OVERCOMING THE DEMOCRATIC DISCONNECT
SOMETHING SCARY ABOUT AMERICA, REALLY SCARY, AND REALLY unsettling, became evident to us as we traveled the United States on extensive national tours for our two previous books—one of which examined the collapse of mainstream journalism as a source of the information that is necessary and sufficient to sustain democracy, and the other of which examined the collapse of democracy itself under the weight of a campaign-finance system so broken that it has become the plaything of rogue billionaires and self-interested CEOs.1 Everyone understood what we were talking about. We were examining the fundamentals of the political process as it currently operates, and condemning that process as a travesty that no longer serves citizens or communities or the country as a whole. Yet, we got almost no pushback. Even when we appeared as unapologetic progressives on conservative or libertarian talk-radio programs, even when we responded to callers from across the political spectrum, even when we “debated” those who had positioned themselves as defenders of traditional values, there was a universal sense that the United States had entered into a period of crisis.
That wasn’t the scary part. While the crisis is serious, it would be far worse if people failed to recognize that the country has veered off course.
The scary part was the response of many of the best and brightest people we met to that recognition. As part of these tours, we gave well over a hundred talks on scores of college campuses. The discussions were thoughtful and highly engaged; we were struck by the deep awareness that something had gone askew with America. No one—no student, no professor—jumped up and said, “Hey, you’ve got it all wrong. The system is working just fine.” Back in the late 1990s when we spoke on campuses, we occasionally encountered spirited defenses of the status quo. No more. On our recent tours we found deep recognition of the crisis and a palpable desire to address it: to boldly and genuinely democratize the nation. But we also found a profound and numbing pessimism. Americans live in a time when it often seems that nothing of consequence is ever accomplished by the political system for the benefit of the people—or, at the least, that nothing that is accomplished is as good as was promised, or as permanent as expected. When a putative candidate of the people, Barack Obama, is elected with spellbinding rhetoric and overwhelming, unprecedented support from young voters, the actual results are pretty much business as usual on core economic issues, if not across the board. The message we got from every corner of the country, from every campus and church basement and union hall, was that the experience of politics in recent years has poured gasoline on the flames of cynicism. You can fight the power, we were informed. But you cannot win. Resistance, too many Americans of good sense and good will were telling us, is futile.
Scholars and researchers and writers from across the political spectrum point to the certainty that severe economic disruptions, coming in the none-too-distant future, are going to undermine the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans. Few dispute this, at least not with evidence. Most people, too, accept that the democratic infrastructure, as it is currently arranged, is insufficient to foster the necessary response to the challenges that are coming our way. These same people recognize that rebuilding the democratic infrastructure is necessary and long overdue, and would go a long way toward making it possible to reform the economy so we could dramatically improve the human condition. But then the despair sets in. This is impossible, we are told. People will never rise up and make social change. This is as good as it gets. Remarkably, even people who are working hard for change tell us that, in all likelihood, their efforts are for naught. They will struggle on, for reasons of morality and solidarity, they say, but, really, it’s hopeless. These good citizens are experiencing the poet Allen Ginsberg’s sad, resigned calculus: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”2
The resulting depoliticization may well be the greatest victory of the counterrevolution launched in the 1970s by the web of corporate-funded think tanks, policy networks, political action committees, and media that has come to dominate the discourse. It has so disillusioned those who know the current system is not working that many of the Americans who should be our most engaged and active citizens see no hope at all. This represents the greatest challenge Americans face today as a people. Yet, it is not a new challenge. Rulers have always found that having their subjects be quiescent of their own volition is the preferable means of maintaining the status quo. But history also tells us that a time comes when the people can stand it no more—when it is not just optimism but necessity that inspires a reaction against conditions that have grown unbearable—when, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “evils” are no longer “sufferable.”
This will be the case again, and soon. Indeed, there are signs all around us that the roots of a new activism on behalf of economic democracy are growing underneath the corporate media radar. There was no movement for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage when we were touring in 2010, and only the barest hints of one when we were touring in 2013. Now, that movement is everywhere. There are parallel movements for a Retail Workers Bill of Rights, for new unions, for a new economy. These movements are not yet so powerful as they will be, and they are not yet so linked together as they will be. But the remarkable response to the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, which made the linkages in a political context, suggests that the prospect for a transformational moment is real. So, too, does history. Indeed, we can learn from history what it takes for popular forces to not merely engage in electoral campaigns, but to secure a fuller politics and a fairer economy.
We have felt the urgency and seen the activism as we have worked on this book. Something is stirring in the land, because of the economic turbulence that has become so very evident—and because, no doubt, people understand that the turbulence is just the beginning. We still hear plaintive wails of hopelessness. But we also hear talk of organizing, marching, and building something. In fact, one of the most common questions we get at public events these days, sometimes during the formal question-and-answer period, sometimes in furtive conversations that extend late into the evening, has to do with where exhausted citizens who were perfectly willing to expend all that was left of their energy might direct themselves. “What’s the most pressing problem?” “What’s the most important reform?” “What should I be doing right now?” These people do not want to give up; they know that giving up is not an option. Their numbers are growing. This chapter, and this book, is for them, for you.
AS REAL A REVOLUTION AS THAT OF 1776
We have reviewed the crucial debates concerning democracy at the founding of the nation and in its earliest years. There were also important lessons then about how to make effective social change. “The man who loves his country on its own account, and not merely for its trappings of interest or power, can never be divorced from it, can never refuse to come forward when he finds that she is engaged in dangers which he has the means of warding off,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a 1797 missive that noted threats to liberty coming not from distant kings or tea companies but from elected congressmen and presidents.3 A few years later, when those threats had become all too evident, and when Jefferson was leading an electoral revolt against the abuses of John Adams’s presidency, the author of the Declaration of Independence observed that “it behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves. We are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so.”4
Americans still believe this. But they are not, necessarily, “full of confidence in themselves.” For that confidence to be renewed, a connection must be made. Not for the first time, but again—as it has been in the past. Jefferson’s victory over Adams in 1800 represented the first such American connection. Even at a point when the country fell far short of democracy, when the vast majority of adults could not and did not vote, when editors and members of Congress had been threatened with imprisonment (and in several circumstances were actually jailed) for challenging the authority of an increasingly totalitarian president, a political revolution occurred. Jefferson’s defeat of Adams led to much more than the first peaceful transfer of power from a president of one faction to a president of another faction. “The revolution of 1800” was, the new president correctly observed, “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.”5
A stack of books has been written about the election of 1800, and scholars continue to wrestle with its lessons and consequences. Yet, the explanation of what happened came before the vote from Jefferson himself, in a 1798 letter to John Taylor of Caroline, as the recipient was known. A great advocate of citizen engagement to prevent “a capitalist sect artificially created” from concentrating wealth and power in the new United States, Taylor was agitated by the machinations of Adams and his compatriots, via the Alien and Sedition Acts, to consolidate the authority they had obtained following Adams’s narrow 1796 victory over Jefferson.6 Jefferson counseled that
a little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. . . .
And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.7
An impulsive and often contradictory figure, Jefferson still frustrates biographers. Yet, for all his flaws, he had two remarkable strengths: he was a great popularizer of ideas (second only to Paine) and he was a master of political strategy. Jefferson understood precisely what was required for those who are disempowered to achieve a political revolution. He had experience in this regard, both as the essential author of the Declaration of Independence and as the champion of religious tolerance in colonial Virginia. He understood that there must be “a standard of general feeling” in order to generate both the political will and the political reforms necessary to bend the arc of history. Thus, the key phrase in Jefferson’s letter to John Taylor was not the oft-recalled reference to “the reign of witches” but the neglected reference to how “if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together.”8
What Jefferson was focusing on was the prospect that disparate movements and factions—and there were many in the early days of the American experiment—might be drawn together by a common sense of crisis. And by a common sense of how to respond to that crisis. Though cautious American historians frequently write around this reality, crisis moments in the United States invariably have immediate and clear economic underpinnings. The frequent causes of turbulence are technological, societal, and structural changes to the economy that upset both individual work life and society.
The 1790s saw several financial panics sweep the new United States, as real-estate speculation by foreign and domestic elites created bubbles that burst in much the same way that the speculators of the 1990s and 2000s created boom-and-bust cycles leading up to the financial meltdown of 2008. The speculators often regrouped, but the damage done to the condition of port workers, wage laborers, and shopkeepers lingered—for instance, the Panic of 1797 was still felt in 1800, especially in the port cities along the east coast.9 This was one of the factors that “hooped together” critics of Adams’s presidency and helped Jefferson to win states he had lost in the preceding election, including New York and Maryland. Jefferson’s foes in 1800 referred to the Virginian and his supporters as Jacobins, borrowing the term first used to describe the most radical of French revolutionaries and then quickly adapted to describe the advocates who, though far from France, shared a taste for upsetting old political and economic orders. From afar, the British conservative Edmund Burke warned that Jefferson and his kind were “intoxicated with ‘the wild gas’ of liberty.” Burke was giving Jefferson too much credit, but many of Jefferson’s followers were proud to call themselves Jacobins. They joined Democratic-Republican societies that were referred to as “Jacobin Clubs” and that amplified demands not merely for “liberty” but for “equality.”10
THE URGENT DEMAND OF THE WORKING CLASS
As Jefferson’s career was winding down—he left the White House in 1809—the first industrial revolution was transforming England. It was here that technological revolution was fused with a radical transformation of the economy, with explosive effects on the people. The British historian E. P. Thompson provided the deepest insight into the “Pilgrim’s Progress” by which disparate individuals and groups of individuals become a class that identifies itself as separate and apart from the political and economic overlords of a nation, with immediate demands for reforms that might alter the nexus of power so that, via democracy, the ruled might become the rulers.11 Half a century ago, in the introduction to The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson reframed and dramatically expanded the discussion of class and class consciousness to establish an understanding of the champions of democracy as a class of citizens seeking to forge a society in which their demands for justice, initially placed through direct-action protests against changes they could not control, might create a circumstance of majority rule:
Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and laborers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.12
Thompson recognized in the machine-breaking protests of the Luddite rebels against the manifestations of a new industrial age something more than an unthinking rejection of technology and labor-saving devices. He saw the honest expression of a fear—perhaps not fully understood or explained, but fully experienced—that a change imposed by mill owners and “rotten-borough” parliamentarians would render the circumstance of the great mass of workers less humane, less reasonable, less fair. Thompson does not suggest that the initial protests by the Luddites and their fellow insurgents against the oppressive demands of industrialization were all about democracy. Those who protested were often, as author Kirkpatrick Sale has so ably explained, “rebels against the future.”13 But Thompson teaches us that they were also part of something bigger. The historian argues that isolated and seemingly separate protests across the British Isles in the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth century began to forge a consciousness of the need for democracy—and of how that consciousness eventually led to mass mobilizations on behalf of fundamental and transformative political reform.
With the emergence of an understanding that few significant changes could be achieved by separate economic, social, and political reform movements, but that every change might become possible with a focused and cohesive movement for democracy, the champions of labor rights, religious tolerance, and republicanism turned toward one another. An industrial revolution had thrown everything into question, and in the initial uncertainty the old elites had imposed their will. But the questions were not answered. In fact, they grew more pressing. This, in turn, created a circumstance that provides broad insight into how movements for economic justice produce an agitation for democracy sufficient to permit citizens to repair the breach created by elites.
The first decades of the nineteenth century were a time of epic technological and industrial advances in the United Kingdom, but also of epically irresponsible financial speculation—almost on a scale with what we see today in the United States. That speculation caused cycles of boom and bust that became increasingly devastating for the great majority of workers, farmers, and small shopkeepers. As failed speculators sought to retain their elite status and their comforts by squeezing the poor, it grew increasingly clear that advancing science and industry did not equate to advancing equality. In fact, shifting economic arrangements were creating social chaos. The 1830s saw a banking crisis and then a broader collapse of industrial employment in Britain, such that “grievous reports of distress were being received in 1837 from all the manufacturing districts” of the British Isles. Tens of thousands were unemployed in Manchester, fourteen thousand were out of work in Paisley, while business failures were “alarmingly frequent” in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. Riots swept the country as the people rose in opposition to the crude and punishing “Poor Law” of 1834. It consigned impoverished adults and children into workhouses with intentionally deplorable housing and food in exchange for mandatory unpaid labor, of the back-breaking variety—“the operation of which was now for the first time being actively felt.”14 Yet, the response of the economically and politically powerful elites of Great Britain was not to recognize the severity of the crisis and the barbaric consequences for the people. Rather, it was to use the full policing and military force of the central government to put down the protests and to jail and deport those who objected.15
It was then that workers and farmers would no longer settle for old inequalities dressed up in an emperor’s new clothes of industrial “progress.” They began to identify as Chartists, joining their disparate protests, their disparate energies, their disparate fears, and their disparate hopes to the campaign for a “People’s Charter” that demanded the democratization of politics and governing:
• All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage)
• Voting should take place by secret ballot
• Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years
• Constituencies should be of equal size
• Members of Parliament should be paid
• The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished16
Today, these changes may appear to be simple and incremental reforms. But at the time they were lodged by the London Working Men’s Association, the demands were portrayed as the height of radicalism—anticipating some principles of equal representation that the United States, the supposed exporter of democratic ideals, would not formally embrace for more than a century. Yet, when the People’s Charter was first circulated in 1838, the radicals gathered 1.25 million signatures supporting their cause, and then several years later they gained 3 million signatures.17 The powerful pushed back, often using violence to thwart peaceful protest and direct-action demonstrations, yet even official historians now accept that “the Chartists’ legacy was strong” and reforms once imagined as radical were with relative speed accepted as “inevitable.”18 From these reforms came a new politics, and from that new politics came transformations of working life and of society that answered the “clumsy” questions first posed by the Luddites about what would happen to the displaced, the unemployed, the unrepresented masses in a new industrial age.
How did this happen? John Bates, an English Chartist who would eventually immigrate to the United States and continue the democratic struggle by organizing miners into a pioneering American union, offered the best explanation. Recalling the transformative moment when many struggles became one, he explained that in Britain “here were [radical] associations all over the county, but there was a great lack of cohesion. One wanted the ballot, another manhood suffrage and so on. The radicals were without unity of aim and method, and there was but little hope of accomplishing anything. When, however, the People’s Charter was drawn up . . . clearly defining the urgent demands of the working class, we felt we had a real bond of union; and so transformed our Radical Association into local Chartist centres.”19 A period of economic and social upheaval spawned a plethora of radical responses that slowly coalesced into a cohesive demand for democracy.
This is an arc of history that must be understood in our times. It provides an indication of the vital role to be played by contemporary campaigners on a host of issues, and of the way in which Americans might confront and tame the digital disruptions that have already occurred and those that are sure to come. Thompson invites us, correctly, essentially, to look for a new set of heroes who are not celebrated in the “official” histories of the past or on the business pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal today:
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “Utopian artisan,” and even the deluded follower of [religious prophetess] Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
Our only criterion of judgment should not be whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. In some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. Moreover, this period now compels attention for two particular reasons. First, it was a time in which the plebeian movement placed an exceptionally high valuation upon egalitarian and democratic values. Although we often boast our democratic way of life, the events of these critical years are far too often forgotten or slurred over. Second, the greater part of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.20
Thompson penned those words more than half a century ago, before there was a Google or a Facebook or a Twitter, before there were cellphones or personal computers. Yet, we would update his proposition only in two ways. First, we are certain that Thompson’s view of political formation is appropriate not merely to an industrial age but to a digital age. Second, we fear that the timelines Thompson worked on are speeding up, as barriers once thought insurmountable are collapsed in a chaotic age when historian of science James Gleick charts “the acceleration of just about everything.”21
BREAKING THE YOKE OF SOULLESS INDUSTRIAL DESPOTISM
The advocates of humanity are getting better and better at expressing frustration with expanded inequality and diminished democracy. Yet, they have not succeeded in turning these understandings into a practical politics and governance that can make the change Theodore Roosevelt and his supporters proposed more than a century ago when they spoke of replacing “the tyrannies” of economic and political elites with governance that starts with the premise that “this country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.”22 It was at this moment, in the first decades of the twentieth century, that the American people created the first great democratic surge in response to the heavy industrialization, widening inequality, and rampant corruption of the Gilded Age.
Roosevelt was not a radical, and he has richly earned his share of criticism. He was a synthesizer of popular ideas that were once considered radical but that were rapidly becoming part of the weltanschauung of a new age. Roosevelt and his allies argued that “it is time to set the public welfare in the first place.”23 But their point of beginning was not with a specific program. Rather, it was with a recognition that the America in which they sought to achieve progressive economic and social change lacked the democratic infrastructure that was needed to reflect the will of the people onto the policies adopted by legislators and executives. In the great framing address of what would come to be a Progressive Era of sweeping reform and social change, Roosevelt explained that
no sane man who has been familiar with the government of this country for the last twenty years will complain that we have had too much of the rule of the majority. The trouble has been a far different one that, at many times and in many localities, there have held public office in the States and in the nation men who have, in fact, served not the whole people, but some special class or special interest. I am not thinking only of those special interests which by grosser methods, by bribery and crime, have stolen from the people.
I am thinking as much of their respectable allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the whole United States, while the rights of all the people were merely an unsecured debt. . . .
Now there has sprung up a feeling deep in the hearts of the people—not of the bosses and professional politicians, not of the beneficiaries of special privilege—a pervading belief of thinking men that when the majority of the people do in fact, as well as theory, rule, then the servants of the people will come more quickly to answer and obey, not the commands of the special interests, but those of the whole people.24
While casual historians tend to imagine isolated historical events defined by clashes between great men, serious observers of social movements that lead to meaningful change recognize the way in which economic change in general—and patterns of economic instability in particular—bend the arc of history toward moments of initial upheaval and eventual political and social change. This is true in the British experience observed by E. P. Thompson. And this is true in the American experience of Thomas Jefferson and the nation that extended from his Declaration of Independence. America has seen many moments of intensely focused and effective popular engagement in the past, as abolitionists forced the issue of slavery to the center of the nation’s agenda, as “vote yourself a farm” campaigners forced the redistribution of public lands to the poor and new immigrants, as populists and trust busters undid the Gilded Age, as New Dealers saw off the “Toryism” of the Wall Street gamblers and unfeeling corporatists whose covetous greed had crashed the global economy, as civil rights campaigners began to give meaning to a two-centuries-old promise that “all men [and women] are created equal.”
None of these movements blossomed from thin air. They bloomed with deep and complex root structures, which had grown together over decades. Disparate movements for what had once seemed to be very different causes came, usually in a moment of crisis, to a realization that they were not so different in their fundamental purposes. Thus, an agrarian populist excited by William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech to the 1896 Democratic National Convention might eventually make common cause with an urban do-gooder enthused by Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. Like the Chartists of another land, responding to an earlier stage of an ongoing industrial revolution, Americans came in the early years of the twentieth century to understand the necessity of uniting in pursuit of democratic reforms that were needed to address the corruption, the inequality, and the economic and political violence of a new age of “robber barons.” It is no coincidence that the economically and socially unstable period from 1910 to 1920 saw the United States amend its constitution to create an elected rather than an appointed US Senate, to establish an income tax and the infrastructure by which corporations would be taxed and regulated, to extend the franchise to women so that 133 years into the American experiment it might finally be possible to speak of majority rule.25 The first wave of the modern democratic infrastructure was being constructed.
Nothing was given to the American people in this period. These constitutional amendments were demanded by a great movement for reform that crossed lines of gender and race and class and partisanship and immediate self-interest. The political platforms of the 1912 election—in which the Democratic, Republican, Progressive, and Socialist parties competed with a seriousness and an intensity that has not since been matched—did not peddle pabulum. They outlined bold agendas for altering the character of the economy and the direction of society, and they recognized the need for democratic changes that would make it possible to achieve those alterations. The economic critique drew from economist Thorstein Veblen’s summary dismissal of then-existing capitalism as irrational and unfair. Of course, the Socialist Party platform of American Railway Union leader Eugene Victor Debs and Milwaukee Mayor Emil Seidel was more radical, but the practical agenda of the Socialists, with its calls for a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, conservation of natural resources, and an end to child labor, was echoed in the platforms of the other parties. So, too, were calls for an elected Senate, and for women’s suffrage. And so, too, in only slightly less ardent language, was the understanding of what was awry. The Socialists argued that “the capitalist system has outgrown its historical function, and has become utterly incapable of meeting the problems now confronting society.”26 They denounced “this outgrown system as incompetent and corrupt and the source of unspeakable misery and suffering to the whole working class.” And they explained that
in spite of the multiplication of labor-saving machines and improved methods in industry which cheapen the cost of production, the share of the producers grows ever less, and the prices of all the necessities of life steadily increase. The boasted prosperity of this nation is for the owning class alone. To the rest it means only greater hardship and misery. The high cost of living is felt in every home. Millions of wage-workers have seen the purchasing power of their wages decrease until life has become a desperate battle for mere existence.
Multitudes of unemployed walk the streets of our cities or trudge from State to State awaiting the will of the masters to move the wheels of industry. The farmers in every state are plundered by the increasing prices exacted for tools and machinery and by extortionate rents, freight rates and storage charges.
Capitalist concentration is mercilessly crushing the class of small business men and driving its members into the ranks of property-less wage-workers. The overwhelming majority of the people of America are being forced under a yoke of bondage by this soulless industrial despotism.27
Radical? Perhaps. But compare the language of the Socialists with the program outlined by former President Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Party, which began by announcing that “to destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”28 The Progressives contended that the “test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes, and that the test of corporate efficiency shall be the ability better to serve the public; that those who profit by control of business affairs shall justify that profit and that control by sharing with the public the fruits thereof.”29
Roosevelt and his compatriots were not socialists. They were simply speaking the language of the moment; it is a clear example of how the weltanschauung had changed. Indeed, as he prepared his 1912 candidacy, Roosevelt argued that
the absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who gained their promotion by leading the army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.30
Roosevelt was right. Meaningful progress toward the betterment of society could not be achieved without facing the fact that corporations, not citizens, were in charge. The wealthy men who controlled those corporations were absolutely unwilling to act in the public interest, and as such they were employing the great developments of an age of invention and innovation—and the accumulated wealth associated with the mass production of those inventions and the implementation of those innovations—to consolidate their power rather than to improve the condition of the great majority of Americans. Roosevelt recognized that the improvement in the circumstance of that great majority could not be achieved without a democratic revolution. He called it “reform” or “progressivism.” His opponents called it “dangerous” or “anarchism.” But what Roosevelt proposed in the second decade of the twentieth century was precisely what must be proposed today—an outline for democracy in a new age:
If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part of our affairs. We need to make our political representatives more quickly and sensitively responsive to the people whose servants they are. More direct action by the people in their own affairs under proper safeguards is vitally necessary. The direct primary is a step in this direction, if it is associated with a corrupt practices act effective to prevent the advantage of the man willing recklessly and unscrupulously to spend money over his more honest competitor. It is particularly important that all moneys received or expended for campaign purposes should be publicly accounted for, not only after election, but before election as well. Political action must be made simpler, easier, and freer from confusion for every citizen. I believe that the prompt removal of unfaithful or incompetent public servants should be made easy and sure in whatever way experience shall show to be most expedient in any given class of cases.31
Specific demands for a democratic revolution were woven into the platforms not merely of Roosevelt’s Progressives and Debs’s Socialists but of the Republican Party that backed incumbent President William Howard Taft and the Democratic Party that would beat them all with a college professor-turned-politician named Woodrow Wilson. Though the 1912 campaign was one of the hardest fought in American history, a rough consensus on democratic reform was achieved during its course.32 So it will come as little surprise that, during Wilson’s presidency, the Constitution was for the first time since the immediate aftermath of the Civil War amended in relatively rapid succession to end the corrupt practice of appointing senators, to allow for the taxing and regulation of corporations, and to enfranchise women. This was a democratic revolution, and it did much more than clear the way for the immediate changes of the Progressive Era.
These structural changes to American democracy made possible the timid economic and social reforms of the 1910s and 1920s (many of which developed in the states that were recognized then as the nation’s “laboratories of democracy”). But they also laid the groundwork for the moment when America would confront the supreme issue outlined by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his observation that “we must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”33 Facing the economic and social breakdown that extended from a Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt responded with a New Deal that was made possible by the democratization of America. We rarely put democratic reforms in proper perspective, we rarely recognize how different things would be had one change not cleared the way for another. But we need to recognize that FDR’s decisive action in 1933 was made possible by reforms initiated in 1913. And we need to recognize how those reforms were achieved.
STUMBLING TOWARD DEMOCRACY
The Progressive Era of democratization did not begin with a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, or even by his worthier antecedent (and frequent scold) Robert M. La Follette. The reforms that eventually became inevitable were not always broadly popular—in fact, they were not always understood as having anything to do with economic injustice. The period after the Civil War in the United States was a time of wild economic instability—of booms and busts that could be a little rough on the rich but absolutely devastating for the farmers, shopkeepers, and day laborers who were struggling to make sense of an economic system that had just been radically reordered by both a war and the arrival of a new age of northern industry, rapid expansion to the west, and fierce financial speculation. The Panic of 1873 rocked the United States so completely that, until 1929, the financial meltdown of the 1870s was referred to as the “Great Depression.” When the wave of financial speculation that followed the end of the Civil War crashed, banks collapsed, the New York Stock Exchange closed, and factories began mass layoffs as unemployment soared. Within a matter of months, fifty-five of the nation’s railroads had failed; within two years, an estimated eighteen thousand businesses had been shuttered.34
The elite response to the meltdown was consolidation, monopoly, and the building of trusts by those like John D. Rockefeller who had the resources and the connections to capitalize on crisis.
The response of the people to the panic was a great agitation about money, which saw farmers associated with the Grange movement and some of their allies form a Greenback Party that argued for easing the gold standard in order to clear the way for the circulation of unbacked paper money, known as greenbacks.35 This change, the party and its supporters in the labor movement of the day argued, would tip the balance in favor of farmers and workers rather than robber barons and bankers. It was an inspiring prospect, so much so that the Chicago Weekly Tribune imagined that the Greenbackers were providing “an opportunity to accomplish something for the country at large—not for the farmers merely, but for all who live by their industry, as distinguished from those who live by politics, speculations and class-legislation.”36 The Greenbackers did indeed have some success at getting candidates elected to state legislatures and the Congress—and considerably more success at introducing ideas such as the eight-hour day, protections for unions, and opposition to monopolies into the political discourse. They decried the “money power” as “the monster of the age” and raged against an “aristocracy of untaxed wealth”—sharing a lexicon with the National Labor Union of the 1870s and the Knights of Labor movement that would rise in the 1880s. Yet, they never gained sufficient traction in a political system that was stacked against the notion of giving economic power to the people. The same went for the People’s Party—or Populist Party—that stirred even greater interest around the time of the next great panic, in 1893.37
The People’s Party built stronger and better alliances between farmers and workers, and had considerably more success at the polls, especially in 1894. But the loose third-party movement never quite succeeded in breaking the stranglehold of the two “old parties,” and in 1896 the movement effectively aligned with the Democrats after the surprise nomination of thirty-six-year-old Nebraska populist William Jennings Bryan for the presidency. Bryan was a brilliant public speaker, with immense personal appeal and righteous anger at the bankers and monopolists who had come to rule the Gilded Age. He objected on moral grounds to the impoverishment of farmers and to the violence that was visited upon miners and railway men who sought to organize unions. “The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as the friend of a sound currency,” growled the Great Commoner. “The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist, but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.”38
Bryan anticipated the New Deal and the modern Democratic Party when he explained to the Democratic delegates of 1896 that “there are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests up on them.”39 Yet, Bryan was in most senses a nostalgic politician who framed his advocacy in deeply religious and romantic terms, pouring his heart and soul into the defense of an agrarian age that was rapidly passing. In effect, he ran against the future, declaring that “you come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”40 This was a proper diagnosis, but not a proper appeal.
Against the “money power” assembled by Mark Hanna, the Republican kingmaker who contemporary political grifters such as Karl Rove cite as their hero, Bryan’s hapless Democrats were defeated in 1896—and Bryan would lose again in 1900, and again in 1908. The 1896 Democratic platform was thick with talk of gold and silver “standards,” but devoid of a vision for how to make a politics that would deliver a new economy.41 Bryan accepted the political structures that had been assembled to defeat him, and he was, predictably, defeated. The Bryan Democrats, with their emphasis on state’s rights, never captured the energy of the burgeoning New Nationalism of the dawning twentieth century. Often more urban, and more adept at utilizing new tools for communicating and organizing, the rapidly expanding social movements of the period supported women’s suffrage, immigrant rights, labor rights, civil rights, child-labor laws, and workplace protections so there would be no more industrial disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire that claimed the lives of 146 garment-factory workers (123 of them women and girls as young as fourteen) in New York City in 1911. They had their own agendas, but they were beginning to recognize that none of them would be achieved within the existing calculus of American politics—a calculus that Bryan had, unwittingly, confirmed could not be upset even with the most inspired populism.
A critical turning point came with the Panic of 1907, when the speculators busted the economy. The official response will sound familiar to anyone who was paying attention almost exactly a century later when a descendent generation of speculators busted the economy. Washington politicians went to work developing better ways to shore up big banks. But the conversation among reformers and rebels and radicals began to turn. Instead of merely answering another crisis with another round of populist fury at the bankers and their political minions, it began to dawn on activists and eventually on Americans in general that the problem wasn’t merely a matter of crooked bankers and corrupt politicians. The problem was with a constipated system that offered limited options for setting things right. Labor activists began to recognize the vital importance of votes for women—who were so abused in workplaces, and whose children were on the machine floor rather than in the school room. Suffragettes began to recognize that a monopolized economy might be as much of a problem as a monopolized politics, and that the way to address both issues might be by aligning with the trust busters. And everyone began to recognize that very little was ever going to change if the US Senate was made of men chosen in backroom deals, men so devoid of shame that the solons had no trouble with making Nelson Aldrich, the millionaire father of John D. Rockefeller’s son-in-law, the chairman of the National Monetary Commission.42
Mass communication played a role in all this. The heart of the system, newspaper journalism, was notoriously corrupt. But a dissident journalism flowered on the margins and it proved integral to political success. Muckraking writers like Upton Sinclair exposed remorseless bankers and barbarous industrialists.43 Muckraking magazines like Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan, but in its earlier incarnation as a crusading journal) published a nine-part series on the “Treason of the Senate,” which declared that “treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be.”44 Instead of waiting for a “kept press” to tell the truth about machinations of “the money power,” progressives such as Robert M. La Follette began to start their own magazines (La Follette’s Weekly, now the Progressive, started in 1909), socialists took local publications such as the Milwaukee Leader and the New York Call national, and anarchists such as Emma Goldman became editors. The labor press flourished. And the exposés and calls to action grew so loud that the “kept press” in many instances grew a little less kept and a little more conscious that something had to change.
In the period leading up to the 1912 election, connections were constantly made between economic and social ills and the dysfunction of democratic institutions. The “disconnect” of that time between a demand for change and meaningful reform was revealed and reviled. Citizens could organize, advocate, assemble and petition for the redress of grievances; they could raise cries against injustice and against the practical failures of ruling economic elites; and they could decry the economic misdeeds that created a boom-and-bust pattern that seemed always to boom for the wealthy but that frequented busted everyone else. They could combine direct action that yielded isolated victories (particularly for skilled workers involved in industrial disputes) with electoral action that made temporary gains in cities such as Milwaukee and Cleveland, where brutally corrupt Democratic and Republican machines were upended by the transformative administrations of “Sewer Socialists” and other progressive reformers. But the prospect of a whole and meaningful response to the crisis of the age did not become real until the connection between political reform and economic and social progress became a central theme of national politics. The disconnect could no longer be ignored. It had to be addressed.
The political reforms that were demanded and largely achieved in the period from 1910 to 1920—an elected Senate; votes for women; bans on corporate campaign contributions; direct primaries; the option for citizens to petition for initiatives, referendums and recalls; limited protections for labor organizing and collective bargaining; structural shifts that allowed for the development of state banks and municipal utilities; an expanded commitment to public education in general and higher education in particular—did not immediately repair all that ailed America. In some ways, this new democratic infrastructure made things more unstable, more uncertain. But the instability was democratic rather than feudal, and it pointed toward prospects for fundamental change that would be realized as the defeated Democratic vice-presidential nominee of 1920 became the elected Democratic president of 1932.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt frequently celebrated the role that democratic reforms had played in clearing the way for policies that would humanize industry and finance, policies that voice “the deathless cry of good men and good women for the opportunity to live and work in freedom, the right to be secure in their homes and in the fruits of their labor, the power to protect themselves against the ruthless and the cunning. It recognizes that man is indeed his brother’s keeper, insists that the laborer is worthy of his hire, demands that justice shall rule the mighty as well as the weak.”45 FDR preached that the essential tool in the pursuit of a humane future was a sense of cohesion around a set of democratic principles and ideals that link all of those who are fighting “against those forces which disregard human cooperation and human rights in seeking that kind of individual profit which is gained at the expense of his fellows.”46 This Roosevelt saw his election not as the start of something but as the next stage in a progression toward democracy.
“It is just as hard to achieve harmonious and cooperative action among human beings as it is to conquer the forces of Nature. Only through the submerging of individual desires into unselfish and practical cooperation can civilization grow,” the thirty-second president explained a year after his election, as he celebrated the legacy of Robert M. La Follette and the progressive reformers on a trip to Wisconsin. “In the great national movement that culminated over a year ago, people joined with enthusiasm. They lent hand and voice to the common cause, irrespective of many older political traditions. They saw the dawn of a new day. They were on the march; they were coming back into the possession of their own home land.”47
It was not merely that the New Deal reforms rested on the shoulders of what had been done in the Progressive Era; they rested on the shoulders of activism across the nineteenth century. As we saw in Chapter 4, the great democratic wave of the 1960s and early 1970s was elevated by the democratic infrastructure created in the New Deal, and much of the activism today that we turn to now finds its most important antecedents in that era. We are not alone, and we are not reinventing the wheel.
A FORMULA FOR DEMOCRATIZING THE FUTURE
Often, when discussing modern society, wise observers will talk about the extent to which human beings feel disconnected. There is now an entire literature devoted to the “bowling alone” phenomenon of collapsing community, just as there are now entire industries devoted to easing and addressing the alienation of modern times.48 But that’s not the “disconnect” that interests us at this point. That’s not the crisis. The political crisis facing Americans has to do with a more traditional definition of disconnect—the sort that occurs when a fully developed and otherwise functional device does not work because it is not connected to a power supply. The power supply we refer to is the great mass of Americans, many of them already active, many more ready to be engaged. They need a democratic infrastructure that can translate their existing and evolving demands for an economy that translates technological advancement into societal progress.
Think of the economic and social movements that are already active in America, think of the values that Americans already share, think of our fears and think of our hopes, as sources of immense possibility—a light that might lift the darkness, a phone that might call for help, a medical device that might keep the heart beating. The ideas have been developed. The energy to advance them exists. But there is no connection. They are not plugged into a system that exists with the purpose of establishing and maintaining what Theodore Roosevelt described as the essential requirement for addressing societal ills and achieving social progress in a great and prosperous land: “a true democracy on the scale of a continent, on a scale as vast as that of the mightiest empires of the Old World.”49
If we recognize the necessity for democratizing the debate about dramatic economic and social changes—changes that reveal the extent to which disenfranchised peoples find themselves with insufficient tools for shaping their futures—and if we recognize that history provides us formulas for achieving that democratization, then the questions that remain are clear.
Is the current crisis sufficient to inspire a radical response? The answer to our view, indeed the entire point of this book, is to suggest that we are already in the midst of a transformational crisis that it is rapidly extending in scope and consequence. Elites in media and politics may assume, or at the very least pretend to assume, that the great masses of Americans are sufficiently entertained to remain docile. But this is not the case. The economic and social changes ushered in by long periods of deindustrialization, radical workplace change, and stark wage stagnation are creating chaos that benefits 1 percent or so of our population but that leaves the rest of us confused, frightened, and justifiably angered. The keyword of our moment is disruptive.50
The economic uncertainty of our times has spawned new movements that reject half-steps and seek to address income inequality and wage stagnation with immediate initiatives. When President Obama was being told by Washington insiders, some of whom call themselves “Democrats,” that he was being too bold in proposing to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour, fast-food and retail workers across the country said that simply was not enough. The argument that full-time workers ought not live in poverty has been forced into the political debate by low-wage workers, union activists, and proud radicals like Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant.51 They aren’t settling for incremental change; they are fighting for $15-an-hour wage rates. And they are winning in Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles and other communities across the country.52 The most powerful retailer in the United States, Walmart, has felt the pressure and moved to raise wages for most workers above $10 an hour—significantly more than a supposedly pro-labor president was proposing two years earlier.
This is a movement that has displayed political skills, but it has also embraced old-fashioned direct action. After Seattle’s Sawant was arrested at a protest that demanded wage hikes for airline workers, the city councilmember said the airline should be on trial—not her. Asked if it was appropriate for elected officials to be arrested in protests against corporations, Sawant declared, “When workers and faith leaders and community activists are putting their own lives on the line to fight for the rights of workers, it’s appropriate for me as an elected public figure to join them in the struggles.”53 She’s right. And the struggles in Seattle and other cities are having a dramatic impact. Hundreds of thousands of workers are being lifted above the poverty line not just by organizing to “Fight for 15” but by sophisticated new initiatives—such as a “Retail Workers Bill of Rights,” which was enacted in San Francisco after a 2014 campaign spearheaded by the Jobs With Justice movement and its allies. This bill of rights addresses the abusive scheduling and workplace uncertainty that has become endemic in the increasingly app-driven fast-food and retail sectors. It forms a rough outline for a movement not merely to hike wages but to humanize work—and to ensure that workers are not merely whipsawed by that rapid restructuring of traditional industries.54
This country has a more militant labor movement than at any time since the early 1970s, possibly even the 1930s. Despite the end of labor reporting by most major media and the replacement of traditional business reporting with “coverage” that is best understood as cheerleading, there are still almost fifteen million union members in the United States today.55 They are under brutal assault by corporate-funded Republican governors and legislators—and, notably, a number of Democratic mayors—who seek to shut down the steadiest defenders of public services and public education in our politics. Yet, in states such as Missouri and West Virginia, workers have blocked anti-labor right-to-work laws. And in cities such as Los Angeles and New York, and unexpected regions such as the Rio Grande Valley, unions are actually expanding their membership—especially among low-wage workers. Savvy labor leaders such as Rose Ann De Moro of National Nurses United (NNU) recognize that the movement is not as unified or as strategically sophisticated as it needs to be—especially in the face of technological changes that are designed to replace professionals with robots. But, says De Moro, “a movement that has already organized millions of Americans has the potential to be a lot more influential and effective, and right-wing politicians are giving us a lot of reasons to get our act together.”56
NNU, for example, has been in the forefront of researching so-called digitalized care. While the healthcare industry and new tech companies that have developed to share in the profits are busy developing robots to provide bedside care, the Office of Inspector General, US Department of Health and Human Services, has identified serious and widespread flaws with new systems for healthcare delivery. Not that long ago, the idea of a “robot nurse” would have been the stuff of science fiction but it’s a reality now. However, it was not a well-examined reality until NNU launched its own research and education programs to warn that “bedside computers that diagnose and dictate treatment for patients, based on generic population trends not the health status or care needs of that individual patient, increasingly supplant the professional assessment and judgment of experienced nurses and doctors, exposing patients to misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and life-threatening mistakes.”57
In working on this book, we met with NNU officials and discussed their investment of resources and energy in this project. It’s a serious commitment, focused on gathering information, developing statistical databases and, most importantly, identifying for patients and policymakers the right standards to apply when considering which technologies to utilize and how. “The American health care system already lags behind other industrialized nations in a wide array of essential health barometers from infant mortality to life expectancy. These changing trends in health care threaten to make it worse,” explains NNU Co-president Jean Ross, RN. “Behind every statistic is a patient, and their family, who are exposed to unnecessary suffering and risk as a result of the focus on profits rather than what is best for individual patient need.”58 The nurses aren’t opposed to technology; they use it all the time. But instead of merely considering the bottom line, they are considering the life-and-death consequences of automation and adding a human component to the equation. And they are expending considerable resources on education campaigns that publicize their conclusions. They fill at least some of the void created by the collapse of serious journalism and the decay of traditional oversight by regulators and legislative and congressional committees. It’s not enough, as the nurses were the first to tell us. But this is an important model that ought to be embraced by other unions and activist groups–and that foundations and donors that are serious about getting to the heart of the matter should fund.
Getting workers directly involved with how automation is deployed was considered enlightened thinking in the 1960s, and accepted across much of the political spectrum, at least in principle. It is high time people organize to get us back to that point, and to abandon the suicidal notion that the corporations have an innate right to do whatever they please, social consequences be damned, as long as they are maximizing profits.
This country is seeing the renewal of historic ideals of public and cooperative enterprise. New movements are taking on what Gar Alperovitz, the cofounder of the Democracy Collaborative, refers to as the “huge and agonizing long-term task” of developing and popularizing alternative models for ownership and job creation that involve “nothing less than transforming the underlying institutions that are producing the outcomes we see—in short, one way or another, transforming the system over time, beginning, as always [and as we shall see], in local communities where the pain is greatest.”59 This is big bold stuff, and it has moved way beyond theory. The United States has a vibrant Slow Food movement that has established itself in every state and every major city, along with many small towns. This movement is developing and supporting sustainable models for farming, food production, and eating out—or in. And there is an expanded vision of cooperative enterprise that has begun to renew old ideals of worker ownership and consumer involvement in a country where almost thirty thousand cooperatives have issued almost 350 million memberships.60 Across the country, there are proposals to democratize finance, with public banking at the state and local levels (along the lines of the century-old and highly successful State Bank of North Dakota), and a coalition of unions and consumer groups is working to renew postal banking as a vehicle to strengthen the US Postal Service and provide access to necessary (and responsible) financial services to low-income and rural communities.61 “Essentially, a new strategic paradigm—the idea that democratizing ownership can begin locally—is emerging around the nation,” argues Alperovitz. “Just beneath the surface of most public reporting, in fact, an explosion of experimentation like this is going on in all parts of the country. It is also beginning to demand—and get—backing from larger institutions, and political backing as well. Such efforts include groups like Prospera, in San Francisco, and Cooperative Home Care Associates, in New York, that bring together women who do home cleaning and home health work, respectively; cab driver co-ops in several cities; food co-ops in most parts of the country; advanced manufacturing co-ops like Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing in Madison, Wisconsin; and many, many more.”62
Extending the democratic infrastructure to the economy is the logical next step. It is a topic that requires study and experimentation. And, though you would not know it from media coverage of economic debates, that study and experimentation is burgeoning in communities across the country.
So, too, are movements that refused to be boxed up in neat packages of partisanship. These are the big-picture movements that “get” that the organizing of the future requires a challenge to both major parties and to all of our politics. It’s the only way to address essential issues of our time.
This country has a movement to address climate change that recognizes the economic and political challenges outlined by Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben and other visionaries. And it has drawn millions of Americans, especially young Americans, into the streets to demand not merely a transition off fossil fuels but, in the words of Climate Justice Alliance co-director Cindy Wiesner, “an economy good for both people and the planet.”63 An estimated four hundred thousand people joined the September 21, 2014, People’s Climate March in New York, and hundreds of thousands more participated in hundreds of marches in communities across the United States—in solidarity with millions more at thousands of rallies across the planet.64
This country has a new civil rights movement that has drawn millions of young people—and many of their elders—into the streets and onto social media to declare that “Black Lives Matter.” This movement is challenging policing models that have left too many young African American men dead, criminal “justice” models that have substituted mass incarceration for mass employment, and political models that seek to “win” elections by undoing the progress made by the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. In states across this country, unprecedented multiracial, multiethnic, multi-religion coalitions that link unions and students and seniors together have surged onto the political scene, declaring as does the Reverend William Barber of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement that “we need a transformative moral fusion movement that’s indigenously led, state-based, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor movement that brings people together, that doesn’t wait for somebody to rescue you out of Washington DC, but [that] you mobilize from the bottom up.”65
This country has a democracy movement that has evolved into the most vibrant crusade for constitutional reform in a century—since the days when progressive reformers sought an elected Senate and votes for women. More than six hundred American communities have formally demanded congressional action to begin the process of undoing the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, and McCutcheon decisions. They seek nothing less than a constitutional amendment that will renew the fundamental American premises that money is not speech, that corporations are not people, and that citizens and their elected representatives have a right to shape campaign finance laws to ensure that votes matter more than dollars. Sixteen states have formally requested action to amend the constitution. Millions of Americans have voted in referendums, signed petitions, and appeared before legislatures, city councils, and town boards to demand an electoral politics that is defined by ideas rather than the money power of self-interested billionaires and pay-to-play corporations.66 Yet, still, when we mention what has happened in speeches to engaged and thoughtful Americans, surprising numbers of them do not know that this movement even exists.
To that end, this country has a media reform movement, steeped in democratic values and a fundamental understanding of civil society’s need for robust journalism and unrestrained debate; a movement that in February 2015 beat the most powerful telecommunications corporations on the planet in a fight to preserve a free and open Internet.67 How? “Four million Americans wrote this agency to make known their ideas, thoughts, and deeply-held opinions about Internet openness,” said Federal Communications Commission member Jessica Rosenworcel, who voted with the people and against the conglomerates. “They lit up our phone lines, clogged our e-mail in-boxes, and jammed our online comment system. That might be messy, but whatever our disagreements on network neutrality are, I hope we can agree that’s democracy in action and something we can all support.”68
The number of Americans who are actively involved in the work of addressing the economic and social and political challenges of this moment is astronomical. The critical mass is real. The energy is real. But it is not yet, to borrow an organizing concept from Jefferson, hooped together.
We know this, practically, because so many movements that have drawn so many people to the streets, to the capitals, and to the polls have succeeded by every reasonable measure when it comes to sounding the alarm, making the case, winning the argument, and even winning the election. But they have not succeeded in making big-enough change—or even in creating the space where the change might be possible.
There is more to this than the simple challenge of coordination. Of course this is an issue, but not as much of an issue as might once have been the case. Climate-change campaigners get that there is an economic-justice component to their work. Living-wage advocates understand that there is a racial-justice component to their work. Yes, there is still a tendency on the part of advocates to imagine that one issue must go first. We hear powerful and poignant arguments for this model of prioritization or that. We have made some of them ourselves. But, if history is any indicator, we know that the defining and uniting issue will be economic. And we know that the crisis of a jobless future will bring millions of Americans who are not currently engaged into a fight that extends from the First Amendment–sanctioned direct action of assembling and petitioning for the redress of grievances through the organizing of new-model labor unions and cooperatives, to the casting of ballots on behalf of candidates who really are better than their opponents. But we also know, as was the case two hundred years ago on the moors of Yorkshire, and one hundred years ago in the sweatshops of New York, that the political process is weighted against this activism—indeed, against all activism.
Hence the electoral system is generally the last place social change leaves its mark. It is a crucial and necessary stage to lock in change, and election campaigns can be valuable in pushing movements forward, but electoral success is best understood as part of the of the process. And in these times, where money has corrupted the system almost beyond belief, the process is frequently frustrating. This is why the extraordinary enthusiasm generated by US Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the presidency has been so striking. As the Sanders campaign gained traction in the summer and fall of 2015, massive crowds and rising poll numbers provided tangible evidence of the deep reservoir of support for radical social changes that would reconstruct the economy to suit the needs of the poor and working class. At a point in American history when frustration was high, and when cynicism about the prospects for change threatened to become debilitating, Sanders was getting people out of their houses and back into a political process that was sorely in need of an infusion of people power. In the senator’s hometown of Burlington, Vermont, more than five thousand people showed up to cheer on his announcement of candidacy. Then came ten thousand people in Madison, Wisconsin. Then there were fifteen thousand in Seattle, twenty-seven thousand in Los Angeles, and twenty-eight thousand in Portland. In the first caucus state of Iowa and the first primary state of New Hampshire, the crowds for Sanders were vastly greater than those of any of the other candidates, many of whom had more name recognition, stronger connections to the political establishment in key states, bigger campaign treasuries and massive Super PACs bankrolled by the wealthiest Americans.
What distinguished the Sanders campaign from the start was a focus on the issues that are being raised by the new movements for economic and social change. The newness of the movements created pressures for Sanders; #BlackLivesMatter activists pressed the candidate to speak more forcefully about the need for the reform of policing and for an end to mass incarceration. Instead of resisting the pressure, Sanders embraced it and evolved his campaign and its message. That evolution illustrated how the Sanders run was distinct from standard electoral projects—but not from movements that are in a constant process of updating and extending their activism and their organizing. The explosive growth of the Sanders campaign illustrated the potential for a movement politics that addresses the issues arising from rapid technological and economic change. Indeed, Sanders built his campaign, from the start, around the idea that a “political revolution” would be required to democratize politics and economics. To do this, Sanders spoke, constantly, of the need to rejuvenate the democratic infrastructure with constitutional amendments, sweeping reforms and unprecedented levels of popular engagement. This is the language of a transformative politics—which is, of course, precisely what is needed.
THE POINT AT WHICH EVERYTHING BEGINS TO CHANGE
Transformation is the key. The political process must change—not merely with candidates and parties, but with structural responses that are as bold as was the choice in the 1910s to democratize the selection of senators and to extend the franchise to the majority of citizens. From a new embrace of structural change, in turn, will extend a fresh politics that gives citizens the power to join the debate about how new technologies will be utilized, how new wealth will be shared, and how a new society based on old ideals of liberty and justice for all, equality, and sustainability will take shape.
The way out is a democratic one, but Americans ought not be foolish enough to imagine that the citizenless democracy that currently exists will get us there. This moment’s great leap forward will not be made by addressing a single issue. Yet, we ought not neglect or dismiss the single issues around which people have already done so much organizing. We ought not neglect the connections that have already been made. We ought not neglect the concern, the fear, the anger, the passion, the hope, the idealism that have drawn millions of Americans to movements that are so real and so needed—and yet so frustrated. There is a change coming. It is a frightening change. But it need not be overwhelming. Like the Chartists and the Progressives, we arrive at this moment unexpectedly well prepared—if not exactly well organized. Perhaps some of today’s radicals are, as their political ancestors were, “without unity of aim and method.” Perhaps they have “little hope of accomplishing anything.” But the economic turbulence that is already here, and that will grow as technology transforms our circumstance, will clarify much and embolden many. As new movements develop a People’s Charter or a progressive platform for our time, “clearly defining the urgent demands of the working class,” we will identify the “real bond of union” for our time. What might a People’s Charter for these times include? That is the topic for the concluding chapter.
Thomas Jefferson was right: when we overcome the democratic disconnect, when we the people are hooped together, that is the point at which everything begins to change.