"If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people"
About this Quote
Wallace is selling optimism with a ledger book in hand: freedom isn’t a mood or a slogan here, it’s an “area” that can expand if the country invests its political imagination wisely. The phrasing is almost technocratic, but the stakes are moral. By calling it “liberal potential,” he’s treating reform as dormant energy - something real, measurable in outcomes, and dangerously easy to waste or misdirect. “Properly channeled” carries a quiet warning: the same post-crisis momentum that can widen rights and security can also be diverted into repression, plutocracy, or permanent emergency.
The master stroke is “spend up our rate of social invention.” Wallace borrows the language of R&D and production to argue that democratic progress depends on continual institutional creativity - new policies, new protections, new arrangements between state, market, and citizen. It’s a deliberate rebuttal to the idea that America’s greatness is a fixed inheritance. For Wallace, the nation’s comparative advantage is improvisation, and the ethical test is where that improvisation lands.
Context matters: Wallace was a New Deal architect and vice president during a period when the U.S. was mobilizing for war and then recalibrating for peace, prosperity, and Cold War anxiety. In that churn, “freedom” was being defined aggressively abroad and selectively at home. His subtext is that freedom without welfare is thin - and that a democracy that can invent aircraft carriers can also invent dignity at scale. The line reads like a challenge to the political class: stop treating reform as charity and start treating it as national capacity.
The master stroke is “spend up our rate of social invention.” Wallace borrows the language of R&D and production to argue that democratic progress depends on continual institutional creativity - new policies, new protections, new arrangements between state, market, and citizen. It’s a deliberate rebuttal to the idea that America’s greatness is a fixed inheritance. For Wallace, the nation’s comparative advantage is improvisation, and the ethical test is where that improvisation lands.
Context matters: Wallace was a New Deal architect and vice president during a period when the U.S. was mobilizing for war and then recalibrating for peace, prosperity, and Cold War anxiety. In that churn, “freedom” was being defined aggressively abroad and selectively at home. His subtext is that freedom without welfare is thin - and that a democracy that can invent aircraft carriers can also invent dignity at scale. The line reads like a challenge to the political class: stop treating reform as charity and start treating it as national capacity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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