[Dialogue] Need for a new national story - by Bill Moyers

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Here is something by Bill Moyers on the need for a
national story. It's worth staying to end.
Doris Hahn


For America's Sake
By Bill Moyers
The Nation
22 January 2007 Issue

The following is an adaptation of remarks made by Bill
Moyers to a December 12 gathering in New York
sponsored by The Nation, Demos, the Brennan Center for
Justice and the New Democracy Project. -The Editors

You could not have chosen a better time to gather.
Voters have provided a respite from a right-wing
radicalism predicated on the philosophy that extremism
in the pursuit of virtue is no vice. It seems only
yesterday that the Trojan horse of conservatism was
hauled into Washington to disgorge Newt Gingrich, Tom
DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and their hearty
band of ravenous predators masquerading as a political
party of small government, fiscal restraint and moral
piety and promising "to restore accountability to
Congress...[and] make us all proud again of the way
free people govern themselves."

Well, the long night of the junta is over, and
Democrats are ebullient as they prepare to take charge
of the multitrillion-dollar influence racket that we
used to call the US Congress. Let them rejoice while
they can, as long as they remember that while they ran
some good campaigns, they have arrived at this moment
mainly because George W. Bush lost a war most people
have come to believe should never have been fought in
the first place. Let them remember, too, in this
interim of sweet anticipation, that although they are
reveling in the ruins of a Republican reign brought
down by stupendous scandals, their own closet is
stocked with skeletons from an era when they were
routed from office following Abscam bribes and savings
and loan swindles that plucked the pockets and purses
of hard-working, tax-paying Americans.

As they rejoice, Democrats would be wise to be mindful
of Shakespeare's counsel, "'Tis more by fortune ...
than by merit." For they were delivered from the
wilderness not by their own goodness and purity but by
the grace of K Street corruption, DeLay Inc.'s
duplicity, the pitiless exploitation of Terri Schiavo,
the disgrace of Mark Foley and a shameful partisan
cover-up, the shamelessness of Jack Abramoff and a
partisan conspiracy, and neocon arrogance and
amorality (yes, amoral: Apparently there is no end to
the number of bodies Bill Kristol and Richard Perle
are prepared to watch pile up on behalf of illusions
that can't stand the test of reality even one Beltway
block from the think tanks where they are hatched).
The Democrats couldn't have been more favored by the
gods if they had actually believed in one!

But whatever one might say about the election, the
real story is one that our political and media elites
are loath to acknowledge or address. I am not speaking
of the lengthy list of priorities that progressives
and liberals of every stripe are eager to put on the
table now that Democrats hold the cards in Congress.
Just the other day a message popped up on my computer
from a progressive advocate whose work I greatly
admire. Committed to movement-building from the ground
up, he has results to show for his labors. His request
was simple: "With changes in Congress and at our state
capitol, we want your input on what top issues our
lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top
priority."

I clicked. Su re enough, up came a list of thirty-four
issues-an impressive list that began with
"African-American" and ran alphabetically through
"energy" and "higher education" to "guns,"
"transportation," "women's issues" and "workers'
rights." It wasn't a list to be dismissed, by any
means, for it came from an unrequited thirst for
action after a long season of malignant opposition to
every item on the agenda. I understand the mindset.
Here's a fellow who values allies and appreciates what
it takes to build coalitions; who knows that although
our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery
to the heart that pumps life through the body politic,
and each is important to the health of democracy. This
is an activist who knows political success is the sum
of many parts.

But America needs something more right now than a
"must-do" list from liberals and progressives. America
needs a different story. The very morning I read the
message from the progressive activist, t he New York
Times reported on Carol Ann Reyes. Carol Ann Reyes is
63. She lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia
and is homeless. Somehow she made her way to a
hospital with serious, untreated needs. No details
were provided as to what happened to her there, except
that the hospital-which is part of Kaiser Permanente,
the largest HMO in the country-called a cab and sent
her back to skid row. True, they phoned ahead to
workers at a rescue shelter to let them know she was
coming. But some hours later a surveillance camera
picked her up "wandering around the streets in a
hospital gown and slippers." Dumped in America.

Here is the real political story, the one most
politicians won't even acknowledge: the reality of the
anonymous, disquieting daily struggle of ordinary
people, including the most marginalized and vulnerable
Americans but also young workers and elders and
parents, families and communities, searching for
dignity and fairness against long odds in a cruel
market world.

Everywhere you turn you'll find people who believe
they have been written out of the story. Everywhere
you turn there's a sense of insecurity grounded in a
gnawing fear that freedom in America has come to mean
the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions
of Americans are dumped from the Dream. So let me say
what I think up front: The leaders and thinkers and
activists who honestly tell that story and speak
passionately of the moral and religious values it puts
in play will be the first political generation since
the New Deal to win power back for the people.

There's no mistaking that America is ready for change.
One of our leading analysts of public opinion, Daniel
Yankelovich, reports that a majority want social
cohesion and common ground based on pragmatism and
compromise, patriotism and diversity. But because of
the great disparities in wealth, the "shining city on
the hill" has become a gate d community whose
privileged occupants, surrounded by a moat of money
and protected by a political system seduced with cash
into subservience, are removed from the common life of
the country. The wreckage of this abdication by elites
is all around us.

Corporations are shredding the social compact,
pensions are disappearing, median incomes are
flattening and healthcare costs are soaring. In many
ways, the average household is generally worse off
today than it was thirty years ago, and the public
sector that was a support system and safety net for
millions of Americans across three generations is in
tatters. For a time, stagnating wages were somewhat
offset by more work and more personal debt. Both
political parties craftily refashioned those major
renovations of the average household as the new
standard, shielding employers from responsibility for
anything Wall Street didn't care about. Now, however,
the more acute major risks workers have been forced to
be ar as employers reduce their health and retirement
costs-on orders from Wall Street-have made it clear
that our fortunes are being reversed. Polls show that
a majority of US workers now believe their children
will be worse off than they are. In one recent survey,
only 14 percent of workers said that they have
obtained the American Dream.

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.

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 f ew 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
chieftans 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.

; When Ronald Reagan addressed the Republican National
Convention in 1980, he a 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 Party 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
Revolution, 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 De pression, the Civil
War and the American 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 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.

And t hat 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 one of us has a
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 of 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 book s 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 "government 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 nineteenth
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, Schwar z 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 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 th e
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 be not 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 exp osed 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
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." 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 political 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 for poor children, Social Security, the GI
Bill, home mortgage subsidies, progressive
taxation-democratic instruments that checked economic
tyra nny 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 achievements of the last century grew
from shared goals and collaboration 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 Americans really care
about. More and more people agree that growing
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 ge neration
now.

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.

Some stories doom us. In Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond tells of the
Viking colony that disappeared in the fifteenth
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 twenty-first 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 nat ion 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 that 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 were left
to forage. The other story joins the memory of
struggles that have been waged with the possibi lity
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 forty 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 w hen they choose to send our soldiers into
war." The eight-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 la ptops, 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.