One of the key insights driving the creation of the modern welfare state was an adaptation of the older republican idea that self-governing government could not sustain without economic security and independence. According to the original concept, owning a farm and managing a house is to secure your economic position and cultivate civic habits.
The closing of borders, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the transition to salaried labor for most workers have forced Americans to rethink the terms of the community. free peace. Populism – the insurgency movement that emerged in the late 19th century to place the national economic life under the democratic control of “common people” – was an attempt to renegotiate the terms of by the US. The more elite-led Radical Movement, which emerged after the collapse of the Populist Party, was another movement.
For Populists, freedom means universal control over economic decision-making. For Radicals like Walter Lippmann, that meant safety from economic necessity. Lippmann writes: “Instead of hanging human dignity on a single assumption of autonomy, you insist that human dignity requires a standard of living.” The government is then judged according to whether it is producing “a certain minimum of health, decent housing, material needs, education, freedom, pleasure, beauty, rather than sacrificing all of this, it vibrates with the self-centered views floating around in men’s minds.”
You can think of the New Deal, in this context, as an attempt to synthesize Populist and Radical conceptions of freedom. Organized through industrial unions, workers have the right to shape their collective economic destiny and, conversely, use the administrative capacity of the state to secure their economic foothold and bring freedom from privation and dependence on the arbitrary power of private owners.
For employers, of course, this kind of authoritarian power is just another name for “liberal,” and most conservatives oppose social insurance and the welfare state rooted in their belief that believes that this expansion of state power is a threat to the sanctity of the market and to the freedom of action of individuals within it.
