Franklin Roosevelt delivered his eighth State of The Union Address in January of 1941. The speech came just eight months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. War was already raging across East Asia and in Europe. It was understandable and appropriate that the president devoted most of his speech to the national security of the United States and the world-wide threat posed to democracy by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Roosevelt took the opportunity to argue that the United States should abandon the false security of the isolationist policies that emerged from World War I, and to promote the recently introduced Lend-Lease Act which was designed to provide much needed material support to the British and advance the plan to make the United States the “arsenal of democracy.”
In addition, the speech set forth the basic policy rationale for United States involvement in World War II, framed by the president in terms of the “Four Freedoms” for which the speech has become widely known. Seeking to rally the nation for the struggle ahead, he asked the American people to “look forward to a world founded on four essential human freedoms . . . a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation . . . the very antithesis of tyranny . . . .”
According to Roosevelt, the four freedoms worth fighting and dying for, the freedoms that define a humanity-affirming world order are: (i) freedom of speech, (ii) freedom of religion, (iii) “freedom from want . . . economic understandings which will secure . . . a healthy peacetime life . . . ,” and (iv) “freedom from fear . . . a world-wide reduction of armaments . . . [to the point that] . . . no nation will be able to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor . . . .”
Roosevelt’s four freedoms represent two fundamentally different concepts of freedom based on two fundamentally different concepts of human rights.
Freedom of speech and religion are protected by the First Amendment because the Founders understood that the constitutional rule of law must restrain the power of an ever-encroaching state to keep that power out of the space each of us needs to freely exercise our God-given rights to think and speak and associate and worship as we choose to do in our pursuit of happiness. The Founders understood that the essence of human freedom is the absence of government interference with our individual lives that frees us to exercise and enjoy unalienable human rights that come to us from the hand of God.
In stark contrast, freedom from want and freedom from fear, i.e., economic security and disarmament, are not protected or even recognized in the Constitution. They have nothing to do with unalienable rights or rights in any meaningful sense of the term. They are simply the generally stated policy goals of government programs said to address the specified shortcomings in our material condition and to create a dramatically modified material condition free from the shortcomings targeted by the government programs.
Progressives like Roosevelt have sought for years to justify and advance material condition modification programs by characterizing their purpose to be the protection and fulfillment of “human rights” that can only be enjoyed if the government acts to modify our material condition. For progressives, the essence of human freedom is the presence of government interference in our individual lives that permits us to exercise and enjoy “rights” that come to us from the hand of government.
The Founders of our nation held that all people are created by nature’s God possessing in equal measure certain natural rights that, taken together, entitle each person to lead the life and pursue the happiness of his own choosing, free from state tyranny and limited only by the need to respect the right of others to do the same. The rights of the people are unalienable, inseparable from their shared sacred humanity. The people’s rights exist in them because they exist as individuals. Their rights are not created by the ruler, they come from the hand of God and pre-exist both the ruler and the government.
The Founders explained that the purpose of the government they created—the only rightful purpose of any government—is to recognize, respect, and protect the pre-existing rights of the people. Faithful adherence to this purpose is the essential precondition of the government’s legitimacy and the people’s consent to its rule. It’s all there in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, the foundation of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Progressives have always rejected the Declaration’s self-evident truth that our rights exist naturally as a permanent essential characteristic of our sacred humanity. They put God aside and set the state in His place as the sole creator and only source of all our rights. They redefine what it means to have rights, reducing the concept to nothing more than a collection of ever-changing and inevitably changeable dispensations by the government of status classifications and material benefits.
Woodrow Wilson argued that the second paragraph of the Declaration “is of no consequence to us . . . .” Justice Brandeis, in a 1921 opinion, wrote that the “rights of . . . the individual must be remolded from time to time to meet the changing needs of society.” John Dewey asserted that “an individual is nothing fixed,” but only something to be molded by government through the “positive construction of favorable institutions.”
And in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt asserted that government has always been “a relation of give and take . . . rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on condition that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.”
By degrading the concept of rights, progressives inevitably degrade the concept of the individual who holds the rights. If your rights are nothing more than material benefits and status classifications created and distributed by the government, then you can be nothing more than the contingent recipient beneficiary of the government’s generosity, a currently eligible program participant. No one can have an unalienable right to the receipt of specific material benefits that depend for their distribution on the government’s ability to continue paying for them.
By redefining rights to be nothing more than government grants of status and material benefits, progressives have weakened our ability to defend our unalienable rights. The decades-long focus on material benefits has distracted and confused us. It has dulled our appreciation of the unalienable rights we have and lessened our understanding of the fundamental distinction between unalienable rights and government benefits.
Ultimately, the degrading concepts of progressive government define and drive the most serious divisions that beset our nation. The progressive mindset rejects the unifying truth of a shared sacred humanity and a sovereign people endowed with unalienable rights and relocates sovereignty in Roosevelt’s “ruler” while reducing the people to the degraded dependent status of bitterly factionalized subject supplicants battling endlessly for government grants of status and material benefits.
So let us recall Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms address, but let us do so first and foremost to revitalize our appreciation of the fundamental distinction between the unalienable rights that define our independence and the material government benefits that foster dependence.
Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public policy matters. Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. We welcome responses to the views presented here. To join the debate, please email us at [email protected].