Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed —
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”
Several of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution, ranking from private all the way up to captain. On Independence Day, I often think about what led them to sever their bonds with the people who had been up to that point their countrymen. I think the answer is that, when the revolutionary moment comes, it doesn’t arrive through the town crier, or the newspaper. It arrives right in the middle of your daily life, and you can’t go on as you have before.
It’s men knocking on the door in the middle of the night, waking you, harassing you, trying to intimidate you and your neighbors. That’s how the revolutionary moment comes.
It’s the inability to function in a free marketplace because some monopoly or corporate boss far away has rigged the system against you and gutted your community’s economy. That’s how the revolutionary moment comes.
It’s the realization that the government that’s supposed to represent you not only doesn’t care what you think — its officials are actively trying to avoid allowing you to participate until they exhaust your desire to engage. That’s how the revolutionary moment comes.
There are echoes of that time in modern-day America. We are in a revolutionary moment. Half-measures won’t do. We can’t go on as we have before. We have to make the turn.
Our campaign and our supporters are united behind a simple message: Liberty and justice. For all. I believe if we can fight for these values in real, tangible ways, we can reconnect with the largest bloc of voters in American life: those who sit on the sidelines not because they don’t believe in the idea of liberty and justice for all, but because they have lost faith in the rigged system to deliver it. We can enlist them in the revolution that must continue today.
So what does a campaign to restore liberty and justice for all look like?
To me, a campaign for liberty means:
- Fighting corporate bosses and monopolies when they take away our political and economic choices
- Passing Medicare for All so we can make choices free of the fear of a medical bill
- Having real choices about our future that aren’t wrecked by college or consumer debt or a devastated climate
This idea of liberty reclaims what we used to insist upon. As FDR put it, we know “that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place,” and that “economic royalists” are just as much a threat to freedom as unchecked political power. This idea incorporates Henry Wallace’s understanding that “[m]onopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise.” Liberty must mean political and economic liberty, or it’s meaningless — and a fight for liberty will go nowhere unless we recognize with clarity that the economic royalists are just as much a threat to our liberty as a totalitarian politician.
A campaign for justice must broaden to include economic justice as well as justice in the traditional sense, meaning:
- Passing a fair, $15/hour minimum wage and equal pay for women.
- Fighting economic injustice, and getting justice for the people and communities crushed by corporate interests or Wall Street
- Ending the injustice of mass incarceration and the attack on immigrants.
Liberty and justice for all means everyone has a fair shot at the American dream, not just those at the top — regardless of ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or religion.
Dedication to these ideas of liberty and justice for all — for everyone, no exceptions — recognizes that it’s not just the overall wealth of our society, but the size of the gaps between the rich and the poor, that drive increases in “physical and mental illness, violence, low math and literacy scores among young people, lower levels of trust and weaker community life, poorer child well-being, more drug abuse, lower social mobility and higher rates of imprisonment and teenage births.” That knowledge will cause us to recoil from the intense and toxic economic inequality that involves such grotesque facts as 8 men owning as much wealth as half of the world. Fighting for liberty and justice and against inequality is a requirement if we are to knit our country back together.
We have to approach this fight for liberty and justice for all with the fire of a revolution — because the stakes are huge and immediate.
Right now, Republicans in Congress want to kick between 22 million and 23 million people off of their health coverage provided by the Affordable Care Act. We know from research on the outcomes of a lack of health insurance that once 22 million people lose health coverage, close to 100,000 people additional people could die per year, to say nothing of the financial devastation it sets up for millions of Americans who get sick or injured. The only purpose behind this vicious attack on our lives and liberty is to provide a tax cut for very rich people.
Unfortunately, on this Independence Day, we find ourselves ruled by one of the most toxic groups of corporatists and economic royalists to ever hold power in this country. But against the ugly coded cries of “Make America Great Again,” we can set Langston Hughes’ demand to “Let America Be America Again.”
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain —
All, all the stretch of these great green states —
And make America again!
Our campaign has a message for the corporate bosses, monopolists, and royalists behind the attack on our health and the broader attack on our liberties: You can have your yacht. You can have your mansion. You can have your big company and your big bank accounts. But you can’t have our neighbors, you can’t have our liberty, and you can’t have our lives.
When we stand up for liberty and justice for all, we’re standing firm in the American tradition and remembering who we are. Yes, there are those among us that take advantage of others. Yes there are corporate bosses and ultra-wealthy monopolists.
But we’re also the tempest-tossed.
The wretched refuse of the teeming shores of the Old World.
The indigenous survivors of the colonization of the New World, the descendants of African peoples torn from home and shipped across the sea for whom “America was never America to me,” but who swear “America will be!”
I remember who I am. I’m the descendant of people who fought to throw off a king. I come from people who answered the world-wide welcome shining from the lightning-touched torch of a mighty woman whose names are Liberty, Justice, and Mother of Exiles. Eleven generations after she welcomed my people, I can imagine her turning from the sea and seeing behind her, entrenched in a once new world, her old enemies who once sent us fleeing into her arms. And where she once rescued us, she needs us to rescue her.
That’s our calling today. To tend the lightning in her torch. To save liberty and justice for all. This is our moment. This is our revolution.
When we salute the flag today and celebrate our nation’s independence from the crown, let’s remember that the revolution never ends, and we have a fight of our own, right now, and the future of country is at stake. Let’s make sure our effort is worthy of those that have come before.
Happy Independence Day.
Derrick Crowe is a candidate for Congress in the 21st District of Texas. He’s running against Lamar Smith, the climate-change-denying chairman of the House Science Committee. Learn more at electcrowe.com.