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Daniel Riemer Published 1:54 p.m. CT Feb. 3, 2017 | Updated 6:13 p.m. CT Feb. 3, 2017

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security bill in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 14, 1935.(Photo: Associated Press)

A fortune cookie my mom recently opened contained this advice: If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.

The message, as Thomas Jefferson would say, is self-evident. Some may think it trite. But nothing better expresses the predicament and the challenge that Democrats across Wisconsin and our nation now face.

If we do not change the ideas and strategy that weve been using since 2008, we Democrats are going to end up where were heading: on the downward path of losing influence and losing elections.

Democrats urgently need to change direction. The starting point, to use the title of a famous movie, is to go back to the future, back to our roots in the New Deal.

By returning to the principles of the New Deal, principles we have mistakenly ignored, we can recapture and revise a core set of ideas about governments role about what government should do, and not do that will appeal overwhelmingly to Wisconsins voters and the American electorate.

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Based on the enormous appeal of what Democrats will then stand for, we can recruit candidates in every election, win more legislative seats and governorships, and eventually recapture Congress and the presidency.

President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers including our own Progressive Republican Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. believed that government should provide what I call a Foundation for Freedom.

It is governments role, they believed, to guarantee economic security and confidence, promote equal opportunity in health and education, and make sure that the market is free.

Based on these principles, Roosevelt and his New Deal allies largely eliminated the welfare system created by his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover. In place of welfare, FDR and his allies put in place the opportunity for the unemployed to work in wage-paying jobs, for programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, until they could be absorbed into what FDR called a rising tide of private employment.

FDR promoted economic security in other ways. He championed and signed laws that allowed collective bargaining, set a minimum wage and created Social Security. He favored national health insurance.

Roosevelt and the New Dealers also worked to restore Americas collapsed economy. They enacted legislation to protect the environment, workers, consumers and investors.

FDR and the New Deal were not perfect. They made mistakes, and they could not predict the future. They could never have imagined that trade with China, Mexico and Europe combined with amazing advances in technology would wipe out millions of manufacturing jobs, as well as both destroy and create millions of other jobs.

Democrats today should again embrace the core values and aims that FDR and the New Deal pursued, adapting those values and aims to todays conditions and the futures challenges. We should again envision government as a Foundation for Freedom. That foundation should rest on three pillars. First, protect us from true dangers, whether foreign or domestic; second, connect individuals to work, decent incomes, health care and education; and third, respect the free market by making sure the market is freed from cheaters who dump on the environment, workers, consumers and investors. Thats what classical economic thinkers, such as Adam Smith, really meant by free markets.

Democrats also should make clear that, except for performing these essential functions of government and protecting our rights, we want government to do nothing. Since Thomas Jefferson, Democrats have been the party of limited government. Since FDR and the New Deal, Democrats have been the party of economic and political freedom. We need to make it clear through word and deed that we, todays Democrats, are again the party of freedom.

To this end, I propose that Democrats in Wisconsin and the U.S. should promote these five specific policies as we build a New Foundation of Freedom:

First, guarantee economic security, by growing short-term jobs for adults who cannot easily find full-time work, raising the minimum wage, strengthening the effective Earned Income Tax Credit, restoring and strengthening collective bargaining, and for those who truly cannot work because of a severe disability or seniors retired on Social Security providing payments that lift them out of poverty.

Second, provide equal opportunity in health and education, by making sure that all citizens have excellent and affordable health insurance, requiring equal funding for K-12 students at good public schools, and in time allowing qualified high school graduates to attend, tuition-free, a public university, such as Wisconsins technical colleges and world-class public universities.

Third, restore balance to the tax system with cuts to property, sales and income taxes for working families and the middle class, while requiring the super-wealthy and those who live on loopholes to pay their fair share.

Fourth, truly free the market, by prohibiting once and for all the kind of dumping on the environment, mistreatment of workers and defrauding of consumers and investors that lets cheating firms steal an advantage from reputable and law-abiding businesses. We should further level the playing field by eliminating the unfair subsidies and tax loopholes that distort the markets efficiency and freedom by unfairly picking winners (campaign contributors) and losers (the middle class).

Finally, end the welfare programs that require people to be poor to get help. Right-wing Republicans love welfare. It serves as a scapegoat that diverts attention away from their unpopular agenda of holding down wages, abandoning health care for tens of millions, hurting education, tolerating pollution and doling out tax cuts for the super-rich. Rather than defending a welfare system that fails to end poverty, Democrats should do what Roosevelt did in the 1930s and call for its end, replacing it with a path for all people to the middle class through work and wages. This will sharply distinguish us from welfare-loving Republicans who need welfare to last forever to distract from their harmful agenda.

If Democrats advance these (and other) worthy and overwhelmingly popular ideas that create a new Foundation for Freedom, we will not only be adapting the New Deal tradition to meet the needs of the 21st century. We will be proposing whats right for Wisconsin and America.

And we will start winning again. I believe that, with this vision of freedom, Democrats will win sooner than later.

The future does not come to us in the form of fortune cookies. We make the future. Democrats can win again and earn the right to enact laws that actually put in place a new Foundation for Freedom. The future starts now.

Daniel Riemer, a Democrat, is a member of the state Assembly from Milwaukee.

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