Essay On Conservative Republicans

One of the consistent arguments that conservative Republicans are hurling against President Obama and the Democrats this election season is that President Obama’s support for federal intervention in the economy, through such programs as his ill-fated jobs bill or the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, represents an attack on individual liberty. They claim the promotion of government intervention in the economy is somehow “un-American” and that what the president really wants is to turn the United States toward socialism. We have even heard the charge, uttered by one right-wing conservative congressman, that a significant number of liberal members of the House of Representatives are in fact “members of the Communist Party.”

The use of such tactics to discredit those who believe in government intervention in the economy is not new, of course. Franklin Roosevelt faced similar charges when he ran for re-election in 1936. Like President Obama and those in Congress who favor government programs to put

Indeed, as FDR saw it, the events of the 1920s and ‘30s made it obvious that “democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.” Viewed from this perspective, the real threat to our individual liberties came not from government, but from the “heedless self interest” of those in positions of vast wealth and power, whose greed crushed individual initiative and so restricted “the field open for free business” that private enterprise “became too private... it became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.” In such a system, the political equality the American people once enjoyed became “meaningless in the face of economic inequality,” and as such “life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of