This diary is meant to spur some discussion on what being progressive means. For the sake of argument, I would like most people to assume that being a progressive includes political economy, because before neoclassical/neoliberalism we thought in terms of political economy, not politics on one hand and economics on the other. It was only once economics was firmly taken out of the realm of moral philosophy from which it original sprang and declared a science not unlike physics was “political economy” torn asunder.
So, I’ve chosen FDR as our bench mark because I think it’s not very controversial to claim that he was a progressive.
“FDR’s Second Bill of Rights was, it seems to me, his most mature expression of his increasingly progressive views. If he had lived longer, he would have pressed for its adoption. As a reminder:
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“The Second Bill of Rights is a list of rights that was proposed by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944.[1] In his address, Roosevelt suggested that the nation had come to recognize and should now implement, a second "bill of rights." Roosevelt's argument was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." His remedy was to declare an "economic bill of rights" to guarantee eight specific rights: Employment, Food, clothing, and leisure with enough income to support them, Farmers' rights to a fair income, Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, Housing, Medical care, Social security, Education.
Roosevelt stated that having such rights would guarantee American security, and that the US's place in the world depended upon how far the rights had been carried into practice…..