James Holland

One of them is freedom from want.

It's a family around the Thanksgiving Day table with a huge turkey, plump-breasted turkey coming on and all the rest of it.

It's such a kind of contrast to the bleakness and repression of the societies behind the Iron Curtain, of their kind of monochrome tower blocks and Stasi and KGB and all the rest of it.

There is this sort of mainstream consciousness, I think, that the Soviet communism is repressive and browbeating,

um as nazism and fascism i'm very much a new enemy and of course you know this is the period in which you know in the 50s and late 40s and 50s that the cold war is underway you know you have the berlin blockade um with the berlin airlift liberating that in 1948 to 1949 then you have the korean war um

There's other post-war settlements that are ratified in 1945.

And in 1947, there's a general agreement on tariffs and trade, the GATT, which bans barriers stymieing international trade, signed by 23 democratic countries.

And of course, the GATT is renamed the World Trade Organization in 1995, which is in many ways becomes the undoing of the modern United States with that entry of China into the WTO in 1999.

Yeah, and it's not that FDR and Truman aren't without flaws.

And one has to remember that FDR had a massive role in the interment of 120,000

Yeah, these Americans, for example, Executive Order 9066 in February 1942.

But I think it is also true that both are compelled by a profound sense of duty and dedication to prosperous global democracy.

And the hallmarks are obviously capitalism and free trade, low tariffs and good neighborliness and profound sense of Christian morals.

We live in a much more secular times these days, but they have a moral backbone.

And I would say both of them, for all the Machiavellian ruthlessness of Roosevelt, he still is compelled by that moral backbone.

And so too is Truman.

And, you know, these are fundamentally, profoundly good people, I think.

And, you know, those lessons need to be learned because, you know, here we are.

You know, in the first years of this century, we had economic crisis caused by war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then we had the 2008 financial crisis, again, completely self-imposed, just as the Wall Street crash was in 1929.