the airport. Except that most Americans in 1944 did not have televisions, let alone the Internet; did not have access to chemotherapy; and did not fly across the world. In the 66 years since Roosevelt’s speech against individualism, the world has changed because real freedom has expanded — not freedom from want or freedom from fear, but freedom from overweening bureaucrats who claim to know better.
