Earlier ideas can influence later ideas - Essay Example

It is unavoidable that such a state of affairs will exist because no one has a monopoly of ideas and very few ideas are truly original. In most instances, later ideas build on earlier ideas, expound on them, extend their boundaries, and explicate further obscure concepts. However, many ideas are simple in the sense they are self-evident but still they require constant repetition in some cases because people have a disquieting tendency to take these ideas for granted. This is what the paper will discuss; it is about how democracy and freedom are all intertwined by a series of ideas expressed over a period of time and how these ideas are all brought together by their similarities and close connections.

Each idea seems to build on a previous idea and this paper attempts to show how these are all interconnected to each other. History travels in a one-way deterministic street and analysis will reveal the connections. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third inaugural speech on January 20, 1941 contained the four basic freedoms he deemed important and these freedoms were later found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Both the article of Robert Kaplan and the second inaugural speech of Pres.

Obama also relate to the two documents mentioned earlier, but not with each other. Discussion President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first came to power in 1933 during the height of the Great Depression. As a visionary president, he undertook massive reforms in government, big industry, and other sectors of American society to help steer it towards the so-called 3Rs which are relief for the poor masses and millions of jobless workers, quick recovery for the weakened economy in the shortest time possible using the government’s stimulus funds (the concept of Obama’s stimulus funds for the Great Recession came from FDR’s original idea to pump-prime the economy) and massive reforms needed in the financial system as a whole by strong government intervention to avert a similar catastrophic failure in the future.

Roosevelt crafted these policies and passed them through Congress to achieve his aims for the 3Rs and called it the New Deal to sell it to the American electorate despite some opposition. Many of these government programs are still in place without many people knowing what these are. Key pieces of legislation in the New Deal era included laws for the creation of the Social Security System (SSS), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which is now the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and laws that guaranteed a minimum living wage and the maximum working hours for workers (Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938) and other social safety nets.

Roosevelt got re-elected three more times and his term saw the outbreak of Second World War. Having seen the despair of the Great Depression, he is now confronted with the widespread desperation and devastation associated with a truly global war and he saw it fit to declare in his Third Inaugural address to specifically mention these four freedoms which he considered to be very vital to humankind in general. The “Four Freedoms” speech centered on the freedom of speech, of religion, from want, and lastly, from fear (Edsitement 1).

The very first freedom he mentioned, freedom of