[Dialogue] Democracy in America Is a Series of Narrow Escapes, and We May Be Running Out of Luck

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Saturday, May 17, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
<http://www.commondreams.org>  

Democracy in America Is a Series of Narrow Escapes, and We May Be Running
Out of Luck

by Bill Moyers

The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers' new book, "Moyers on Democracy
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523807?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0385523807&adid=1VF197204RR1CBA4FCDK&> ".

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running
out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the
historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress,
the conviction that the present is "better" than the past and the future
will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep
telling ourselves, "The system works."

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and
fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future
together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth
and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and
stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country
- a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as "believing the dogma of
'democracy' on a superficial public level but not believing it privately."
We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state
under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it
has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the
political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer
seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent
and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to
our children's children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as
public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being
consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal
of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like "liberty" and "individual
freedom" invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787
promise to "promote the general welfare" have been perverted to create a
government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political
class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people
are losing it. It isn't necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful
Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry,
or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King
Priam's palace grounds wailing "The Greeks are coming." Or Socrates, the
gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere,
if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes
open to see what's happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to
spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the
ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft's
essential imperatives: connect the dots.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault
on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and
dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the
river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process
and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments - genuine
savings - in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose
inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of
small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and
out of hope.

And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of
sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great
Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who
pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who
are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded
for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable
opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that
effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in
their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on
which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes
are satisfactory to the sleek "bundlers" who turn the spigots of cash on and
off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the
Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly
"veneration for wealth" are now de facto in force and higher than the
Founding Fathers could have imagined. "Money rules Our laws are the output
of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties
lie to us and the political speakers mislead us." Those words were spoken by
Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept
the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was
signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.

Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind
prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled
anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of
federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose
jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care
for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans
with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way
upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our
triumphant reactionaries' campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum
wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them
of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking
middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up
with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable
housing - while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are
legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and
with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence
over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: "No one can eliminate
prejudices - just recognize them." Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and
poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the
state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice
for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as
proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln's sacred
belief in "government of the people, by the people, and for the people";
mocks the democratic notion of government as "a voluntary union for the
common good" embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the
Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy
popularized in the last quarter century that "freedom" simply means freedom
to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair
theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that
the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the
enabler of privilege - the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and
laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs - is as subversive as Benedict
Arnold's betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease:
"The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the
foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the
great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from
tramping its plain provisions underfoot."

Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored in the idea
that "We the People" - not just a favored few - would identify and remedy
common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our forebears undertook
when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves
wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with notions of a wholly
privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that, as
Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism of the American
Revolution, discovered its greatness "by creating a prosperous free society
belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary
pursuits of happiness" - a democracy that changed the lives of "hitherto
neglected and despised masses of common laboring people."

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest
in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for
lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to
speak truth to power - a modest risk compared to those of some journalists
in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the
identical "crime." But our journalists are not in control of the instruments
they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing
houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of
corporate effort, news organizations - particularly in television - are
folded into entertainment divisions. The "news hole" in the print media
shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed
citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity
scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner
workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and
readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors
confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative
reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be
sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow
popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their
existence and their First Amendment rights.

Bill Moyers is the author of many books including "Moyers on Democracy
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385523807?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0385523807&adid=1QXN7XQYA7M7R836D5XM&> "
(Doubleday, 2008) and the host of the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/17/9016/

 

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