NEXT DEAL:

Bush's Second Inaugural: Reversing FDR (Ken Masugi, January 20, 2005 , Claremont Writings)

After this prelude Bush notes his change of focus: "Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens." Echoing his opening lines about "a day of fire," he calls on Americans to light "a fire in the minds of men." The youngest citizens should note "duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers." "America has need of idealism and courage because we have essential work at home—the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty."

Then comes the most problematic—and ambitious—part of the speech, translating our world commitments to the "essential work at home." Here he sees a "broader vision of liberty" behind Lincoln's Homestead Act and FDR's Social Security Act and GI Bill of Rights. That vision leads to "reforming great institutions [e.g., Social Security] to serve the needs of our time." Moreover, "by making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear and make our society more prosperous and just and equal." [...]

Bush's speech should be read as a reply to FDR and an attempted reversal of the process he started domestically, why affirming its international presence but bypassing the United Nations FDR supported. Bush would maintain America as a force in the world and use that commitment to bring more freedom to America.

Bush appears to be aiming at a grand political realignment here, one that questions the very basis of the Progressivism that undermined American constitutionalism. What does such a realignment involve?

As America's preeminent Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa has argued (see Equality and Liberty), the American political landscape has been transformed by three critical elections that have produced realignments: the elections of Jefferson in 1800, Lincoln in 1860, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Further, Jaffa maintains, each of these realignments has been based on reinterpretations of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. For Jefferson, his election meant the Declaration's vindication of limited government. For Lincoln, the Declaration's principle of equality truly would apply to all men and self-government would be legitimated. FDR (aided by Woodrow Wilson) transformed the earlier understanding of equality by making the Declaration an instrument of class warfare and a means of overthrowing limited government.

Bush's challenge is to overthrow the FDR legacy. It appears he knows what he's doing. In his New Yorker profile of Bush advisor Karl Rove, Nicholas Lemann concludes that "Rove's Republican-majority America would be not just pre-Great Society, and not just pre-New Deal, but pre-Progressive era…. Rove's intellectual hero is James Madison."

Keeping the safety net but privatizing it is the kind of fundamental reform that could make the GOP dominant for decades.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 21, 2005 12:00 AM