Opponents of Republican proposals to privatize Social Security must contend with a painful irony: It was not George W. Bush, but Franklin D. Roosevelt, who first popularized the notion that workers have an individualized, proprietary stake in Social Security. It was FDR who planted the bomb, in the form of the workers’ portion of the payroll tax, which now threatens to explode Social Security’s identity as a social insurance program.

In 1935, Roosevelt overrode strong opposition to the payroll tax from advisors who argued it was regressive, saying, “I guess you’re right on the economics, but those taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.” It was this decision to tie ben- efits to worker contributions (along with subsequent developments, like annual Social Security “statements” mailed to beneficiaries) that gives Bush’s privatization proposal its political appeal. When the president tells workers that they should be able to invest their own money, he is only telling them what they already know: it’s their money, after all.

Turning Roosevelt against himself is a clever move by proponents of private accounts, one that helps explain the popularity of a plan that all analysts agree will be incredibly expensive and complicated to implement. We would be wrong, however, to abandon FDR as a guide to the political defense of Social Security. Roosevelt also reached for another analogy, one that is ideally suited to counter the press for  privatization and at the same time to support proposals to make Social Security stronger and more equitable.

Roosevelt and the New Dealers cast Social Security as a disaster relief program, with the goal of protecting Americans from what FDR termed the “hazards and vicissitudes” of old age. New Dealers frequently drew an analogy between fires, floods, and hurricanes, and “economic earthquakes” which, they said, could strike without warning, wiping out savings and leaving the elderly unable to fend for themselves. Roosevelt repeatedly asserted that the government had an obligation under these circumstances to “aid those overtaken by disaster.”

The “hazards and vicissitudes of life” that Social Security guards against are just as threatening today as they were in 1934. The transition from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy, globalization, the outsourcing of middle class jobs, the rising cost of higher education and housing that is depleting the ability of the middle class to save for retirement, fears of being a burden to children, lingering illness, and extended widowhood—all of these things strike the same chords of panic today that they did in 1934.

The market is still a potential disaster for those without time to wait out its fluctuations. Even those retirees who have the means to invest for their own retirement face widely divergent outcomes based on the state of the equity and debt markets during their working lives and retirement.Compounding this uncertainty is the potential “disaster” of outliving one’s retirement savings.

What would happen if we were to move to a fully or semiprivatized Social Security system? The history of federal disaster relief is instructive in this regard: from the early days of the republic, payments to disaster victims have been broadly politically popular and regarded as something akin to entitlements. The rare politician—most famously Herbert Hoover—who has opposed relief for blameless disaster sufferers, has faced repudiation at the polls and in history books.

Faced with widespread shortfalls in retirement income security as the result of market conditions (e.g., the collapse of the Internet boom), a future Congress and president would almost certainly accede to widespread calls to aid retirees and bail out the program. This is made more likely by the fact that benefits paid by the program are crucial to the vast majority of Americans. The choice is therefore not whether to insure the elderly against market forces, but what form that insurance should take: a predictable, orderly system for providing a basic level of retirement subsistence, or an unpredictable series of reactions to market events.

Moreover, linking Social Security to disaster relief clarifies that Social Security’s strongest political appeal is in sheltering retirees from the winds of economic chance, not in serving as an all-purpose vehicle for retirement savings. Private savings [perhaps in a tax subsidized vehicle such as a new, universal 401(k) program] is the appropriate method for supplementing this base level of support, not replacing it. Providing every American with a base level of protection from disaster, plus the opportunity to save beyond that, is a far more appealing program than betting old age economic security on the vagaries of the market.