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Bernie Sanders injects a big idea into the presidential race
June 12
Excerpts:
Bernie Sanders’s big speech at George Washington University was billed as an address about “democratic socialism,” which naturally has shaped all the media attention. But in his address Wednesday afternoon, Sanders spent at least as much time talking about another, related ideal: economic rights.
First, let’s address what Sanders does not mean by an “economic bill of rights.” He’s not talking about what are commonly called “subsistence” rights, that is, a right to a bare economic minimum. He’s talking very much in the same spirit that President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered in his original proposal.
In his 1944 State of the Union speech, Roosevelt described his second bill of rights, economic rights, as a guarantor of “true individual freedom,” which requires “economic security and independence” (emphasis mine). For instance, Roosevelt’s second bill of rights included a call for “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.” That’s not merely saying you have a right to medical care if you’re dying; it’s a right to the resources needed to physically flourish. In Roosevelt’s telling, the full suite of economic rights are a precondition for true freedom and independence. Sanders is drawing on that tradition.
And though great strides were made in fortifying the safety net and battling poverty in the 1960s, the basic story has been that in the human rights revolution of the second half of the 20th century, the political and intellectual commitment to economic rights took a back seat.
As Moyn recounts, this was partly because of the human rights movement’s prioritization of basic freedoms and civil liberties against state violence and partly because of the triumph of neoliberal “market fundamentalism.” The result has been that, relative to human rights, far too little work has been done to push for economic rights, conceived as the baseline for a substantially more humane economic distribution as the moral alternative to what Moyn describes as the “decisive” triumph of the super rich and the “obliteration of any constraints on inequality.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/12/bernie-sanders-injects-big-idea-into-presidential-race
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