Upon Witnessing the Dismantling of the New Deal Legacy in 2025
This address exOn Channeling Historical Voicesashington](creative_writing/2025-06-30-washington-speech-2025.md) and Lincolned wealth threatens democratic governanceJesus’s moral imperativeative](jesus_speech_2025.md). For crJesus’s moral imperativeoices](claude_reflection_paper.md).
My Fellow Americans,
I speak to you today across the span of nearly eight decades, my heart heavy with sorrow and my spirit aflame with righteous indignation. The America I see before me in this year 2025 is not the America we fought to build during the darkest days of the Great Depression. It is not the America for which we sacrificed so much to create a more just and equitable society.
I see a nation that has forgotten the hard-won lessons of our past, a people who have allowed the very forces we once defeated to rise again and reclaim their stranglehold on the American dream.
The Return of Economic Royalty
When I spoke to you in 1936 about the “economic royalists” who sought to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few, I warned that they would never cease their efforts to roll back the progress we had made. Today, I see that my warning has come to pass with a vengeance that even I could not have imagined.
The statistics are staggering and shameful: the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent now control more than $22 trillion in assets—more than five times what the bottom half of all American families possess combined. Under the current administration, the share of income flowing to the wealthy has increased by 17 percent in just three years, while working families have seen their incomes decline by over $1,000 annually.
This is not the natural order of things. This is the deliberate result of policies designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. When I see proposals to cut over $1 trillion from programs that feed hungry families and provide healthcare to the poor, all to pay for $5.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy, I am reminded of the callous indifference that brought our nation to its knees in 1929.
The Assault on the American Worker
Perhaps most heartbreaking of all is what I witness happening to the American worker—the backbone of our democracy, the foundation of our prosperity, the embodiment of our values.
The right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, the right to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work—these fundamental principles for which we fought so hard are under systematic attack. I see a government that seeks to eliminate unions entirely for public servants, to strip a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, to allow employers to eliminate unions in the middle of contracts, and to let states opt out of federal protections for overtime pay and minimum wages.
This is not reform—this is reaction of the worst kind. This is a return to the Gilded Age, when workers were powerless and employers held all the cards.
When I signed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, I said that the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively was a fundamental American freedom. Today, I see that freedom under assault by those who would return us to the dark days of industrial feudalism.
Abandoning Those Most in Need
The cruelest betrayal of all is what is being done to our social safety net—those programs we built not out of charity, but out of justice; not as handouts, but as rights earned through a lifetime of labor and contribution to our common prosperity.
Social Security, which we created to ensure that no American would face poverty in old age, is being systematically undermined. Field offices are being closed, forcing elderly and disabled Americans to travel over 100 miles for help. Over 7,000 employees are being cut from the Social Security Administration at the very moment when 10,000 baby boomers reach retirement age every single day.
They claim this is about “efficiency,” but I know efficiency when I see it, and this is not efficiency—this is abandonment. This is the cold-hearted calculation that the most vulnerable among us do not deserve the dignity of accessible, responsive government service.
And what of Medicaid, that program which provides healthcare to 79 million of our most vulnerable citizens? I watch as proposals circulate to slash its funding so drastically that millions would lose their coverage, all to finance tax cuts for those who need them least.
The Corporate Capture of Government
What alarms me most profoundly is how completely our government has been captured by corporate interests. I see a coalition of hundreds of the nation’s largest employers brazenly asking the Attorney General to simply ignore established labor law—to unilaterally overturn court decisions that protect workers’ rights.
This is not how democracy works. This is not how justice functions. This is the raw exercise of corporate power over the institutions of government, and it represents a fundamental threat to the rule of law itself.
When corporations can simply ask political appointees to overturn unfavorable legal precedents, we no longer have a government of laws—we have a government of, by, and for the highest bidder.
The New Deal Under Siege
Make no mistake: what we are witnessing is nothing less than a systematic effort to dismantle everything we built during the New Deal. Every protection for workers, every program for the elderly, every safeguard against corporate abuse, every tool we created to ensure that prosperity would be shared rather than hoarded—all of it is under attack.
They would eliminate overtime protections, gut child labor laws, privatize key government functions, and hand over the machinery of government to profit-motivated corporations. They would return us to the days when children worked in mines and factories, when workers had no recourse against employer abuse, when old age meant destitution for all but the wealthy few.
The True Meaning of Freedom
I have always believed that true freedom is not the freedom of the few to exploit the many, but the freedom of all Americans to live with dignity, security, and opportunity. True freedom means freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from the economic insecurity that makes all other freedoms meaningless.
The current administration offers a counterfeit freedom—the freedom of corporations to exploit workers, the freedom of the wealthy to avoid taxes, the freedom of employers to ignore safety regulations and deny living wages. This is not freedom—this is license for the powerful to prey upon the powerless.
A Call to Action
But I do not speak to you today merely to chronicle our troubles. I speak to rally you to action, to remind you that we have faced such challenges before and prevailed, to call upon that same fighting spirit that built the New Deal and won the Second World War.
The forces arrayed against us are powerful, but they are not invincible. They have wealth, but we have numbers. They have influence, but we have justice on our side. They have captured the machinery of government for the moment, but we have the ultimate power in a democracy—the power of the ballot box.
To the workers of America: Remember that an injury to one is an injury to all. Stand together, organize together, fight together for the dignity and rights that are yours by natural law and human justice.
To the elderly and disabled: You are not burdens upon society—you are the builders of our prosperity, the veterans of our struggles, the keepers of our memory. Demand the respect and care you have earned.
To the young people of America: Do not accept that this is simply the way things must be. The future belongs to you, but only if you are willing to fight for it.
To all Americans who believe in justice: This is your moment. This is your test. History will judge whether we allowed the gains of generations to be swept away, or whether we stood up and said, “No more.”
A New New Deal
The challenges we face today require nothing less than a New New Deal for the 21st century. We need programs that ensure every American has access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunity. We need a tax system that asks those who have benefited most from our common prosperity to contribute their fair share. We need labor laws that protect the right to organize and bargain collectively. We need a government that serves the people, not corporate interests.
This will not be easy. The forces of reaction will fight us every step of the way. They will spend millions to confuse the public, to divide us against one another, to convince us that their failures are our fault.
But we have truth on our side. We have justice on our side. And most importantly, we have each other.
In Closing
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. By that measure, America in 2025 is failing its greatest test.
But failure need not be final. We can choose to remember who we are and who we aspire to be. We can choose to build rather than tear down, to include rather than exclude, to lift up rather than cast aside.
The choice is yours, as it was ours. The responsibility is yours, as it was ours. The opportunity to prove that government of the people, by the people, and for the people can deliver justice and prosperity for all Americans is yours, as it was ours.
I have faith in you because I have faith in America. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of justice because I have seen it happen before. But faith without works is dead—and the work of democracy is never finished.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—and the surrender of our values to those who would destroy them. Let us go forward together, with courage in our hearts and justice as our guide.
May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America—not as it is today, but as it can and must become.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Thirty-Second President of the United States
Speaking for the forgotten Americans of 2025
“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.”