Bill Moyers had Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) and Robert Kuttner(American Prospect) on his show the other day to talk about why we progressives just can't seem to reach critical mass in the current political climate. Kuttner made a crucial point:
The other thing that's missing, if you compare [Obama] to Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, the other thing missing is a social movement. In all these great transformations, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the Civil Rights movement and Johnson. It describes the Abolitionists and Lincoln, and it describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. Where's the movement?
At first I thought: he's wrong. The Nets Root Nation is the movement. Then I realized: no, it's not a movement. So far it's a personality cult. First the cult was focused on Howard Dean. Then it focused on Barack Obama.
Kuttner also said something that added considerable urgency to the idea of forming a social movement. He said:
One way or another there is going to be a social movement because so many people are hurting, and so many people are feeling correctly that Wall Street is getting too much and Main Street is getting too little, and if it's not a progressive social movement that articulates the frustration and the reform program, you know that the right wing is going to do it. And that I think is what ought to be scaring us silly.
This may seem idiotic, but until he said that I hadn't even considered the possibility that there could be a right-wing "social movement." I had this idee fixe that right meant rich and elite. But Kuttner is absolutely correct: under the surface of the right-wing teabag birther froth is a riptide of disenchantment. We have known since "What Happened to Kansas?" that these voters are being peeled off from the old progressive farmer wing of the Democratic Party and signed up to the cultural values wing of the Republican Party.
What issues are ripe for a social movement? One thing I have noticed over the past several years is that there are a handful of positions favored by the VAST MAJORITY of the American people but which are NOT EVEN CONSIDERED by Congress. These include: (1) single payer health insurance; (2) a return to usury rules, meaning a limit such as 12 - 15 percent on the amount of interest a bank (or anyone else) can charge to loan money; and (3) a return to a much more progressive taxation system with the idea being that this is what prevents the gap between rich and poor from getting out of control (between 1945 - 1964, the heyday of the American middle class, the average income tax rate on income over $250,000 was 90%).
If a social movement could focus on issues that command a GREAT MAJORITY (three-fifths or more) of support and that Congress won't even touch or consider, then maybe it could command support from across partisan lines.