| The U.S. economy grew steadily through most of the 1990s. However, nearly all of the newly created wealth has gone to the already rich, magnifying market-generated inequalities. President Bush and the Republicans have reduced taxes paid by the rich and services for everyone else, while increasing corporate subsidies. Democrats for the most part have not opposed, but complained and followed. Greater inequality in income and wealth are both cause and effect of greater inequality in political power. Corruption of the political system by wealth is not new in the United States. But neither is the progressive movement, which rose in the late 19th Century and had some influence for much of the 20th. Whether it be in what the late Senator Paul Wellstone termed "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party," or in the Greens or other political forces, the progressive tradition has been to overcome the dominance of the extreme right. |
obtain from Phone: 800-444-1977 Title: The Progressive Story of
America
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| "This is the oldest story in America, the struggle to determine whether 'We the people' is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality, one nation indivisible, or merely a charade masking as piety, manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others." |
[The following is the last third only of the complete talk.] . . If anybody is going to own the politicians, it might as well be the people. When advised that businessmen... [interreupted by applause] Let me be clear on something. These progressives weren't all saints. Their glory years coincided with the heyday of lynching and segregation, of empire and the big stick, and the bold theft of the Panama Canal, with immigration restriction and ethnic stereotypes. Some of the progressives, as I said, were themselves businessmen only hoping to control an unruly marketplace by regulation. But by and large they were conservative reformers. They aimed to preserve the balance between wealth and commonwealth; their common enemy was unchecked priviledge; their common hope was a better democracy; and their common weapon was informed public opinion. In a few short years the progressive spirit made possible the election not only of reform mayors and governors, but of national figures like senator George Norris of Nebraska or Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and even that hard-to-classify political genius, Theodore Roosevelt--all three of them Republicans. |
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Here is the simplest laundry list of what was accomplished at the state
and federal levels.
That mighty progressive wave peaked in 1912, but these ideas that were unleashed by forge politics in the 20th century. Like his cousin Teddy, Franklin Roosevelt argued that the real enemy of enlightened capitalism were the malefactors of great wealth, the economic royalists from whom it was necessary to save capitalism by reform and regulation. Progressive government became an embedded tradition of Democrats, the heart of FDR's New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal, John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. It had its final fling in the landslide of 1964, when LBJ, who was a son of the west Texas hill country where the populist rebellion had been nurtured in the 1890's, won the endorsement for what he meant at the time to be the capstone of the arch of the New Deal. I had a modest role in that era. I shared in its exhiliration and its failures. We went too far, too fast. We overreached at home and in Viet Nam. We failed to examine some assumptions. We misjudged the rising discontents and the fierce backlash engendered by war, race, civil disturbance, violence and crime. Democrats grew so proprietary in this town that a sterile political establishment grew so fat and complacent it couldn't recognize its own intellectual bankruptrcy or see that a beltway was beginning to separate it from the rest of the country. The failure of Democratic politicians and public thinkers to respond to popular discontents to the daily lives of workers, consumers, parents, and ordinary taxpayers allowed the conservatives to convert public concern and hostility in a crusade to resurrect social Darwinism as a moral philosophy, muiti-national corporations as a governing class, and the theology of markets as a transcendental belief system. [The
part above has been added to Jer's letter from the OPB radio broadcast
of December 11, 2003.]
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| As a citizen I don't like the consequences of this crusade, but you
have to respect the conservatives for their successful strategy in gaining
control of American public life. Their stated and open aim is to
change how our country is governed -- to strip from government all its
functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors.
They are quite candid about it, even about their mean spirit in accomplishing
it. Their leading strategist in Washington, whom I mentioned
a moment ago, Grover Norquist, has said he wants to shrink the government
down to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. More recently,
in commenting on the fiscal crisis in the states and its affect on schools
and poor people, Norquist said, "I hope one of them" meaning one of the
states "goes bankrupt." So much for compassionate conservatism. But
at least Norquist says what he means and means what he says. The
White House pursues the same homicidal dream without saying so. Instead
of shrinking down the government, they're filling the bathtub with so much
debt that it floods the house, water-logs the economy, and washes away
services for decades that have lifted millions of Americans out of destitution
for decaedes. And what happens once the public's property has been
flooded? Privatize it. Sell it at a discounted rate to the corporations.
I actually disagree with Barney. I don't think this is the consequence of ignorance. I think this is deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States way of government. It is the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in over one hundred years. And I simply don't understand it or the malice in which it is steeped. Many people are nostalgic for a golden age. These people sincerely seem to long for the Gilded Age. That I can grasp. But I can't explain the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to dismantle every last brick of the social contract. What I can't explain is the rage of the counter-revolutionaries to dismantle every brick of the social contract. And I guess at this advanced age I simply--and this is hard--I simply have to accept the fact that the tension between haves and have-nots is built into human psychology and into society itself; it's ever been with us. But to be frank, I'm just as puzzled as to why, with right wing wrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once considered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being labeled "class warriors" [extended applause] ...why the Demoocrats are fearful of being labeled "class warriors" in a war the other side started and is winning. I truly don't get why conceding your opponent's premises and fighting on his turf isn't the sure-fire prescription for irrelevance and ultimately obsolescence. But I confess as well--why old old habits still persist, but I'm not partisan--I confess as well that I don't know how to resolve the social issues that have driven wedges into liberal ranks. And I don't know how to reconfigure democratic politics to fit into an age of soundbites and policy dominated by a media oligopoly whose corporate journalists are neutered and whose right-wing apologists have no shame |
Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance is Strength
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| What I do know: the social dislocations and meanness that galvanized
the progressive movement in the 19th century are resurgent, but so is your
presence tonight--your enthusiasm, the contagion of a celebration instead
of a wake-- so is the vision of justice, fairness, and equality...and that's
a powerful combination if only there are people willing to fight for them.
In addition to reading a lot of Paige[?] Smith these days--his several volumes of Amrerican History will stir the heart and mind--I've also been checking back with the American Commowealth by James Bryce, published in 1895 at the height of the First Gilded Age. Americans, Bryce found, "were hopeful and philanthropic." He saw first-hand the ills of that "dark and unlovely age," but he went on to say: "A hundred times I have been disheartened by the facts I was stating: a hundred times has the recollection of the abounding strength and vitality of the nation chased away those tremors." |
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| So, what will it take to get back in the fight? Understanding the real
interests and deep opinions of the American people is the first thing.
And what are they? That a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age. That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to America. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it's a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for production and progress, but it is amoral, if not immoral, when not contained within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy all the cars they want, all the homes they want, all the vacations they want, all the gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. That public services, when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that we all rise and fall together as "one nation, indivisible." That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half a democracy and half an oligarchy than it could survive "half slave and half free" and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady, heavy work--our work. Ideas have power as long as they are not frozen into doctrine. But ideas need legs. Hear me; hear me, young people, The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources and the protection of our air, water, and land, women's rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security and a social service based on merit--all of these were launched as citizen's movements and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and in the face of bitter opposition and sneering attacks by the Murdochs and De Lays, the Gingerichs and Limbaughs of their day. |
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| Democracy [doesn't] work without citizen activism and participation,
starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn't work much
better than trickle down economics. Hear me: Civilization happens
because we don't leave things to other people. What's right and good doesn't
come naturally. You have to stand up and argue and fight for it as
if the cause depends on you. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe
that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there's one candle
in your hand. But a thousand candles become a search light, a thousand
more a floodlight, a thousand more a light beacon in the sky.
I know you have the passion. So go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember that the progressives faced worse a hundred or so years ago, and Karl Rove isn't tougher than Mark Hanna in his time and a hundred years from--I will wager you, although I'm not, like Bill Bennett, a wagering man--a hundred years from now I will wager that some historian will be wondering how they let Norquist and Company got away with it as long as they did; how they waged war almost unopposed on the infrastructure of social justice, on the arrangements that make life fair, on the mutual rights and responsibilities that offer opportunity, civil liberties, and a decent standard of living to the least among us. "Democracy is not a lie" I first learned that from Henry Demarest Lloyd, the progressive journalist whose book, "Wealth against Commonwealth," laid open the Standard Oil trust a century ago. Lloyd came to the conclusion that to "Regenerate the individual is a half truth. The reorganization of the society, which he makes and which makes him and her, is the other part. The love of liberty," he said, "became liberty in America by clothing itself in the complicated group of structures known as the government of the United States." And then he said: "Democracy is not a lie. There lives in the body of the commonality the unexhausted virtue and the ever-refreshened strength which can rise equal to any problems of progress." And he concluded by saying, as I do, "In the hope of tapping some reserve of their power of self-help, this story is told to the people." Remember this story, the progressive story. It's your story.
Go out now, and pass it on.
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| Patriotism | The dangers of oversimplifications not recognized as such by the majority are among the most threatening dangers a democracy can face. The erosion of our society by these threats has already gone so far it may not be reparable. But we must try. |