This recording is very similar to this speech:
THE great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I believe the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them. I believe, again, that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes. Our opponents pay lip-loyalty to this doctrine; but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.If you go read the entire speech, and substitute "special interest lobbies" for "monopolies and trusts", the hair on the back of your neck will stand up. Srlsy.
No sane man who has been familiar with the government of this country for the last twenty years will complain that we have had too much of the rule of the majority. The trouble has been a far different one that, at many times and in many localities, there have held public office in the States and in the nation men who have, in fact, served not the whole people, but some special class or special interest. I am not thinking only of those special interests which by grosser methods, by bribery and crime, have stolen from the people. I am thinking as much of their respectable allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the whole United States, while the rights of all the people were merely an unsecured debt. Am I overstating the case? Have our political leaders always, or generally, recognized their duty to the people as anything more than a duty to disperse the mob, see that the ashes are taken away, and distribute patronage?Not in Massachusetts. Welcome to the New Revolution. It's actually an Old Revolution that's been forgotten.
I'm not quite sure what you're hearing is what he meant. If you read carefully, he's not using "people" as the plural of individual, but rather meaning the voting public as a whole. "the American people are, as a whole, capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes." doesn't mean that individuals should be free to do their own thing and learn from their mistakes, but rather that the populace should have the power, through their elective officials, to enact whatever policies they want, unfettered by restraints, constitutional or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteaughtSix, perhaps. However, I read (and heard) this as "trust the people - they're not idiots."
ReplyDeleteTeddy was a great Progressive (in the original sense of the word, meaning working from a core set of rationality). I don't see how you can convince the People by rational arguments without convincing people. He explicitly contrasts the American people with the Parisian revolutionary mob in this manner.
Perhaps this is semantics, but I expect that TR would be shocked by the notion of "collective rights" that you hear proposed today.