Government can do more than wage war and collect taxes
In the heart of DuPage County, in the shadow of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway, Illinois Republican heavyweight Jim Ryan is using "The Jim Ryan Symposium on Public Affairs" to shed light on one of the greatest speeches by one of 20th-century America's greatest presidents.
Nope. Not that guy.
Ryan's symposium Thursday at Benedictine University in Lisle will focus on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the big-government Democrat who brought us the "New Deal."
The lecture by University of Chicago law professor and author Cass R. Sunstein asks, "Does America Need a Second Bill of Rights?" -- a concept FDR pushed in his Jan. 11, 1944, State of the Union address.
"Essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations," Roosevelt said, proclaiming all Americans had a right to decent wages, a safe home, adequate medical care, a good education and protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment. "Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want."
How did we get from FDR talking about the government's role in bringing social and economic rights to the people to this fear of the federal government as a jack-booted thug, or at least an unnecessary burden, that we must expel from our lives?
"That's a complicated one. Part of it was the Reagan revolution," Sunstein says during our e-mail exchange. "Reagan was in many ways a great president, but he also had a much-too-simple view of the relationship between government and society. Those simple views, captured in some attractive cliches, are too much with us today."
Republican Ryan agrees.
"I'm a Republican, but I think some of the notions about what Republicans stand for are simplistic," Ryan says. "I don't think we should bash government. It's our government. We are a community of self-governing equals. It's our government. … It's there to help us."
Ryan, who read Sunstein's "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution & Why We Need It More Than Ever," says Americans need to take care of their fellow Americans.
"People want to be secure; not only from foreign enemies, but they want to be secure at home," Ryan argues. "There's a floor below which we should not allow Americans to go.
"When people are homeless, when people are hungry or when people are without health care … that's wrong," says Ryan, the former Illinois attorney general who speaks often of "human dignity and the importance of every human life."
Mere mention of FDR, the New Deal or government involvement in health care rattles folks who bray "Socialism!" any time the federal government does anything aside from waging wars and launching the occasional space mission. That's not what FDR was about, say Sunstein and Ryan.
"FDR was concerned not with inequality, but with extreme deprivation," Sunstein points out. "He didn't think everyone should have the same amount of money. Instead he thought that everyone should have a good education -- and decent food and shelter -- and basic opportunity. That's a far more modest agenda than 'equality.' "
The free lecture runs from 6:30 until 8 p.m. Thursday at Scholl Hall Room 101 at Benedictine University. To make a reservation, phone (630) 829-6460 or log onto www.ben.edu/cci.
"Government exists to help people," Ryan says. "If government can't do that, it doesn't stand for much."
Rekindling FDR's agenda makes sense for today's America.
"I'm pretty optimistic," Sunstein says. "I think we're rethinking fundamental questions these days -- and that we're likely to end up with something good, and possibly even great."