“Freedom from want and fear, by contrast, are not inalienable rights guaranteed by the constitution. But those two additional proposed freedoms feel like they modernize the goals of a democracy, define it away from broad open-ended self-determination—which, if no one has noticed, is not working out very well—and give some structure to the positive space we could or should be swimming toward…
“Now, it feels like we almost live in a funhouse-mirror version of the worst future timeline that FDR could only imagine in 1941. Sometime between 1941 and now, the idea of “freedom from want” became not only no longer a priority, but antithetical to how things work around here. “Want” drives the vicious cycle of our existence. We are set up to think we are supposed to solve most of our problems by want—you have to want it even just to eat decent food; you have to want it to have physical health; you have to want it to have a good education and establish yourself beyond a sixth-grade reading level; you have to want it to have a stable career, and want it for that career to be stable enough to support a family. You have to want it to have shelter and basic dignity. We’ve baked want so deeply into the American experience that we now fully believe that wanting is supposed to be part of the “””fun,””” that literally there is no “deserve” without “want.””