Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck
By
Bill Moyers Read Spanish Version
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.
