Author’s note: In his state of the union address Wednesday, President Bush invoked the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bolster his argument for dismantling a key feature of the New Deal FDR fought to pass: Social Security. Bush further mocked FDR’s legacy with implicit comparisons of his war on Iraq, founded on lies and misleadership and frought with corruption, torture, and imperial hubris, to the struggle of the world against fascism in World War II. Since we know that Bush isn’t too concerned about being fast and loose with the truth, here is a review of an interesting book that provides an honest assessment of FDR’s legacy and our continuing battle to fulfill it.


Constitutional scholar Cass R. Sunstein’s recent book on the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an effortless read and a thoroughly argued account of the former president’s call for social justice. In our era of the ultra right’s continuous attacks on 'big government' serving as an ideological basis for dismantling beneficial social programs, Sunstein provides a thoughtful counter based in a long tradition of US legal thought. Sunstein’s point is that FDR correctly viewed the state as a tool that protects both collective and individual liberties and rights by making social benefits universal. A major drawback to Sunstein’s account of FDR’s policies and philosophy is the persistent failure to recognize the role of the working class and democratic movements behind what FDR was able to accomplish. Surely FDR’s presidency isn’t the tale of a lone figure in history implementing democratic change. This version makes a nice cowboy movie, but bad history. The labor movement, social movements, community organizations and the large and influential Communist Party were the main engines of the social policies and progress accomplished in that crucial period.

Alone, FDR was an elite, snobby, upper class patrician with little sympathy or interest in the needs and desires of working people. But with the powerful social agitation and labor organizing that called for 'jobs or wages,' for unemployment insurance and health care, housing, the right to organize unions and more during the depths of the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s behind, FDR’s administration took on a whole new character. He was given, not born with, the mantle of a people’s president. Sunstein doesn’t discuss this crucial fact.

The failure to eradicate institutional racism and national chauvinism or would prove to mean that the new programs and organizations would continue to be infested by racism and inequality. To provide one example, racists in the housing programs that emerged from World War II used their authority to move public resources to segregated white communities and to reinforce exclusion and discrimination. Facts like this suggest the revival of FDR’s vision of the universalization of social benefits of our society cannot be blocked or delimited by prejudices or institutionalize inequalities. These too have to be fought if a full realization is to happen. Sunstein’s treatment of this level of that period of history is very limited, perhaps due to his interest in promoting rather than criticizing the man and his vision.

A final failing of the book is the author’s stated belief in the possible ultimate benevolence of the government – or at least the possibility of its class neutrality. Because of this possibility, Sunstein argues, we don’t need socialism. A well-regulated capitalist system is sufficient.

This is where I part with the main ideological direction of the book. It seems clear, given the record of the far right in the last 24 years and its persistent attack on the New Deal and through that on working people, that the state cannot be made a neutral instrument that safeguards the interests of both sides of the class divide. A government that pretends it is neutral will always, inevitably in the end, promote the interests of those who it sees as the largest stakeholders in society. Under capitalism, the predominant opinion is that the largest stakeholders are the capitalists, not working people, despite the fact that they are the vast majority.

In a society with democratic forms and methods of conducting state business, it might take time to bend the state back towards the interests of the capitalists, but the resurgence of the ultra right demonstrates that without more permanent institutions that protect the working-class majority’s power such a shift backwards would always happen. A state that explicitly and thoroughly sides with working people and anti-monopoly minded sectors of the population – workers, small business, small farmers, etc. – by legal design and systemic necessity is necessary for circumventing the ultra right shenanigans we are now fighting to block.

A revival of the popular forces that compelled FDR’s turn towards social democracy – something akin to the phenomenal independent and working class movement that nearly single-handedly elected John Kerry – a the best tool for re-implementing fully FDR’s vision of the Second Bill of rights. A worker-dominated, anti-monopolistic and socialist-oriented government is the best tool for beginning to make that vision permanent.



The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. By Cass R. Sunstein New York, Basic Books, 2004.



--Martha Kramer frequently writes reviews for Political Affairs.