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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 16th 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 well being 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 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.
© 2003 Bill Moyers |
