80 years ago today, a man died. He has long been a hero of mine, though I know him only from history books. He was a disabled man who, at the age of 39, began experiencing symptoms of a paralytic illness that would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. At the age of 40, something similar happened to me. We both had the blessing of little dogs by our side. We are both Democrats. Our similarities end there.
This man would go on to become one of the most consequential men in human history. He was the 32nd President of the United States. He would, in fact, serve in that role longer than anyone in the history of our country. But his legacy is not limited to longevity. He reimagined the role of government by bringing to it moral clarity: the measure of a nation, as he saw it, was not its wealth, or its military strength, its “ideology” or its religious faith, or even its territorial holdings, but how it treated the vulnerable. He enacted what he called a “New Deal,” which was built on his philosophy that government had a responsibility to do more than stand by while its citizens suffered, and, as if this needed to be stated, that government should never be the cause of their suffering.
He gave us small ‘s’ social security by giving us big ‘s’ Social Security, so that when you retired or if you were born or became disabled and could no longer work you did not fall into poverty. Years later, like-minded politicians would expand on this social contract with Americans and give us Medicare and Medicaid, because access to healthcare is a basic human right. More than any other man or woman in modern American history, he defined what it means to be a Progressive by defining ‘progress’ in his second inaugural address:
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Today is the 82nd day of Donald Trump’s second presidency. In that relatively short amount of time, his administration has launched an all-out assault on the very idea of our national responsibility to the less fortunate amongst us and around the world, and masqueraded this cruelty as “efficiency” and “fiscal responsibility.” To add insult to injury, he’s asked the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to spearhead this assault, someone whose personal circumstances make it impossible for him to understand what “need” is or to have empathy and compassion for those who struggle to make ends meet. Together, these two billionaires with a b are redefining human dignity, reducing it to a fiscal transaction rather than something that is innate, immutable, and insured by our constitution.
Budgets, whether the one I set myself each month or the one the administration is pushing through congress with the help of Trump’s Republican lackeys and sycophantic boot-lickers there, are inherently an exposition of one’s priorities. The Republican-backed budget currently making its way to the president’s desk slashes over a trillion with a t dollars from social spending programs over the next decade. This speaks volumes about what Trump and Republicans think is important.
I began this post talking about a hero, a president, a man in a wheelchair with a little dog whom he loved dearly. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt or FDR. His dog’s name was Fala.
It is impossible to imagine Franklin Roosevelt responding to rising poverty in America by taking a chain saw – I’d say ‘figuratively,’ but we all saw Musk with an actual chain saw on stage clowning for cameras – to programs designed to prevent it. FDR spelled out a test for our progress as a country.
We are failing that test.