A friend directed me to this. I liked it a lot. If
you don't like articles just delete. If you read it I will be glad
to discuss it with you. I relate to the work issues he raises.
REH
Acceptance of America's Future
Bill Moyers, AlterNet
June 10, 2003
Viewed on June 11, 2003
The following is Moyers acceptance speech for the Lifetime Leadership
Award given at the Take Back America conference last week.
Thank you for this award and for this occasion. I don't deserve either, but
as George Burns said, I have arthritis and I don't deserve that, either.
Tomorrow is my 69th birthday and I cannot imagine a better present than this
award or a better party than your company.
Fifty three years ago tomorrow, on my l6th birthday, I went to work for the
daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a good
place to be a cub reporter -- small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me
busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the
old timers were on vacation or out sick and I got assigned to cover what came to
be known as the Housewives' Rebellion. Fifteen women in my home town decided not
to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They
argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation
without representation, and that -- here's my favorite part -- "requiring us to
collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage."
They hired themselves a lawyer -- none other than Martin Dies, the former
congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective
at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against communist
subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying
the tax.
The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on the
Associated Press wire. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed
to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one
Bill Moyers and the paper for the reporting we had done on the "Rebellion."
That hooked me, and in one way or another -- after a detour through seminary
and then into politics and government for a spell -- I've been covering the
class war ever since. Those women in Marshall, Texas were its advance guard.
They were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my
friends, many of them were active in community affairs, their husbands were
pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable
and upstanding citizens all. So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought
on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They
simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their
families, to their clubs, charities and congregations -- fiercely loyal, in
other words, to their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy
to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry,
wiped their children's bottoms, made their husband's beds, and cooked their
family meals -- these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit,
lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show
from their years of labor but the crease in their brow and the knots on their
knuckles; so be it; even on the distaff side of laissez faire, security was
personal, not social, and what injustice existed this side of heaven would no
doubt be redeemed beyond the Pearly Gates. God would surely be just to the poor
once they got past Judgment Day.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to
determine whether "we, the people" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political
reality -- one nation, indivisible -- or merely a charade masquerading as piety
and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life
at the expense of others.
Let me make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and
democracy; I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember? Nor do I romanticize "the
people." You should read my mail -- or listen to the vitriol virtually spat at
my answering machine. I understand what the politician meant who said of the
Texas House of Representatives, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see
their constituents."
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a
society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose
institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be
the difference between democracy and oligarchy.
Look at our history. All of us know that the American Revolution ushered in
what one historian called "The Age of Democratic Revolutions." For the Great
Seal of the United States the new Congress went all the way back to the Roman
poet Virgil: Novus Ordo Seclorum" -- "a new age now begins." Page Smith reminds
us that "their ambition was not merely to free themselves from dependence and
subordination to the Crown but to inspire people everywhere to create agencies
of government and forms of common social life that would offer greater dignity
and hope to the exploited and suppressed" -- to those, in other words, who had
been the losers. Not surprisingly, the winners often resisted. In the early
years of constitution-making in the states and emerging nation, aristocrats
wanted a government of propertied "gentlemen" to keep the scales tilted in their
favor. Battling on the other side were moderates and even those radicals
harboring the extraordinary idea of letting all white males have the vote.
Luckily, the weapons were words and ideas, not bullets. Through compromise and
conciliation the draftsmen achieved a Constitution of checks and balances that
is now the oldest in the world, even as the revolution of democracy that
inspired it remains a tempestuous adolescent whose destiny is still up for
grabs. For all the rhetoric about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,"
it took a civil war to free the slaves and another hundred years to invest their
freedom with meaning. Women only gained the right to vote in my mother's time.
New ages don't arrive overnight, or without "blood, sweat, and tears."
You know this. You are the heirs of one of the country's great traditions --
the progressive movement that started late in the l9th century and remade the
American experience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third of the 20th
century. I call it the progressive movement for lack of a more precise term. Its
aim was to keep blood pumping through the veins of democracy when others were
ready to call in the mortician. Progressives exalted and extended the original
American revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the
people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most
prosperous decades in modern history, not only here but in aspiring democracies
everywhere, especially those of western Europe.
Step back with me to the curtain-raiser, the founding convention of the
People's Party -- better known as the Populists -- in 1892. The members were
mainly cotton and wheat farmers from the recently reconstructed South and the
newly settled Great Plains, and they had come on hard, hard times, driven to the
wall by falling prices for their crops on one hand and racking interest rates,
freight charges and supply costs on the other. This in the midst of a booming
and growing industrial America. They were angry, and their platform -- issued
deliberately on the 4th of July -- pulled no punches. "We meet," it said, "in
the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material
ruin....Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the
Congress and touches even the bench.....The newspapers are largely subsidized or
muzzled, public opinion silenced....The fruits of the toil of millions are
boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few."
Furious words from rural men and women who were traditionally conservative
and whose memories of taming the frontier were fresh and personal. But in their
fury they invoked an American tradition as powerful as frontier
individualism--the war on inequality and especially on the role that government
played in promoting and preserving inequality by favoring the rich. The Founding
Fathers turned their backs on the idea of property qualifications for holding
office under the Constitution because they wanted no part of a 'veneration for
wealth" in the document. Thomas Jefferson, while claiming no interest in
politics, built up a Republican Party -- no relation to the present one -- to
take the government back from the speculators and "stock-jobbers," as he called
them, who were in the saddle in 1800. Andrew Jackson slew the monster Second
Bank of the United States, the 600-pound gorilla of the credit system in the
1830s, in the name of the people versus the aristocrats who sat on the bank's
governing board.
All these leaders were on record in favor of small government--but their
opposition wasn't simply to government as such. It was to government's power to
confer privilege on insiders; on the rich who were democracy's equivalent
of the royal favorites of monarchist days. (It's what the FCC does today.) The
Populists knew it was the government that granted millions of acres of public
land to the railroad builders. It was the government that gave the manufacturers
of farm machinery a monopoly of the domestic market by a protective tariff that
was no longer necessary to shelter "infant industries." It was the government
that contracted the national currency and sparked a deflationary cycle that
crushed debtors and fattened the wallets of creditors. And those who made the
great fortunes used them to buy the legislative and judicial favors that kept
them on top. So the Populists recognized one great principle: the job of
preserving equality of opportunity and democracy demanded the end of any unholy
alliance between government and wealth. It was, to quote that platform again,
"from the same womb of governmental injustice" that tramps and
millionaires were bred.
But how? How was the democratic revolution to be revived? The promise of the
Declaration reclaimed? How were Americans to restore government to its job of
promoting the general welfare? And here, the Populists made a
breakthrough to another principle. In a modern, large-scale, industrial and
nationalized economy it wasn't enough simply to curb the government's outreach.
That would simply leave power in the hands of the great corporations whose
existence was inseparable from growth and progress. The answer was to turn
government into an active player in the economy at the very least enforcing fair
play, and when necessary being the friend, the helper and the agent of the
people at large in the contest against entrenched power. So the Populist
platform called for government loans to farmers about to lose their mortgaged
homesteads -- for government granaries to grade and store their crops fairly --
for governmental inflation of the currency, which was a classical plea of
debtors -- and for some decidedly non-classical actions like government
ownership of the railroad, telephone and telegraph systems and a graduated --
i.e., progressive tax on incomes and a flat ban on subsidies to "any private
corporation." And to make sure the government stayed on the side of the people,
the 'Pops' called for the initiative and referendum and the direct election of
Senators.
Predictably, the Populists were denounced, feared and mocked as fanatical
hayseeds ignorantly playing with socialist fire. They got twenty-two electoral
votes for their candidate in '92, plus some Congressional seats and state
houses, but it was downhill from there for many reasons. America wasn't -- and
probably still isn't -- ready for a new major party. The People's Party was a
spent rocket by 1904. But if political organizations perish, their key ideas
don't - keep that in mind, because it give prospective to your cause today. Much
of the Populist agenda would become law within a few years of the party's
extinction. And that was because it was generally shared by a rising generation
of young Republicans and Democrats who, justly or not, were seen as less
outrageously outdated than the embattled farmers. These were the progressives,
your intellectual forebears and mine.
One of my heroes in all of this is William Allen White, a Kansas country
editor -- a Republican -- who was one of them. He described his fellow
progressives this way:
"What the people felt about the vast injustice that had come with the
settlement of a continent, we, their servants -- teachers, city councilors,
legislators, governors, publishers, editors, writers, representatives in
Congress and Senators -- all made a part of our creed. Some way, into the hearts
of the dominant middle class of this country, had come a sense that their
civilization needed recasting, that their government had fallen into the hands
of self-seekers, that a new relationship should be established between the haves
and the have-nots."
They were a diverse lot, held together by a common admiration of progress --
hence the name -- and a shared dismay at the paradox of poverty stubbornly
persisting in the midst of progress like an unwanted guest at a wedding. Of
course they welcomed, just as we do, the new marvels in the gift-bag of
technology -- the telephones, the autos, the electrically-powered urban
transport and lighting systems, the indoor heating and plumbing, the processed
foods and home appliances and machine-made clothing that reduced the sweat and
drudgery of home-making and were affordable to an ever-swelling number of
people. But they saw the underside, too -- the slums lurking in the shadows of
the glittering cities, the exploited and unprotected workers whose low-paid
labor filled the horn of plenty for others, the misery of those whom age,
sickness, accident or hard times condemned to servitude and poverty with no hope
of comfort or security.
This is what's hard to believe -- hardly a century had passed since 1776
before the still-young revolution was being strangled in the hard grip of a
merciless ruling class. The large corporations that were called into being by
modern industrialism after 1865 -- the end of the Civil War -- had combined into
trusts capable of making minions of both politics and government. What Henry
George called "an immense wedge" was being forced through American society by
"the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity."
We should pause here to consider that this is Karl Rove's cherished period of
American history; it was, as I read him, the seminal influence on the man who is
said to be George W.'s brain. From his own public comments and my reading of the
record, it is apparent that Karl Rove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of
William McKinley, who was in the White House from 1897 to 1901, and modeled
himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had
one consummate passion -- to serve corporate and imperial power. It was said
that he believed "without compunction, that the state of Ohio existed for
property. It had no other function...Great wealth was to be gained through
monopoly, through using the State for private ends; it was axiomatic therefore
that businessmen should run the government and run it for personal profit."
Mark Hanna -- Karl Rove's hero -- made William McKinley governor of Ohio by
shaking down the corporate interests of the day. Fortunately, McKinley had the
invaluable gift of emitting sonorous platitudes as though they were recently
discovered truth. Behind his benign gaze the wily intrigues of Mark Hanna saw to
it that first Ohio and then Washington were "ruled by business...by bankers,
railroads and public utility corporations." Any who opposed the oligarchy were
smeared as disturbers of the peace, socialists, anarchists, "or worse." Back
then they didn't bother with hollow euphemisms like "compassionate conservatism"
to disguise the raw reactionary politics that produced government "of, by, and
for" the ruling corporate class. They just saw the loot and went for it.
The historian Clinton Rossiter describes this as the period of "the great
train robbery of American intellectual history." Conservatives -- or better,
pro-corporate apologists -- hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism
and turned words like "progress", "opportunity", and "individualism" into tools
for making the plunder of America sound like divine right. Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution was hijacked, too, so that conservative politicians, judges,
and publicists promoted, as if it were, the natural order of things, the notion
that progress resulted from the elimination of the weak and the "survival of the
fittest."
This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the
mind of Karl Rove -- the reputed brain of George W. Bush -- as the seminal age
of inspiration for the politics and governance of America today.
No wonder that what troubled our progressive forebears was not only the
miasma of poverty in their nostrils, but the sour stink of a political system
for sale. The United States Senate was a "millionaire's club." Money given to
the political machines that controlled nominations could buy controlling
influence in city halls, state houses and even courtrooms. Reforms and
improvements ran into the immovable resistance of the almighty dollar. What,
progressives wondered, would this do to the principles of popular government?
Because all of them, whatever party they subscribed to, were inspired by the
gospel of democracy. Inevitably, this swept them into the currents of politics,
whether as active officeholders or persistent advocates.
Here's a small, but representative sampling of their ranks. Jane Addams
forsook the comforts of a middle-class college graduate's life to live in Hull
House in the midst of a disease-ridden and crowded Chicago immigrant
neighborhood, determined to make it an educational and social center that would
bring pride, health and beauty into the lives of her poor neighbors.. She was
inspired by "an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy," to
combating the prevailing notion "that the wellbeing of a privileged few might
justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many." Community and
fellowship were the lessons she drew from her teachers, Jesus and Abraham
Lincoln. But people simply helping one another couldn't move mountains of
disadvantage. She came to see that "private beneficence" wasn't enough. But to
bring justice to the poor would take more than soup kitchens and fundraising
prayer meetings. "Social arrangements," she wrote, "can be transformed through
man's conscious and deliberate effort." Take note -- not individual regeneration
or the magic of the market, but conscious, cooperative effort.
Meet a couple of muckraking journalists. Jacob Riis lugged his heavy camera
up and down the staircases of New York's disease-ridden, firetrap tenements to
photograph the unspeakable crowding, the inadequate toilets, the starved and
hollow-eyed children and the filth on the walls so thick that his crude flash
equipment sometimes set it afire. Bound between hard covers, with Riis's
commentary, they showed comfortable New Yorkers "How the Other Half Lives." They
were powerful ammunition for reformers who eventually brought an end to tenement
housing by state legislation. And Lincoln Steffens, college and graduate-school
educated, left his books to learn life from the bottom up as a police-beat
reporter on New York's streets. Then, as a magazine writer, he exposed the links
between city bosses and businessmen that made it possible for builders and
factory owners to ignore safety codes and get away with it. But the villain was
neither the boodler nor the businessman. It was the indifference of a public
that "deplore[d] our politics and laud[ed] our business; that transformed law,
medicine, literature and religion into simply business. Steffens was out to slay
the dragon of exalting "the commercial spirit" over the goals of patriotism and
national prosperity. "I am not a scientist," he said. "I am a journalist. I did
not gather the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and
laboratory analysis....My purpose was. ...to see if the shameful facts, spread
out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set
fire to American pride."
If corrupt politics bred diseases that could be fatal to democracy, then good
politics was the antidote. That was the discovery of Ray Stannard Baker, another
journalistic progressive who started out with a detest for election-time
catchwords and slogans. But he came to see that "Politics could not be abolished
or even adjourned...it was in its essence the method by which communities worked
out their common problems. It was one of the principle arts of living peacefully
in a crowded world," he said [Compare that to Grover Norquist's latest
declaration of war on the body politic. "We are trying to change the tones in
the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship." He
went on to say that bi-partisanship is another name for date rape."]
There are more, too many more to call to the witness stand here, but I want
you to hear some of the things they had to say. There were educators like the
economist John R. Commons or the sociologist Edward A. Ross who believed that
the function of "social science" wasn't simply to dissect society for
non-judgmental analysis and academic promotion, but to help in finding solutions
to social problems. It was Ross who pointed out that morality in a modern world
had a social dimension. In "Sin and Society," written in 1907, he told readers
that the sins "blackening the face of our time" were of a new variety, and not
yet recognized as such. "The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate,
murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a 'rake-off'
instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or
scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a
malefactor." In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes
and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs
of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House
to write their own regulations.
And here are just two final bits of testimony from actual politicians --
first, Brand Whitlock, Mayor of Toledo. He is one of my heroes because he first
learned his politics as a beat reporter in Chicago, confirming my own experience
that there's nothing better than journalism to turn life into a continuing
course in adult education. One of his lessons was that "the alliance between the
lobbyists and the lawyers of the great corporation interests on the one hand,
and the managers of both the great political parties on the other, was a fact,
the worst feature of which was that no one seemed to care."
And then there is Tom Johnson, the progressive mayor of Cleveland in the
early nineteen hundreds -- a businessman converted to social activism. His major
battles were to impose regulation, or even municipal takeover, on the private
companies that were meant to provide affordable public transportation and
utilities but in fact crushed competitors, overcharged customers, secured
franchises and licenses for a song, and paid virtually nothing in taxes -- all
through their pocketbook control of lawmakers and judges. Johnson's argument for
public ownership was simple: "If you don't own them, they will own you. It's why
advocates of Clean Elections today argue that if anybody's going to buy
Congress, it should be the people." When advised that businessmen got their way
in Washington because they had lobbies and consumers had none, Tom Johnson
responded: "If Congress were true to the principles of democracy it would be the
people's lobby." What a radical contrast to the House of Representatives today!
Our political, moral, and intellectual forbearance occupy a long and
honorable roster. They include wonderful characters like Dr. Alice Hamilton, a
pioneer in industrially-caused diseases, who spent long years clambering up and
down ladders in factories and mineshafts -- in long skirts! -- tracking down the
unsafe toxic substances that sickened the workers whom she would track right
into their sickbeds to get leads and tip-offs on where to hunt. Or Harvey Wiley,
the chemist from Indiana who, from a bureaucrat's desk in the Department of
Agriculture, relentlessly warred on foods laden with risky preservatives and
adulterants with the help of his "poison squad" of young assistants who
volunteered as guinea pigs. Or lawyers like the brilliant Harvard graduate Louis
Brandeis, who took on corporate attorneys defending child labor or long and
harsh conditions for female workers. Brandeis argued that the state had a duty
to protect the health of working women and children.
To be sure, these progressives weren't all saints. Their glory years
coincided with the heyday of lynching and segregation, of empire and the Big
Stick and the bold theft of the Panama Canal, of immigration restriction and
ethnic stereotypes. Some were themselves businessmen only hoping to control an
unruly marketplace by regulation. But by and large they were conservative
reformers. They aimed to preserve the existing balance between wealth and
commonwealth. Their common enemy was unchecked privilege, their common hope was
a better democracy, and their common weapon was informed public opinion.
In a few short years the progressive spirit made possible the election not
only of reform mayors and governors but of national figures like Senator George
Norris of Nebraska, Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin, and even that
hard-to-classify political genius, Theodore Roosevelt. All three of them
Republicans. Here is the simplest laundry-list of what was accomplished at state
and Federal levels: Publicly regulated or owned transportation, sanitation and
utilities systems. The partial restoration of competition in the marketplace
through improved antitrust laws. Increased fairness in taxation. Expansion of
the public education and juvenile justice systems. Safer workplaces and
guarantees of compensation to workers injured on the job. Oversight of the
purity of water, medicines and foods. Conservation of the national wilderness
heritage against overdevelopment, and honest bidding on any public mining,
lumbering and ranching. We take these for granted today -- or we did until
recently. All were provided not by the automatic workings of free enterprise but
by implementing the idea in the Declaration of Independence that the people had
a right to governments that best promoted their "safety and happiness."
The mighty progressive wave peaked in 1912. But the ideas leashed by it
forged the politics of the 20th century. Like his cousin Theodore, Franklin
Roosevelt argued that the real enemy of enlightened capitalism was "the
malefactors of great wealth" -- the "economic royalists" -- from whom capitalism
would have to be saved by reform and regulation. Progressive government became
an embedded tradition of Democrats -- the heart of FDR's New Deal and Harry
Truman's Fair Deal, and honored even by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who didn't want to
tear down the house progressive ideas had built -- only to put it under
different managers. The progressive impulse had its final fling in the landslide
of 1969 when LBJ, who was a son of the West Texas hill country, where the
Populist rebellion had been nurtured in the 1890s, won the public endorsement
for what he meant to be the capstone in the arch of the New Deal.
I had a modest role in that era. I shared in its exhilaration and its
failures. We went too far too fast, overreached at home and in Vietnam, failed
to examine some assumptions, and misjudged the rising discontents and fierce
backlash engendered by war, race, civil disturbance, violence and crime.
Democrats grew so proprietary in this town that a fat, complacent political
establishment couldn't recognize its own intellectual bankruptcy or the beltway
that was growing around it and beginning to separate it from the rest of the
country. The failure of democratic politicians and public thinkers to respond to
popular discontents -- to the daily lives of workers, consumers, parents, and
ordinary taxpayers -- allowed a resurgent conservatism to convert public concern
and hostility into a crusade to resurrect social Darwinism as a moral
philosophy, multinational corporations as a governing class, and the theology of
markets as a transcendental belief system.
As a citizen I don't like the consequences of this crusade, but you have to
respect the conservatives for their successful strategy in gaining control of
the national agenda. Their stated and open aim is to change how America is
governed - to strip from government all its functions except those that reward
their rich and privileged benefactors. They are quite candid about it, even
acknowledging their mean spirit in accomplishing it. Their leading strategist in
Washington - the same Grover Norquist -- has famously said he wants to shrink
the government down to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. More
recently, in commenting on the fiscal crisis in the states and its affect on
schools and poor people, Norquist said, "I hope one of them" -- one of the
states -- "goes bankrupt." So much for compassionate conservatism. But at least
Norquist says what he means and means what he says. The White House pursues the
same homicidal dream without saying so. Instead of shrinking down the
government, they're filling the bathtub with so much debt that it floods the
house, water-logs the economy, and washes away services for decades that have
lifted millions of Americans out of destitution and into the middle-class. And
what happens once the public's property has been flooded? Privatize it. Sell it
at a discounted rate to the corporations.
It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that
has occurred in our lifetime. I'll be frank with you: I simply don't understand
it -- or the malice in which it is steeped. Many people are nostalgic for a
golden age. These people seem to long for the Gilded Age. That I can grasp. They
measure America only by their place on the material spectrum and they bask in
the company of the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged a class as we have
seen since the plantation owners of antebellum America and the court of Louis
IV. What I can't explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to dismantle
every last brick of the social contract. At this advanced age I simply have to
accept the fact that the tension between haves and have-nots is built into human
psychology and society itself -- it's ever with us. However, I'm just as puzzled
as to why, with right wing wrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once
considered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being branded "class warriors"
in a war the other side started and is determined to win. I don't get why
conceding your opponent's premises and fighting on his turf isn't the sure-fire
prescription for irrelevance and ultimately obsolescence. But I confess as well
that I don't know how to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges into
your ranks. And I don't know how to reconfigure democratic politics to fit into
an age of soundbites and polling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate
journalists are neutered and whose right-wing publicists have no shame.
What I do know is this: While the social dislocations and meanness that
galvanized progressives in the 19th century are resurgent so is the vision of
justice, fairness, and equality. That's a powerful combination if only there are
people around to fight for it. The battle to renew democracy has enormous
resources to call upon - and great precedents for inspiration. Consider the
experience of James Bryce, who published "The Great Commonwealth" back in 1895
at the height of the First Gilded Age. Americans, Bryce said, "were hopeful and
philanthropic." He saw first-hand the ills of that "dark and unlovely age," but
he went on to say: " A hundred times I have been disheartened by the facts I was
stating: a hundred times has the recollection of the abounding strength and
vitality of the nation chased away those tremors."
What will it take to get back in the fight? Understanding the real interests
and deep opinions of the American people is the first thing. And what are those?
That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a
membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so
that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age without that help.
That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen
abandonment of responsibility to the country. That income inequality is not a
sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then
unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear
saddles, it's a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is
a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained
within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars
than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not
have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. That public services,
when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that
we all rise and fall together as "one nation, indivisible." That concentration
in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly
over the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and
benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy
and half oligarchy than it could survive "half slave and half free" -- and that
keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work -- our work.
Ideas have power -- as long as they are not frozen in doctrine. But ideas
need legs. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural
resources and the protection of our air, water, and land, women's rights and
civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security and a civil service based on
merit -- all these were launched as citizen's movements and won the endorsement
of the political class only after long struggles and in the face of bitter
opposition and sneering attacks. It's just a fact: Democracy doesn't work
without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle
down politics doesn't work much better than trickle down economics. It's also a
fact that civilization happens because we don't leave things to other people.
What's right and good doesn't come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for
it -- as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that
conceit - to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as
there's one candle in your hand.
So go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember what the progressives faced. Karl
Rove isn't tougher than Mark Hanna was in his time and a hundred years from now
some historian will be wondering how it was that Norquist and Company got away
with it as long as they did -- how they waged war almost unopposed on the
infrastructure of social justice, on the arrangements that make life fair, on
the mutual rights and responsibilities that offer opportunity, civil liberties,
and a decent standard of living to the least among us.
"Democracy is not a lie" -- I first learned that from Henry Demarest Lloyd,
the progressive journalist whose book, "Wealth against Commonwealth," laid open
the Standard trust a century ago. Lloyd came to the conclusion to "Regenerate
the individual is a half truth. The reorganization of the society which he makes
and which makes him is the other part. The love of liberty became liberty
in America by clothing itself in the complicated group of strengths known as the
government of the United States." And it was then he said: "Democracy is not a
lie. There live(s) in the body of the commonality unexhausted virtue and the
ever-refreshed strength which can rise equal to any problems of progress. In the
hope of tapping some reserve of their power of self-help," he said, "this story
is told to the people."
This is your story -- the progressive story of America.
Pass it on.
