FDR & the Four Freedoms

I have a friend here in FL who came from Wisconsin to do graduate work at USF where she did a PhD in anthropology. She fell in love with FL largely because of the weather & decided that she wanted very much to stay here. Naturally, she's being rewarded for that decision by alternating periods of overwork & underpay with completely inept & abusive management and unemployment. Just a few days ago, she mentioned to me that as an undergrad in Wisconsin, she took a course or 2 from a self-professed Marxian scholar named Harvey J. Kaye who convinced her of the merit of certain aspects of Marxian analysis. I checked with the library here to see if they had any of Kaye's works & found & put holds on 2. The first to arrive & the one I'm nearly finished reading now is The Fight for the Four Freedoms. I like the book & will try to tell you why but first I'll include links to 2 reviews: The Washington Post which considers the book to be little more than propaganda - with some possible justification, and Bill Moyers which is far more favorable towards Kaye's thesis which should not come as a surprise.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fight-for-the-four-freedoms-what-made-fdr-and-the-greatest-generation-truly-great-by-harvey-j-kaye/2014/05/02/f832f778-c951-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

http://billmoyers.com/episode/fighting-for-the-four-freedoms/

I'm reading the book coincidentally after just having finished Jane Meyer's Dark Money & I want to emphasize that juxtaposition in these remarks. Meyer talks about the advent of a concerted and centrally planned effort of a small number of hyper wealthy plutocrats to subvert the US democratic process to the detriment of civil rights, civil liberties, economic justice, and proponents of progressive politics in general largely by means of carefully targeted expenditures of huge sums of money. Kaye writes of a very similar counter-revolutionary backlash against the progressive policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt beginning during his presidency but accelerating in the years after his death under the presidencies of Harry Truman & Dwight Eisenhower. The similarities in goals and tactics are undeniable. We are not facing a new phenomenon with the Koch Brothers in any way except the leadership & bankrolling of such a small cadre of determined activists. The Fight for the Four Freedoms is well worth a read as a lesson of just how far the progressive movement has regressed since the days of the New Deal. Kaye explains this failure in terms of leaders lacking vision, commitment and energy. There are no surprises among the enemies of progressivism. He cites most if not all of the usual suspects from Lewis Powell to the Kock Brothers to Ronald Reagan & George W Bush but earning a special place on his Wall of Dishonor is Jimmy Carter who Kaye considers the least progressive or visionary of Democratic presidents. Kaye names Carter as the transition figure between the Democratic leadership of the post-FDR years who at least gave lip service to the principles of the New Deal and the Clintons who transformed the party into one FDR would have scarcely recognized or supported. I'll close with a 1948 quote from Max Lerner as cited by Kaye: "The creative capacity itself seems to have gone out of American political life...What strikes me hardest about all this is the terrible waste of history it involves...The worst part of it is that most liberals seem to feel hopeless unless a new Great Depression comes. Can it be true that the greatness of the American people can be evoked only in adversity, and that liberalism in a plant that flowers only among the ruins?"