Freedom From to Freedom to Government Control of Religion in Hampton, NH

 Remarks on the Warrant Article

(Again)

February, 2024

Well, here we are again.

For me, it's the third time.

Looking about this room, watching people file in, I'm guessing we have about 300 people here tonight, about 200 of whom are congregants, or friends, of the Church of the Miraculous Medal. A priest in his collar is here, and I'm betting he is connected to that congregation.

And all these folks have come to vote to in favor of recommending this warrant article which allows taxpayer funds to pay for invoices from the Church of the Miraculous Medal, Sacred Heart school: invoices for paper crowns which may used for religious pageants, or computers for streaming religious services.  At our last meeting, a year ago the Treasurer who writes the checks, Ms. Curtis, admitted she had no idea how those specific items were used, for religious ceremonies or not.

The members of the School Board have voted to endorse the warrant article, although last year they declined to answer my question about whether using taxpayer money for religious purposes bothered them. Their answer was in their votes.

Or, actually, what some of the School Board members said, by implication, is we are not sure if taxpayer dollars fund these religious icons, but we really don't care if they do. Qui Tacit Consentit--silence implies consent.

Of course, I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind tonight. What I hope is that once you have cast your ballot to invalidate the First amendment of the Bill of Rights, you might reflect on what John F. Kennedy said about not allowing trying to be a good Catholic get in the way of being a good American.

This is what John F. Kennedy had to say on this subject:

"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me—but what kind of America I believe in.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

For some years, and even now, it is possible to believe we have swung in exactly the direction JFK had hoped we would: President Biden, it turns out, is a devout Catholic and yet you almost never hear a word said about that. He is attacked for being many other things--a senile old man, a Communist, a crook, but never "a Catholic."

Nobody here tonight will argue that Sacred Heart School is not worthy of support. I myself have supported it using my own private checking account. I have no objection to supporting Sacred Heart School. I encourage others to do it. But I object to using taxpayer funds to do it.

Some have said this is all a tempest in a teapot: The amount of money whether it is $65,000 or $55,000 in a given year is a pittance compared to the overall town budget. I can only say that  single dollar of taxpayer funds is too much.

.

Is this warrant article unconstitutional?  

Of course, it is, unless you subscribe to the cynical belief that what is unconstitutional or constitutional is whatever the current presiding Supreme Court says it is. 

Justice Sotomayor has said that the current Supreme Court has said that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. She places those 5 justices in the same boat as Representative Lauren Boebert who has declared separation of church and state is nowhere in the Constitution--her own willful blindness--and she has said furthermore that if it were there, it shouldn't be, because the United States is a Christian nation and always should be. And they call her Representative Boebert for a reason: she does represent her constituents. But I hope she could never represent constituents in New Hampshire.

It's a source of sadness, to see Hampton cling to this practice of sending taxpayer monies to a church which many people in Hampton love, to a school of that church which I've heard such good things about, I was moved to dip into my own bank account for that school. 

But, I have to admit, in the end, this insistence by some members of that church, which has enriched so many lives, seems to me somehow unworthy of that church, and is profoundly disappointing.

Gazing at Gaza from New Hampshire

 

Trying to make sense of the horrific events in Gaza from my hamlet in New Hampshire, one can only admit, we haven't a clue. 

Or, perhaps, all we have are clues, but no real clarity.

On the one hand, the rampaging Hamas twenty something men, beheading families, raping, stabbing, shooting, burning can be seen in only one way: Nothing can justify that.

Gaza 2023

On the other hand, these men did not erupt simply because they are monsters. Even monsters arise from some nest.

In white bred New Hampshire, where men wear plaid shirts, blue jeans held up with belts and suspenders, trying to fathom what the complaint is become surreal. We can only imagine.

Is Gaza simply another 9/11, with fanatic men acting from some generalized frenzy of inchoate resentment and loathing, men who would be unable to actually articulate their complaint beyond, "We are occupied! We are oppressed! We live in an apartheid land!"?

Warsaw 1939

Or is Gaza a sort of Warsaw ghetto, where conditions are unlivable, with incomprehensible poverty and destitution, and the destruction is triggered by the overwhelmingly powerful oppressors?

Or is Gaza like the inner cities of the United States in 1968, which exploded in flame, looting, shooting, incomprehensible, random destruction?

All we can tell, from the shire on the Seacoast is someone had a cause, but whatever that cause, they unleashed such random, generalized and untargeted horror it is almost impossible to sympathize with them.

Warsaw Ghetto

Then again, Goebbels and Hitler claimed the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto were violent, dangerous vermin who had to be ruthlessly crushed, and the Nazis wanted everyone to see the Jews in that ghetto as deserving of their fate and an example had to be made of them.

But, that's not the way others saw the people who lived in the ghetto, at whom the Nazis were aiming their wrath:

“We continued in the direction of the city center, but travelled only a few meters, because of the intense fighting…A never ending column of miserable people shuffled by. It was the most shocking site. Women, children, old people. Deadly tired faces without a shadow of hope, eyes swollen from smoke and tears, faces covered with shoot, a picture of despair and doubt. Policemen with machine guns walked beside them.”

Listening to the Israelis today, with the words of "we will crush and destroy these Hamas animals, so they can never arise again," does sound familiar--as if you can exterminate a people, erase them, rub them out.

Well, we did come close to doing that at Wounded Knee, so maybe it's possible.

Nowhere can we find what we really want to know: What is it like for the Palestinians in Gaza and in the rest of Israel?

One professor noted that the GDP per individual in Gaza is $1,000 a year where it is $56,000 for an Israeli. Does that mean this is the average yearly income? He said the Palestinian, making 1/56 of what the Israeli makes has to pay the same prices for goods in Gaza.

What restrictions does the Palestinian have in Gaza? Is it like the Warsaw Jew in his Ghetto, unable to cross out of the ghetto only a few hours a day and that with a special pass? Or can he come and go freely, earn a living anywhere in Israel?

What is life like for the people who Hamas says it speaks for? What does it mean to say they are "occupied?"

We can watch Netflix TV shows set in Palestine and Israel, and get some sense of the issues, but we are really in the dark without real objective information.

All we can know for sure, from New Hampshire, is we have no clue what the real issues are in Gaza. 

Words Matter: The Trouble with "Reproductive Rights" and "My Body, My Choice"

 

Much as I support the last resort of abortion, I cringe every time I hear someone use that phrase, "My reproductive rights," or "It's my body: I should have control over it."

It's been a relief to see that the fight over abortion has in many states come down to a discussion of up to what week of gestation is abortion going to be legal, or, conversely, where to draw the line after which you cannot have an abortion--6 weeks, 21 weeks, etc. This suggests the American public, without ever really discussing it in an academic  way, has accepted the notion that abortion is and should be all about where you draw the line.

Plenty of folk, I suspect the majority of my fellow citizens, are willing to allow abortions, but they are repelled by infanticide. 

28 weeks

But when does the same procedure (a D&C or suction curettage) drift from being an abortion to infanticide?

 Certainly, when I saw a "salting out" procedure as  medical student at The New York Hospital, I was shaken and appalled. That 28 week fetus sure looked like a real baby to me, and it was shaking and moving like a living thing as the nurse placed it on a stainless steel tray and rushed it into a utility room off the delivery suite and we stood there watching it. Did we watch it die? Or did we simply stare at something not yet quite born? Whatever it was, it struck me on some visceral level as wrong.

The mother, on the delivery table had looked at the receding back of the nurse carrying that fetus away and she said, teary eyed, "I'm so sorry..."

She may have been sorry, but it was definitely her choice.

On the other hand,  later that week, I looked over the shoulder of an OB-GYN resident as he scraped out a 4 week conceptus during a D&C and he kept wiping his curette on a 4 inch square gauze pad, examining the red goo, and saying, "Nope, that's not it," or "Okay, that's it," because that stuff was so unformed it was difficult to be sure what it was. That looked like an abortion to me, not infanticide. 

It was the difference between potential and fully formed realization.

So, when I hear a women assert, "It's my body. I get to decide what happens to my body," I can only think: At a certain point, it's NOT just your body; it's two bodies and one of them is not you and has the right to develop and to live and breathe.

24 weeks

In all of this, I should hasten to add, I am a male, not a female, and have never been and will never be pregnant, and have never had something growing inside me which I might think is so connected to me, it IS me and cannot be separated from me in any meaningful way.

And that whole rap about, "I am in control of my own body," strikes me as a bit odd. Once you are pregnant, you actually are no longer in control. If you want to end that pregnancy, you cannot simply close your eyes and say, "End it." You need someone else to help you do that. So you are not, in that important sense, in control of your own body. Something is happening inside your body you need others to help change.

If you read Justice Harry Blackmun's actual opinion in Roe v Wade it is  striking how little law there is in it. Most of it is an examination of the problem of how to determine when something crosses over from being a potential life to being an actual life with rights of its own. Blackmun finally settles on the idea that once the fetus is capable of survival outside his mother's body, it qualifies as a distinct human life, i.e. he draws the line at "viability."

He also says he knows that line will get closer and closer to conception as medical science develops the means to sustain life using technology, but at the time Blackburn was writing, about 1973, it was about 22 weeks or thereabouts.

(He actually spends very little time on the law, the Constitution, searching for an implied right to privacy--a mumble which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg found disquieting. She never liked the Roe decision.)

Having said all that, the whole idea of "It's MINE!" or "IT'S MY BODY" or "I have a right to be in control of my own body," strikes me as unsettling and obtuse.

What this line of attack says is that the other side, the Right-to-Lifers, have no valid point at all. That those people are trying to force a woman to do something with her own body she doesn't want to do, that they are violating her body with their insistence she carry the baby to term, as if that developing fetus were nothing more than a growing tumor, or a cyst expanding inside her.

But at what point does this expanding mass inside a woman acquire "rights?" 

To say that life begins at the moment of conception, strikes me as medieval. Well, not exactly medieval, because at one point in the Middle Ages, the whole concept of conception was pretty vague, and they defined life as beginning at "quickening" when the mother first felt the fetus move.  But then later they said life began when the baby drew in its first breath. The line was for ages a moving target. The Church accepted abortion for centuries, then changed. Once the new knowledge about a sperm and an egg being united, the Church heard a different word from God.

But a two cell thing is not a human life, in my eyes. Might one day become that, but isn't now, any more than a tadpole is a frog or a caterpillar a butterfly. Conception is time zero, but there are a lot of steps which have to be successfully negotiated before you call something a human being.

The "heart beat" line, by the way, is ridiculous. You can see a contracting clump of cells within a few weeks of conception but just because it contracts does not make it a heart. Muscles contract and they are not hearts. Just because it moves fluid and makes a sound does not make it a heartbeat. Gut structures do all that. Swoosh, swoosh. You really do not have anything which qualifies as a heart or heart cells until somewhere in the vicinity of 22 weeks. 

My point is, however, that the anti abortion crowd has a point: At some point this debate is about more than the mother. To keep repeating, "This is all about ME," is to deny the other side a certain respect which, much as they may be unappetizing, they do deserve.

It's all about you, up until a certain point in pregnancy-- when and why can be argued-- but at some point it's not just about you; it's about two people, one of whom is you.

To say abortion is simply a matter of "defending women's health" is so specious as to barely merit a response: An abortion does not improve a woman's health, ordinarily. It may well relieve her of a burden, but, apart from that tiny percentage of women who would be in physical danger from carrying a child to term, it does not improve the woman's physical health to end a pregnancy. It may well be her right, if it's early enough, but if she allows the pregnancy to progress too  far, there is another set of rights involved. 

To say that holding a scalpel up to a full term baby descending the birth canal is simply a matter of "women's health" or "women's rights" loses me and, I suspect, a lot of other citizens.

Simply chanting slogans may make some folks feel empowered, but it persuades no one. 

But then again, maybe demonstrations and protests are not about persuasion. They are about display and feeling a sense of solidarity. 

Voters, citizens, however, at some point have to do some thinking.

Inexplicable: Teddy Roosevelt, Donald Trump and the Poisoned Chalice of Testosterone

 Charisma is what Teddy Roosevelt had.

Quentin Roosevelt 

Ebullience. Joy. Exuberant insistence.

"You must never forget: Theodore is six [years old]," his lifelong friend, Cecil Spring Rice, said of him when Roosevelt was in his 40's.

People gravitated toward him in any room, because he was having more fun than anyone else.

He created a fantasy world of heroes and giants and giant slayers and lived in it. He played cowboy and soldier and naturalist, explorer, big game hunter and philosopher and he was a dilletante in all these arenas.

He was a professional only in politics and writing.

He believed gentlemen ought to treat women as ladies and that ladies should produce lots of children, if they were well bred, intelligent and the right sort, which is to say, the right class of women. But he also supported the vote for women.

The best day of his life, he never tired of saying, was the day he got to play soldier and charged up San Juan hill in the Spanish American war in Cuba. 

Make Believe Soldier

When he got a letter from his son, who he had pushed to join the Army air force, the letter describing Quentin's first "kill" of a German fighter plane, Teddy replied that no matter what happened now, Quentin had had that "crowded moment" of heroism and honor and glory and that is what men, real men, were made for.

A Real Man

Teddy begged Woodrow Wilson to allow him to form a cavalry regiment, as he had done in the Spanish war, as Teddy dreamed of reliving those days of glory, but Wilson and his Secretary of War demurred, and when pushed they finally told Roosevelt he was too old and, in any case, cavalry charging across a field waving swords in the face of machine guns, artillery, tanks, barbed wire and trenches was simply suicidal, and what America needed were real soldiers, trained to fight a modern war, not men captured in arrested development playing out childhood fantasies.  Undeterred,  Teddy urged each of his sons to be the first to volunteer, the first on the front lines.

Quentin lying by his plane: 2 bullets in the brain

Quentin, of course, did not last long. His honor devolved into a shattered corpse with two bullets in his head. He was found by his airplane and given a military funeral by the Germans, who also believed in honor, but who noted he was inexperienced and brought down by a professional German pilot, who actually knew what he was doing.

Teddy loathed and fulminated against weak, soft, quiet men, and particularly Woodrow Wilson, who was cerebral and without brass balls. 

Playing Cowboy

Like Trump, Teddy had no use for shithole nations, although he would never have been so vulgar to use that phrase, but the meaning was the same. He called the autocrats of Columbia "monkeys" and he thought that allowing dark races from Southern Europe freely into America was "racial suicide."  On the other hand, Teddy respected certain Black men, who he  had met on the range when he was playing cowboy, and he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, which got him vilified in the South, where Senators speculated about this Black man rubbing his thigh under the dinner table along the thigh of Alice Roosevelt ("Princess Alice") Teddy's alluring daughter.

A Real Soldier, A  Real Man

So Teddy bloviated about how his sons were heroes, the first to answer the call of duty and honor and he pushed them all, shamelessly, to prove themselves in battle, as he had done and what did that get him?

A dead son.

Playing Frontiersman

A father, six years old until he was 60, and, ultimately a shattered boy man, whose recklessness and joy brought disaster to his family and, if there is any real thing as shame, then it should have brought shame to the man who thought he knew enough to instruct others about what a worthy life should be.

Dumb Liberalspeak: Indians not Native Americans

 Driving along, listening to Rush Limbaugh, in the old days, I used to laugh a lot. He was just so absurd, so enjoying himself, and one could only imagine what most of his audience was like--and they, clearly, could not matter.  They had to be the boy with the banjo in the holler. How many of them could there even be, people who bought what he was selling?

The actor was actually Italian

But now, with Rush in charlatan heaven, I listen to National Public Radio (NPR) and the experience is not a laugher. It's the agony of fingernails scratching on a blackboard--but, wait. I'm dating myself. Nobody has known what a blackboard is for decades. 

NPR is so relentlessly politically correct, it has become so precious, it is almost impossible to listen to without shouting, "Oh, SHUT UP!"

Most common words and phrases on NPR are, in no particular order: "The most vulnerable,"  "economically disadvantaged," and "terrified" and "challenged"--as in "vertically challenged" (short), or "intellectually challenged" as in stupid or even retarded--and "urban poor" as in Black, African American or Negro (which is vintage Martin Luther King), also "scared" and "frightened" and "scary" and "unprecedented" and the overall gestalt is that of a radio network portraying the world as a threatening place, and its listeners weak, cowering, terrified, mostly feminine, and often prepubertal, unable to defend themselves, except by whimpering and huddling helplessly together,  and hoping some benign, big hero will ride to their rescue.

But one word you will never hear on NPR (or PBS) is "Indian."

Because, you know, "Native Americans" are hurt deeply by being called "Indians" and they find it insulting, and they fall to one knee and tears roll  down their cheeks at such overt racism, and insensitive, predatory language. 

But then, I remember the irreplaceable George Carlin, who had this to say about "Indians."

"I call them Indians because that's what they are. They're Indians. There's nothing wrong with the word Indian. First of all, it's important to know that the word Indian does not derive from Columbus mistakenly believing he had reached "India." India was not even called by that name in 1492; it was known as Hindustan. More likely, the word Indian comes from Columbus's description of the people he found here. He was an Italian, and did not speak or write very good Spanish, so in his written accounts he called the Indians, "Una gente in Dios." A people in God. In Dios. Indians. It's a perfectly noble and respectable word.

So let's look at this pussified, trendy bullshit phrase, Native Americans. First of all, they're not natives. They came over the Bering land bridge from Asia, so they're not natives. There are no natives anywhere in the world. Everyone is from somewhere else. All people are refugees, immigrants, or aliens. If there were natives anywhere, they would be people who still live in the Great Rift valley in Africa where the human species arose. Everyone else is just visiting. So much for the "native" part of Native American."

So, there you have it. "Indian" is derived from indigenous people of God. What's wrong with referring to a people or peoples who are people of God?

And that whole idea of "Native" really irks me. As Carlin points out, "Natives" don't own this continent because they got here first. They did not arise from the soil in New England or the Great Plains. They likely migrated here across the Bering Straight, or in boats. They often look quite a lot like Asians, because that's where they migrated in from. But they are not native, as in originating here. They were clearly displaced, but they did not own the land any more than anyone else can "own" land. Ownership is a construction of government.

Kids Who Really Did Need Protection

Just a brief digression: there are no native people and there are no native fish or grasses or trees. Things arrive in some area of geography, and they find a climate, temperatures, food sources amenable to their genomes and so they exploit a niche and flourish. But then some other living thing arrives, a snake fish, a Norway maple tree, a rat, a snake and they are then "invasive" species which are BAD and we must eradicate.

No: Every species is an invasive species. We just like some more than others.

In New Hampshire the beautiful Norway maple with its maroon leaves are illegal: no nursery can sell them, and you cannot even transport them across state lines.

Why? Because some arborists at the University of New Hampshire, do not like maroon trees, and they testified before some legislative committee of bowling alley owners, retired postal workers and restaurateurs and they called Norway maples "an invasive species."

Norway Maple

Of course, you almost never see Norway maples growing free in the forests or parks or free spaces in New Hampshire. You see them around schools, houses and other places where people who love their lovely maroon leaves (which turn bright crimson in the Fall,) have planted them--before the legislature was enlightened by the UNH faculty of horticulture. If this is an invasive species, it is a remarkable docile, well behaved invasion, only appearing where it was invited, or in this case, deliberately planted.

Now back to the Indians.

During the COVID lockdown, the New Hampshire Democrats opened their virtual convention with a group of Native Americans pounding on drums for the longest fifteen minutes in the history of time, to remind us that they were here first and "we," an invasive species, displaced them.

Now, I'm not saying what European immigrants did to the Asian immigrants they called "Indians" or "redskins" was a blessing or a good thing. White, European Americans ruthlessly murdered not just Indians, their children and wives but also the buffalo, and all that was dreadful and movies like "Little Big Man" and "Dances with Wolves" and books like "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "Custer Died for Your Sins" have made this case.

But Indians are Indians, as far as I'm concerned and I can hardly abide NPR nowadays. I may get desperate enough to start listening to network news. At least there you have the open hucksterism of commercial news. They are selling stuff, but at least they have few pretensions they are actually dealing in the truth. "Coming up, a story which could save your life!" Or, "Miss this story and you may well seal your doom!" Or, "And now a heartwarming story from Topeka, Kansas..."

"Wait a moment, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

Now, THAT would be news.

How to Beat Charisma with Ideas

 When Amy Klobuchar visited New Hampshire during the 2016 primary season, I asked her how she intended to beat a candidate of charisma (Trump) with a campaign of policy.

She seemed stumped, momentarily, and admitted she had never been asked that question, but finally said she thought she had charisma.  

What most Democrats seem to think is they can continue to talk about policy (Women's rights to control their own bodies, i.e. to have abortions, transgender rights, gay rights, rights of the disabled, rights of minorities) and they can use this approach to beat the Trump stand in's running for Congress, Senate, state seats, and ultimately, Trump himself.

But, what I hear from so many folks, like the Black cab driver in Chicago, and a White machinist in Lawrence, Massachusetts is nothing about policy. All they talk about is how old Joe Biden is.  Or they like that "Trump talks like I do: He talks about shithole countries, and that's what they are, you know? He's just brave enough to say it."

So how do you beat that?

Canvassing door to door for Hillary Clinton, I met enough people who said they would have voted for Bernie but they would not vote for Hillary, and it was the way they said it, the looks of disgust on their faces that really rocked me.

That taught me that if you're going to beat Donald Trump, you'd better do it with something real, and you cannot appear to be parsing your words so as not to offend the gays or the Blacks or the immigrants.

But, of course, Bernie was seen as too radical by too many people.

So what to say? 

Well, history may offer some clues.

In 1910, a wealthy American Aristocrat, Theodore Roosevelt,  went to Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had battled slavers with the sword, and he spoke about the upcoming election as another battle in that effort to perpetuate the American experiment.

He began by laying down some basic principles:

1. He noted that even Lincoln had observed that in every modern industrialized society beyond subsistence farmers, a struggle between those who produced and those who profited. And Lincoln concluded that "labor is superior to capital."

2. Corporate Greed Over Common Good

Teddy, who lived in a mansion with servants, insisted that property rights must henceforth be secondary to to those of the common welfare, and society should strive to undermine "unmerited social status."

He said, "The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been to take from some men or class of men the right to enjoy power or wealth or position or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows." That meant that the corporate elite should not be able to buy votes in Congress. 

"The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation."

(Apparently, SCOTUS disagreed in Citizens United, when it said corporations have the same rights to free speech as individual citizens.)

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall not be the master of the man who made it."

That might take a crowd a moment to digest. But then:

"The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."

(Does Elizabeth Warren say anything different, when she notes that the man who owns a company which employs workers taught to read and write at public expense, who ships his goods over publicly built roads and pumps his waste into public air owes something to society?)

To this end we need to protect 

        a/ A graduated income tax

        b/ Taxes on inheritance on big fortunes

3. The Rigged System: 

With "channels of collusion"  between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government.."The people must insist on complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs...the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes" must be regulated. 

4. Ecology:

He went on, as Edmund Morris notes in his Roosevelt biography,

"The great central task of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security," is imperative.

5. Supreme Court Reform:

Essential is Supreme Court reform making the "judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions." And we need a judiciary which favors "individual over property rights." 

6. Importance of a Strong Central Government

to wit:

a/ child labor laws

b/ workmen's compensation laws

c/ safety and sanitation in the workplace

d/public scrutiny of all political campaign spending both before and after elections.

Note that even as long ago as the turn of the 20th century, in 1910,  the wealthy aristocrat, a member of the ruling class saw that campaign finance scrutiny was essential to a functioning democracy.

In 2011, President Obama made the speech available on his White House website.

I would propose that the Democratic candidate who is picked to run against Trump--or any Democrat running against any Trump Republican (a tautology) simply begin by reading the Republican Teddy Roosevelt's Osawatomie speech, and when he is accused of being a communist, an anarchist, a socialist, he can simply shrug and say, "Well, all I'm doing is quoting a famous Republican," and move on.