I hard fought rights up to 2021 are being erased by Trump and TRUMPGOP regime.
We must rise up and let our Legislators know, we want the restoration of all our rights. We’re entitled to a good education, outstanding Universities, research and development, healthcare and the statistical analysis that marks our progress , plus a living wage that allows us to afford our own homes.
The history of our Rights, as written, by historian, Heather Cox Richardson. She started with the Civil War and I chose to start with FDR.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied Americans to oppose fascism by emphasizing the principles that would, he said, provide “the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” He called for “the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”
The gulf between the ideals of democracy and the reality of life in the segregated U.S. during and after World War II galvanized Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans to demand equality. They successfully challenged school segregation, racial housing restrictions, state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and anti-Chinese laws based in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
As the military fought fascism in Europe, schools and churches at home emphasized that democracy depended on acceptance of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Rallies championed diversity, and government-sponsored films warned Americans not to succumb to fascist propaganda. Posters trumpeted slogans such as “Catholics–Protestants–Jews…Working Side By Side…in War and Peace!” and reminded Americans not to “infect” their children “with racial and religious hate.” In a 1947 radio show, Superman fought a Ku Klux Klan–like gang trying to keep foreign-born players off high school sports teams, and in 1949, comic book artist Wayne Boring portrayed him on a poster urging a group of American schoolchildren to defend their classmates from “un-American” attacks on their race, religion, or ethnicity.
In the 1950s those ideas had produced a “liberal consensus,” shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike. The government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, and promote infrastructure: in other words, it should reflect democratic values. But when the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Educationdecision tied the federal government not just to economic equality for white Americans, but also to civil rights, opponents of the liberal consensus resurrected the same argument former Confederates had used after the Civil War to couch their ideology in economic, rather than racial, rhetoric.
Rejecting the idea of equality, they argued that the government’s effort to protect civil rights was tantamount to socialism because it took tax dollars from hardworking white men to provide benefits for undeserving Black people who wanted a handout. This idea gained momentum after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and gradually came to include people of color and women who demanded equality. In 1980, Ronald Reagan rode the idea that the liberal consensus was simply a way to redistribute wealth to undeserving Americans of color or women—or both, like Reagan’s “welfare queen”—into the White House.
As more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans deflected attention from the hollowing out of the middle class by demonizing racial, religious, and gender minorities. By 2012 they were talking of “makers” and “takers,” and by 2016 they were feeding voters ideas and images straight out of the nation’s white supremacist past.
By 2021 the idea that some people are better than others and have a right to rule—the same ideology that had driven the Confederates—created a mob determined to end American democracy. The rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election believed they were writing a new history of the United States, one that brought to life the hierarchical version of American history claimed by the Confederates before them. On that day, one of the rioters accomplished what the southern troops during the Civil War had never been able to: he carried the Confederate battle flag into the United States Capitol.