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Law and political science professor Cass Sunstein begins guest blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy with the best post I’ve yet read on that site.

Dr. Sunstein’s forthcoming book, The Second Bill of Rights seeks to burn away the fog of reverie and politics that has encloaked Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy. We celebrate victory in WWII, the end of the depression, Social Security and the New Deal as artifacts living outside time or culture.

Dr. Sunstein’s wants to draw FDR into present day discussion:

The leader of the Greatest Generation had a distinctive project, running directly from the New Deal to the war on Fascism — a project that he believed to be radically incomplete. We don’t honor him, and we don’t honor those who elected him, if we forget what that project was all about.

The outline of this project Dr. Sunstein discovers in FDR’s 1944 State of the Union speech.

He paraphrases [bold, and numbering mine]:

Recalling the New Deal, [Roosevelt] cut to the chase: The nation had “accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.”

Then he listed the relevant rights:

1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
4. 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;
5. The right of every family to a decent home;
6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
8. The right to a good education.

The things they would say would that this, or a similar, speech come from John Kerry. Forests of trees would be felled for the Conservative fulmination.

Undoubtedly, some of the criticism would be level and true. Full employment and subsidized farming are provoke harmfully unsustainable economic policy. Within this very speech they complicate and perhaps contradict the desire to alleviate “unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad”. Leave these and what’s left remains great indeed.

This list recalls the precepts of elementary biology. Life has four basic requirements: space, sustenance and shelter. Gone the horrors of the war, gone the devastation of the depression, Roosevelt deemed it most pressing to secure for all people the right to mere survival.

As it says in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

The original Bill of Rights has provided magnificently in protecting thosee latter two rights: liberty and property. But while there are homeless walking American streets, hunger wracking American bellies and untreated illness and injury wrecking American lives our Government fails us and itself.

Franklin Roosevelt believed we we could feed, house, employ and heal every American. We do an immense disservice to the man and his memory if we do not answer the question: Do I believe this was well?

I believe we can. I think most in the Democratic Party believe we can. It has become quite clear the majority of the Republican Party does not. Decide for yourself, or, for you, they will.

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