Philosophy professor at UGA makes Congressional run

ATHENS – With an audacious platform of federally guaranteed jobs, a minimum living wage of $20 per hour and a proposed super-Medicare program providing health care for all, University of Georgia professor of philosophy Richard Dien Winfield has announced his decision to make a run for Congress in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District.

“I decided to throw my hat in the ring and run for an office in Congress after the 2016 election of Trump,” Winfield, who has been teaching philosophy at UGA for 35 years, said. “I felt our nation was entering a kind of political crisis where our democratic freedoms were in jeopardy, but the reason for all of that had much deeper grounds than simply what happened in that election. As a nation, we have failed to recognize and enforce the social rights we need to be able to exercise our democratic freedoms and take care of our family welfare.”

Winfield said he was inspired by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 Economic Bill of Rights speech and said everyone has a genuine right to work and to adequate food, clothing and recreation; a right to a decent living; a right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; a right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment, and a right to a good education.

“I think as a nation we have failed to do that,” Winfield said. “In some way, the triumph of the civil rights movement has brought that into relief, because for many years, our basic political rights and civil rights had not been extended to everyone. The success of the civil rights movement made those civil rights much more uniformly applied and consistently realized, but nonetheless, we are the most unequal nation in the developed world, as far as upward mobility.

“More and more Americans are finding it harder to just get by and care for their family, and this has an impact on the way that we participate fairly in our democracy. So I am advancing what I call a bold social rights agenda. It’s anchored in what I think is the true right to work, which I think is essential to the American dream. That way, anyone who wants to work will be able to work and support themselves. And if we really want to enforce that, we have to realize that the market can never be relied upon to provide everyone with a fair wage. Our government needs to step in and provide work to anyone who wants to work, for a fair wage, who can’t find employment at all, or full-time employment in the market. And we can literally make a political decision to wipe out unemployment and at the same time wipe out poverty wages.”