That our ancestors could ever have understood freedom as something greater than the absence of the state would probably strike protesters as inconceivable. But they did. You can see it in that famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting from 1943: “Freedom from Want,” an illustration of one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” Strange though it might sound, this is a form of freedom that pretty much requires government to get involved in the economy in order to “secure to every nation,” as Roosevelt put it, “a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants.” The idea is still enshrined today in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I doubt that a U.N. endorsement is a seal of approval that today’s right will find reassuring, however. It’s far more likely that they would see it as a confirmation of the satanic wickedness of the “Four Freedoms” and the Roosevelt presidency generally.
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