A new story which is the old story of our revolutionary roots. Bill Moyers hits it out of the park again with this speech in December in NYC. Can we draft him for V.P? He calls on Democrats of all stripes to come up with a different story not a Laundry list of stuff to try to get done. Because so many Americans are being left further and further behind and are "dumped from the Dream", we need big ideas. (Last year he used the great phrase "The Mugging of the American Dream.") I wrote about this again on a local blog this morning and said that "We need to relegate the Washington insiders, Smeogal consultants and pundits to the darkness of steerage while the "radical middle" as Thom Hartmann calls us tries to turn this ship of state away from the iceberg. But Moyers is so much better than I am.
http://www.truthout.org/...
"But America needs something more right now than a "must-do" list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story."
Moyers explores where he believes the story went wrong. It was a time when he was in the White House, so he lived through it.
It is hard to believe that less than four decades ago a key architect of the antipoverty program, Robert Lampman, could argue that the "recent history of Western nations reveals an increasingly widespread adoption of the idea that substantial equality of social and economic conditions among individuals is a good thing." Economists call that postwar era "the Great Compression." Poverty and inequality had declined dramatically for the first time in our history. Here, as Paul Krugman recently recounted, is how Time's report on the national outlook in 1953 summed it up: "Even in the smallest towns and most isolated areas, the U.S. is wearing a very prosperous, middle-class suit of clothes, and an attitude of relaxation and confidence. People are not growing wealthy, but more of them than ever before are getting along." African-Americans were still written out of the story, but that was changing, too, as heroic resistance emerged across the South to awaken our national conscience. Within a decade, thanks to the civil rights movement and President Johnson, the racial cast of federal policy-including some New Deal programs-was aggressively repudiated, and shared prosperity began to breach the color line.
Well, things were looking up. So what happened? Moyers continues:
To this day I remember John F. Kennedy's landmark speech at the Yale commencement in 1962. Echoing Daniel Bell's cold war classic The End of Ideology, JFK proclaimed the triumph of "practical management of a modern economy" over the "grand warfare of rival ideologies." The problem with this-and still a major problem today-is that the purported ideological cease-fire ended only a few years later. But the Democrats never re-armed, and they 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 paralyzing moral void in deciding how the burdens 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 political preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the conservative armies marched on Washington. And they succeeded brilliantly.
The Reagan at the Republican convention of 1980 called for Americans to rescue their country from destruction brought on by the Democratic Party.
His bold story knocked the wind out of the Democrats. He cynically quoted Tom Paine, the greatest democratic rebel we ever had. "We have it in our power to make the world over again." But Moyers points out that though Reagan went all the way back to the Mayflower in his speech what he really was evoking was the "Gilded Age".
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 abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control-a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of 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.
But this is not what the founders had in mind by "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (changed from private property to happiness, by the way). Moyers then recommends three books coming out that should be on every Congressperson and Senator’s desk. I always read Moyers’ recommendations. Two years ago he said that we had to read Harvey Kaye’s "Tom Paine and the Promise of America." I couldn’t agree more. What a book.
Now he recommends "Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism" by Paul Starr and gives this quote "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."
Next up, 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 "government ends up servicing the powerful and taking from everyone else."
Next up Norton Garfinkle who
picks up on 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.
FDR understood this narrative and reacquainted the American people with the story of our founders when he delivered his "Economic Bill of Rights" http://www.fdrheritage.org/...that expanded on our original political bill of rights. He took his cousin’s "Square Deal" and fashioned "The New Deal". Moyers says that "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 warning 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."
Anybody that reads all of Bill Moyers speeches and essays at Truthout.org knows where he is headed.
The question, then, is not about changing people; it's about reaching people. I'm not speaking simply of better information, 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 percent of households now have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent 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.
This is the debate that we see on the blogs every week at least. The Democratic Party must find a new narrative or it is doomed. I am just starting David Korten’s "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community" which is less earth muffin than it sounds. And I heard him on Air America also talk about a new story needed. And "Omnivore’s Dilemma" to bolster my new war on corn. It’s about changing the story of agriculture. William Greider works on a new narrative in "The Soul of Capitalism" as does Gar Aperovitz in "America Beyond Capitalism."
So now I’ve got to add three more books to my reading list. Thank goodness for that Barnes and Noble gift card.
Moyers concludes with a rallying cry as he always does.
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.
Doesn’t that give you shivers? So glad I will hear him live again when I attend next week’s "Media Reform Conference" in Memphis.
It's time to "dream large" as John Edwards recently said. And shout it out, not mew it out.