Wednesday 04 June 2003
Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the
Campaign for Americas Future.
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.
Go
to Original
Bill Moyers' Presidential Address
By John Nichols
The Nation
Monday 09 June 2003
Democratic presidential candidates were handed a dream audience of
1,000 "ready-for-action" labor, civil rights, peace and economic justice
campaigners at the Take Back America conference organized in Washington
last week by the Campaign for America's Future. And the 2004 contenders
grabbed for it, delivering some of the better speeches of a campaign that
remains rhetorically -- and directionally -- challenged. But it was a
non-candidate who won the hearts and minds of the crowd with a "Cross of
Gold" speech for the 21st century.
Recalling the populism and old-school progressivism of the era in
which William Jennings Bryan stirred the Democratic National Convention of
1896 to enter into the great struggle between privilege and democracy --
and to spontaneously nominate the young Nebraskan for president --
journalist and former presidential aide Bill Moyers delivered a call to
arms against "government of, by and for the ruling corporate class."
Condemning "the unholy alliance between government and wealth" and
the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make "the rape of
America sound like a consensual date," Moyers charged that "rightwing
wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush Administration and its Congressional
allies were out to bankrupt government. Then, he said, they would
privatize public services in order to enrich the corporate interests that
fund campaigns and provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If
unchecked, Moyers warned, the result of these machinations will be the
dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."
"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United
States of America," said Moyers, as he called for the progressives
gathered in Washington -- and for their allies across the United States --
to organize not merely in defense of social and economic justice but in
order to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham
Lincoln as the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against
slavery, Moyers declared, "our nation can no more survive as half
democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half
free."
There was little doubt that the crowd of activists from across the
country would have nominated Moyers by acclamation when he finished a
remarkable address in which he challenged not just the policies of the
Bush Administration but the failures of Democratic leaders in Congress to
effectively challenge the president and his minions. In the face of what
he described as "a radical assault" on American values by those who seek
to redistribute wealth upward from the many to a wealthy few, Moyers said
he could not understand why "the Democrats are afraid to be branded class
warriors in a war the other side started and is winning."
Several of the Democratic presidential contenders who addressed the
crowd after Moyers picked up pieces of his argument. Former US Senator
Carol Moseley Braun actually quoted William Jennings Bryan, while North
Carolina Senator John Edwards and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry tried
-- with about as much success as Al Gore in 2000 -- to sound populist.
Former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt promised not to be "Bush-lite,"
and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean drew warm applause when he said
the way for Democrats to get elected "is not to be like Republicans, but
to stand up against them and fight." Ultimately, however, only the Rev. Al
Sharpton and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich
came close to matching the fury and the passion of the crowd.
Kucinich, who earned nine standing ovations for his antiwar and
anti-corporate free trade rhetoric, probably did more to advance his
candidacy than any of the other contenders. But he never got to the place
Moyers reached with a speech that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as
one of the most "amazing and spellbinding" addresses he had ever heard.
Author and activist Frances Moore Lappe said she was close to tears as she
thanked Moyers for providing precisely the mixture of perspective and hope
that progressives need as they prepare to challenge the right in 2004.
That, Moyers explained, was the point of his address, which reflected
on White House political czar Karl Rove's oft-stated admiration for Mark
Hanna, the Ohio political boss who managed the campaigns and the
presidency of conservative Republican William McKinley. It was McKinley
who beat Bryan in 1896 and -- with Hanna's help -- fashioned a White House
that served the interests of the corporate trusts.
Comparing the excesses of Hanna and Rove, and McKinley and Bush,
Moyers said "the social dislocations and the meanness" of the 19th century
were being renewed by a new generation of politicians who, like their
predecessors, seek to strangle the spirit of the American revolution "in
the hard grip of the ruling class."
To break that grip, Moyers said, progressives of today must learn
from the revolutionaries and reformers of old. Recalling the progressive
movement that rose up in the first years of the 20th century to preserve a
"balance between wealth and commonwealth," and the successes of the New
Dealers who turned progressive ideals into national policy, Moyers told
the crowd to "get back in the fight." "Hear me!" he cried. "Allow yourself
that conceit to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as
long as there is one candle in your hand."
While others were campaigning last week, Moyers was tending the flame
of democracy. In doing so, he unwittingly made himself the candle
holder-in-chief for those who seek to spark a new progressive era.
