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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 2007)
PAGE 15 NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, JABRUARY & MARPRIL 2007 Democrats never re-armed, and kept pinning all their hopes on economic growth, which by its very nature is valueless and cannot alone provide answers to social and moral questions that arise in the face of resurgent crisis. While “practical management of a modern economy" had a kind of surrogate legitimacy as long as it worked, when it no longer worked, the nation faced a para lyzing moral void in deciding how the burden should be borne. Well-organized conservative forces, firing on all ideological pistons, rushed to fill this void with a story corporate America wanted us to hear. Inspired by bumper-sticker abstractions of Milton Friedman's ideas, propelled by cascades of cash from corporate chieftains like Coors and Koch and “Neutron" Jack Welch, fortified by the pious prescriptions of fundamentalist preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the conservative armies marched on Washington. And they succeeded brilliantly. When Ronald Reagan addressed the Republican National Convention in 1980, he told a simple story, one that had great impact. “The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic leadership — in the White House and in Congress — for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us.” He declared, “I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself.” It was a speech of bold contrasts, of good private interest versus bad government, of course. More important, it personified these two forces in a larger narrative of freedom, reaching back across the Great Depression, the Civil War and the American Revolu tion, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact. It so dazzled and demoralized Democrats they could not muster a response to the moral abandonment and social costs that came with the Reagan revolution. We too have a story of freedom to tell, and it too reaches back across the Great Depression, the Civil War and the Ameri can Revolution, all the way back to the Mayflower Compact. It’s a story with clear and certain foundations, like Reagan’s, but also a tumultuous and sometimes violent history of betrayal that he and other conservatives consistently and conveniently ignore. Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstract ly as the freedom of the individual from government control — a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill or Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole. And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each of us has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: “inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life.” The quote comes directly from Paul Starr, one of our most formidable public thinkers, whose forthcoming book, Freedom’s Power: The True Force o f Liberalism, is a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America’s greatness as their own. Starr’s book is one of three new books that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate when Congress convenes again. John Schwarz, in Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision, rescues the idea of freedom from market cultists whose “particular idea of freedom... has taken us down a terribly mistaken road” toward a political order where “govern ment ends up servicing the powerful and taking from everyone else.” The free-market view “cannot provide us with a philosophy we find compelling or meaningful,” Schwarz writes. Nor does it assure the availability of economic opportunity “that is truly adequate to each individual and the status of full legal as well as political equality." Yet since the late 19th century it has been used to shield private power from democratic accountability, in no small part because conservative rhetoric has succeeded in denigrating government even as conservative politicians plunder it. But government, Schwarz reminds us, “is not simply the way we express ourselves collectively but also often the only way we preserve our freedom from private power and its incursions." That is one reason the notion that every person has a right to meaningful opportunity “has assumed the position of a moral bottom line in the nation’s popular culture ever since the beginning." Freedom, he says, is “considerably more than a private value.” It is essentially a social idea, which explains why the worship of the free market “fails as a compelling idea in terms of the moral reasoning of freedom itself." Let’s get back to basics, is Schwarz’s message. Let's recapture our story. Norton Garfinkle picks up both Schwarz and Starr in The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth, as he describes how America became the first nation on earth to offer an economic vision of opportunity for even the humblest beginner to advance, and then moved, in fits and starts — but always irrepressibly — to the invocation of positive government as the means to further that vision through politics. No one understood this more clearly, Garfinkle writes, than Abraham Lincoln, who called on the federal government to save the Union. He turned to large government expenditures for internal improvements — canals, bridges and railroads. He supported a strong national bank to stabilize the currency. He provided the first major federal funding for education, with the creation of land grant colleges. And he kept close to his heart an abiding concern for the fate of ordinary people, especially the ordinary worker but also the widow and orphan. Our greatest President kept his eye on the sparrow. He believed government should not be just “of the people" and “by the people" but “for the people." Including, we can imagine, Carol Ann Reyes. The great leaders of our tradition — Jefferson, Lincoln and the two Roosevelts — understood the power of our story. In my time it was FDR, who exposed the false freedom of the aristocratic narrative He made the simple but obvious point that where once political royalists stalked the land, now economic royalists owned everything standing Mindful of Plutarch's warn ing that “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics," Roosevelt famously told America, in 1936, that “the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man." He gathered together the remnants of the great reform movements of the Progressive Age — including those of his late-blooming cousin, Teddy — into a singular cause that would be ratified again and again by people who categorically rejected the laissez-faire anarchy that had produced destructive, unfettered and ungovernable power. Now came collective bargaining and workplace rules, cash assistance DAVID SUTER for poor children, Social Security, the Gl Bill, home mortgage subsidies, progressive taxation — democratic instruments that checked economic tyranny and helped secure America’s great middle class. And these were only the beginning. The Marshall Plan, the civil rights revolution, reaching the moon, a huge leap in life expectancy — every one of these great outward achieve ments of the last century grew from shared goals and collabor ation in the public interest. So it is that contrary to what we have heard rhetorically for a generation now, the individualist, greed-driven, free-market ideology is at odds with our history and with what most Ameri cans really care about. More and more people agree that grow ing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics is corrupting democracy and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help when the market system fails to generate shared prosperity. Indeed, the American public is committed to a set of values that almost perfectly contradicts the conservative agenda that has dominated politics for a generation now. The question, then, is not about changing people: it’s about reaching people. I’m not speaking simply of better infor mation, a sharper and clearer factual presentation to disperse the thick fogs generated by today’s spin machines. Of course, we always need stronger empirical arguments to back up our case. It would certainly help if at least as many people who believe, say, in a “literal devil” or that God sent George W. Bush to the White House also knew that the top 1% of households now have more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. Yes, people need more information than they get from the media conglomerates with their obsession for nonsense, violence and pap. And we need, as we keep hearing, “new ideas.” But we are at an extraordinary moment. The conservative movement stands intellectually and morally bankrupt while Democrats talk about a “new direction" without convincing us they know the difference between a weather vane and a compass. The right story will set our course for a generation to come. Some stories doom us. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond tells of the Viking colony that disappeared in the 15th century. The settlers had scratched a living on the sparse coast of Greenland for years, until they encountered a series of harsh winters. Their livestock, the staple of their diet, began to die off. Although the nearby waters teemed with haddock and cod, the colony’s mythology prohibited the eating of fish. When their supply of hay ran out during a last terrible winter, the colony was finished. They had been doomed by their story. Here in the first decade of the 21st century the story that becomes America's dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and hence our politics. In the searching of our souls demanded by this challenge those of us in this room and kindred spirits across the nation must confront the most fundamental progressive failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility — the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath. In our brief sojourn here we are on a great journey. For those who came before us and for those who follow, our moral, political and religious duty is to make sure this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal, is in good hands on our watch. One story would return America to the days of radical laissez faire, when there was no social contract and the strong took what they could and the weak left to forage. The other story joins the memory of struggles that have been waged with the possibility of victories yet to be won, including healthcare for every American and a living wage for every worker. Like the mustard seed to which Jesus compared the Kingdom of God, nurtured from small beginnings in a soil thirsty for new roots, our story has been a long time unfolding. It reminds us that the freedoms and rights we treasure were not sent from heaven and did not grow on trees. They were, as John Powers has written, “born of centuries of struggle by untold millions who fought and bled and died to assure that the government can’t just walk into our bedrooms and read our mail, to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety net against the often-cruel workings of the market, to guarantee that businessmen couldn’t compel workers to work more than 40 hours a week without extra compensation, to make us free to criticize our government without having our patriotism impugned, and to make sure that our leaders are answerable to the people when they choose to send our soldiers to war." The 8-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources, free trade unions, old-age pensions, clean air and water, safe food — all these began with citizens and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and bitter attacks. Democracy works when people claim it as their own. It is only rarely remembered that the definition of democracy immortalized by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address had been inspired by Theodore Parker, the abolitionist prophet Driven from his pulpit, Parker said, “I will go about and preach and lecture in the city and glen, by the roadside and field-side, and wherever men and women may be found.” He became the Hound of Freedom and helped to change America through the power of the word We have a story of equal power It is that the promise of America leaves no one out Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, from delis and from diners, tell it From the workplace and the bookstore, tell it On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can — to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren Tell it — for America’s sake. Bill Moyers is a national treasure. He has been a news paper editor (Newsday on Long Island), Presidential spokesman (for LBJ until he resigned in dissent over the Vietnam War), a PBS television host (until dismissed for being a liberal by Bush appointees). He is president of the Schuman Center for Media & Democracy. Bikes & B eyond 1 0 89 MARINE DR. ASTORIA, OREGON V I
