Democracy in
America Is a Series of Narrow Escapes,
and We May Be Running Out of Luck
By Bill Moyers
CommonDreams.org
Saturday 17 May
2008
The following
is an excerpt from Bill Moyers' new book, "Moyers on Democracy."
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" (Doubleday, 2008)
and the host of the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.
