Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses

“…[FDR] sought to build something new. He developed the concept of collective and economic rights, as represented by the Wagner Act (1935), which gave organized labor an enormous boost, and then by his “Second Bill of Rights” speech (1944), which asserted claims against society for material benefits without listing any corresponding obligations. The assertion of economic rights began the process of displacing a constitutional order that since the Founding had been organized around individuals endowed with natural rights. In its place would be a new social order reorganized around groups making claims against society, claims that would greatly multiply in the 1960s and 1970s. In the emerging order, the growth of government paved the way for newly minted rights and entitlements, which in turn expanded government.”

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“…the new rights-based client groups that came of age with McGovernism looked to courts and bureaucracies to deliver their demands. They were, at times, defiantly anti-majoritarian. Abortion, racial quotas, and environmental overreach were delivered not primarily by presidential or congressional majorities but by class-action lawsuits and by the iron triangle of interest groups, congressional subcommittees and the liberal media.” ─The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 172.