CHAPTER FIVE
WINNING:
IT WILL TAKE MORE THAN REASON
REASON AND VALUES
In the battle for America, liberals shouldn’t recoil from morality, prosperity, and patriotism. The Radcon versions imperil our future. But unless they’re met head-on by a bold liberal alternative, Radcons win by default. What is this alternative?
To recap:
Morality is important. Here, Radcons have it right. But they confuse public with private morality. A sensible public morality doesn’t try to impose on Americans any particular religious notions about private sexual behavior; it vigilantly separates church and state. It focuses instead on immoral behavior that has unambiguously public consequences. Abuses of power and trust at the highest reaches of American business and government are undermining confidence in our economic and political systems. We need broad changes in laws to prevent corporate fraud, limit the exorbitant pay of top executives, and reduce the flow of money into politics. And these laws have to be backed not only by significant penalties but by strong public condemnation of people who abuse their authority.
Economic growth is essential, too. Again, Radcons are correct in emphasizing it (although we need to be careful about how it’s measured, lest we become mesmerized by the gross domestic product). It’s the Radcons’ solution that’s wrong. A proper vision of prosperity doesn’t shower tax breaks on the rich and squeeze services for everyone else, especially now that the gap between the rich and the rest of us is wider than it’s been in some eighty years. In a global economy, human capital is at least as important as financial capital—in many ways, more so. Our future prosperity depends uniquely on the productivity of our people. This means rejecting supply-side “trickle-down” economics in favor of “bubble-up” economics. We should oppose privatization of social insurance, and make broad-scale investments in the education and health of all Americans. At the very least, repeal Bush’s tax cut for the top 2 percent, and go into debt if necessary, to have enough resources to equip all Americans for better jobs.
Patriotism is at the core of the American character, and we need to respond vigorously to the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Radcons are right about this, too. But the Radcons’ military solutions aren’t working, and won’t work. Instead of waging “preemptive” wars that leave us occupying hostile lands, we should work with our long-term allies to gather intelligence, infiltrate terrorist networks, and act as global “cops on the beat.” We should lead world efforts to reduce global poverty and environmental decay. Positive patriotism also means protecting civil liberties at home, and insisting that all Americans bear their fair share of the burden of financing and serving the nation.
These liberal positions don’t draw their moral urgency from blaming or demonizing anyone. They’re about us, about what we make of ourselves. They come from a clear-eyed view of where America is, where we need to be, what we must do. Radcons’ policies, by contrast, are based on ideology, not reason.
PASSION
But it’s not enough to have reason on our side. To win, liberals also need fire in our bellies. Passion is necessary to gather resources, build organizations, and energize participants. Radcons have been passionate about their mission for more than twenty years.
Passion is also necessary in order to be heard. We need to show the strength and courage of our convictions. Unless we put our ideas out there aggressively, we leave the public arena to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Heritage Foundation pundits, editorial writers and columnists for the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, Washington Times, religious zealots, racists, and screamers.
Passion is required in order to counter Radcon propaganda with the truth. And since Radcons mislead the public over and over again, the truth has to be told repeatedly—through letters to the editor and opinion pieces, on web sites, through e-mail “trees,” and, wherever possible, on radio and television. Consider, for example, how Radcons misled Americans on the estate tax by calling it the “death tax” and causing the public to think that almost everyone had to pay it at death when, in fact, only the richest 2 percent had to pay. As a result of this concerted deception, and liberals’ failure to counter it, most Americans favored the estate tax’s repeal. Among those were Americans earning less than $50,000, who told pollsters that they were concerned about increasing inequality in America and that the rich weren’t paying their fair share of taxes.1
Passion doesn’t mean irrational bile. Liberals don’t need to be nasty to be heard. Rants based on nothing more than self-righteous indignation or religious dogma might generate good sound bites, but they coarsen public discourse and discourage rational argument. Perhaps that’s why many Radcons prefer to push their opinions on talk radio and yell television, or in screed-like books and op-ed pages, without subjecting them to full civil debate. They don’t want to debate, because they’d lose more often than not. Common sense and reason are not on their side. They’d rather prevent or close off dialogue.
The passions aroused by radical conservatives are fueled by anger and resentment, not by reason. They’ve taken the fears of many Americans caught in a long-term economic downdraft and twisted them into hatred of “them.” They’ve blended cultural, economic, and nationalistic populism into an ideology based on conquering an “evil” with a mutable definition. Their evil exists as sexual deviance, sloth, and demonic forces outside America. The stakes are so high that the end justifies any means.
Radcons disguise their radical agenda behind these simple targets. And they offer oversimplified, lowest-common-denominator solutions (cut taxes on the rich, cut spending on the poor, cut regulations, ban abortions, put prayer in the schools, put more people in prison, invade and occupy hostile countries, find and kill all terrorists) and ridiculously simplistic choices (sexual deviance versus family values, big government or small government, blame America or love America). They thereby make their unreasonableness sound like reason. But most of this is fatuous nonsense.
Radcons claim they’re standing up for average Americans and traditional values against so-called liberal elites who court these evils. But these “liberal elites” exist only in the Radcons’ fevered imaginations. The elites are no longer liberal, if they ever were. Radcons now dominate government; they monopolize talk radio and television; and they inhabit most Washington-based policy institutes. Wall Street bankers and CEOs—hardly a liberal elite—run the economy.
Radcons rail against the fading ghosts of the furthest fringes of the sixties, phantom far-left limbs that disappeared long ago. They conjure up these apparitions in order to convince average working people that Radcons are on their side. But they’re just distracting Americans from the real challenges ahead. And they’re dividing us from one another and from our friends around the world.
Liberals have to reclaim from Radcons the populist mantle. Radcon apologists for concentrated wealth and power shouldn’t be allowed to claim they’re representing average working Americans. Long before the sixties, it was liberals who stood up for the little guys. Radical conservatives of America’s Gilded Age represented big business and the wealthy. At the turn of the twentieth century, liberal Republican Theodore Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth”—the price gougers and monopolists who owned large swathes of American industry. Decades later, FDR decried the “economic royalists”—the speculators who manipulated markets for their own benefit.
Wealth itself wasn’t what provoked liberal ire. It was the special privilege, influence, and irresponsible behavior that habitually accompanied it. Liberals managed the economy on behalf of average working people—regulating business where necessary; spending more than was coming in and cutting taxes when the nation needed to prevent the economy from sinking and unemployment from rising; cutting deficits when they got out of control. Internationally, liberals were the ones who led the fights against tyranny, totalitarianism, and fascism, on behalf of human rights and common decency. Conservatives were isolationists.
But in the last several decades, liberalism lost its populist roots. It lost the language and passion of populism. It stopped standing up for ordinary Americans against the bullies; for people without wealth and power against those who have it and misuse it. Liberals who lived through the Depression and World War II moved into retirement and old age. Many of the student activists of the sixties, who had rejected liberalism in favor of New Left activism, fought their fights—winning some, losing some—and then retreated. Those who followed them turned inward, to “self-improvement” or to the “identity politics” of race, feminism, and gay rights. Many grew disillusioned with politics altogether. Some understandably shied away from the growing abusiveness of political discourse.
Yet if there was ever a time for liberals to reclaim the moral urgency of their mission, it is now. The concentration of wealth and power in our country invites abuses. It undermines trust in our economy and our government; showers huge financial awards on a small minority while subjecting many of the rest of us to financial insecurity; invites xenophobic and racist scapegoating; and propels a jingoistic, arrogant, and ultimately dangerous foreign policy. Radcons embrace all of this. The battle must be joined.
ORGANIZATION
Some liberals have tried to fight back. Every four years they throw themselves behind a presidential candidate they believe will deliver us from the steadily rising Radcon tide. But even if liberal-leaning presidents get elected from time to time, they can’t accomplish much without a movement behind them. During the presidential campaign of 1936, a voter asked Franklin D. Roosevelt to push harder for certain New Deal measures. “Good idea,” he responded, “but you’ve got to make me do it.”2 What he meant was that a president who wants to effect change needs citizens to mobilize support and keep the pressure on.
In 1994, when Bill Clinton was battling for his health care proposal, he was handicapped by the absence of an actively engaged political movement demanding the same thing. His formidable powers of persuasion weren’t enough to overcome radical conservative organizing on the other side. By contrast, George W. Bush got his massive tax cuts through Congress (even though Americans were ambivalent about them, at best)3 because he had a political movement behind him. Big business and evangelical Christians gave him the political support he needed.
Other liberals are embroiled in single-issue politics—the environment, abortion rights, campaign finance reform, the war. These are all important, but single-issue skirmishes don’t build a political movement, either. Issues rise and fall, depending on which interests are threatened and when, and what makes the news. Sometimes they even divide liberals rather than unite them, as each issue-advocacy group scrambles after the same set of liberal donors, and competes for the limited attention of the media.
That isn’t to say presidential campaigns are unimportant; all campaigns for elective office are important. Turning out voters is essential. And I can get as passionate about particular issues as anyone else. My point is that these isolated efforts use up huge amounts of energy and resources, but they don’t build a permanent infrastructure that can be used for the next election campaign or for another issue. They don’t mobilize people over the long term, and keep them mobilized for the long haul. The whole is less than the sum of the parts because these efforts don’t build on one another.
I can’t tell you how many solicitations I get every week from candidates and single-issue advocacy groups in Washington. Don’t you? Liberals have become adept at direct mailings and at sticking checks in envelopes. My e-mail is brimming with new left-leaning sites and ways to zip money to this or that liberal cause at a keystroke. But a real movement requires ongoing organization beyond specific candidates or issues, based on shared values. It depends on networks of people who meet regularly at the local level, and periodically connect with others in different locales.*14 It requires the patience to build a disciplined national organization. A real political movement helps particular candidates and pushes specific issues, of course, but it does so out of the ongoing strength and commitment of its members. As it moves from battle to battle, it makes sure to accumulate greater and greater organizational heft, mobilizing liberal activists state by state, district by district, chapter by chapter.
Radcons began organizing two decades ago around a set of common values, with an eye on the long term. They recruited people who share their beliefs and who would run for local, state, or federal office. They supported the campaigns of these people and held them accountable once in office. They found people with money who also shared their beliefs, and used that money to expand their organization, both in state capitals and in Washington. They recruited broadcast pundits and writers, and supported them and spread the word. They created long-term alliances and coalitions with the religious right, small businesses, trade associations, and key lobbyists in Washington.
And with their passion and their organization, they grabbed the mantle of populism right from under our liberal noses.
Americans are ready for a bold, new liberalism that reins in abuses of unconstrained power and greed, that widens the circle of prosperity, and that unites much of the world against terrorism and hate. This isn’t the agenda of the sixties left, nor is it the Republican Lite politics peddled by Democratic centrists who think elections are won in the upscale suburbs. It’s a liberalism grounded in public morality, in a commonsense program for prosperity, and in love of America. It’s a liberalism that’s both passionate and hardheaded.
But it needs to be organized.
DEMOCRATS JUST LOOK DEAD
Can liberals reclaim America through the Democrats?
I’ve served under two Democratic presidents, run for office as a Democrat, and attended hundreds of interminable conferences about “The Future of the Democratic Party.” The truth is, there is no Democratic Party. Yes, I know: Millions of people call themselves Democrats and several hundred thousand show up at Democratic state and national conventions. A Democratic National Committee raises money. But there’s no real national Democratic Party. At least nothing like what the Republicans have. They have discipline and organization. They decide on a party line and stick with it. What do Democrats have? Conferences on “The Future of the Democratic Party.”
The Radcons who have taken over the Republican Party may be dead wrong on the issues that matter to this country, but they have the courage of their convictions. And they’ve built a strong organization. Democrats have neither.
The only time there’s even a semblance of a national Democratic Party is when Democrats come up with a presidential candidate. But if you look closely you’ll see that Democrats don’t actually come up with a presidential candidate. Instead, six to ten people who call themselves Democrats come up with themselves. Then, about a year before election day, as the Democratic primaries approach, the field is winnowed to a handful of contenders who have raised the most money and claimed the most headlines. At this point, a small group of Washington-based Democratic political consultants, pollsters, and marketers decide whom they’ll place their bets on. Meanwhile, you and I are still sitting in some “The Future of the Democratic Party” conference.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats were in almost continuous control of the executive branch, the House of Representatives, the Senate, most governorships, and most state legislatures. Democratic presidents presided for thirty-two of the forty-eight years spanning 1932 and 1980. But in the 1980s, Democrats began losing ground in all these branches and all these levels of government. In the twenty-four years between 1980 and 2004, Democrats controlled the executive branch for exactly eight. Now Republicans have taken it all over, including most governorships. And Radcons are in the driver’s seat.
Some people tell me to forget about the Democrats and join the Green Party, or maybe even help start another party. Third parties have a long history in American politics. Most notable, for our purposes, was the Liberal Republican Party of 1872 (which conspicuously launched the term “liberal” into American politics); the Populist Party of 1892; Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moosers of 1912; Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party of 1924; Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential bid; George Wallace’s, of 1968; Ross Perot’s Reform Party of 1992; and Ralph Nader’s Greens of 2000.
But the history of these and other third-party efforts in America shows that they rarely displace either of the two dominant parties. They sometimes roil the waters and put new ideas into play, and in these ways they have made important contributions. But they also draw votes away from the major party that’s closest to them, ideologically. In other words, third parties help the major party most opposed to their values. That’s what happened in 1992, when H. Ross Perot pulled enough votes away from George H. W. Bush to hand Bill Clinton the election, and then again in 2000, when Ralph Nader drained enough votes away from Al Gore to give George W. Bush an electoral college victory.
Our Constitution created a “winner-take-all” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes gets all a state’s electors, and the party with the most senators or representatives runs that branch of Congress. This almost guarantees that politics will be dominated by only two major parties. When the winner takes all, only one party will take over. It’s different in a parliamentary system, where smaller parties are represented in the legislature in proportion to the number of votes they get out of the total, and may have a part in forming the next government if (as is likely) no single party gets a majority. America could move to a different system. For example, “instant-runoff” voting, by which voters decide their order of preference for various candidates, is used in some American communities. But changing our Constitution isn’t easy—the Founding Fathers didn’t mean it to be—and it’s far from clear any new system would be better than the one we have.
So as a practical matter, liberals need to work through the Democratic Party if we want to effect major political change in America. That shouldn’t be a cause for despair. After all, look what Radcons accomplished in the Republican Party. They worked diligently for over twenty years and finally remade the GOP in their image.
The Democratic Party only looks dead.4 It can be reawakened. What’s needed is a real, ongoing Progressive Democratic Party that takes firm hold at the grass roots; the capacity to think through new ideas and market them; and a passionate commitment to social justice. The party has to be turned into a political movement that embraces all the people who have been left out, who have been mowed over by big corporations in cahoots with government—the people who are working their backsides off but aren’t earning much more than they did a dozen years ago, people who have grown cynical about every institution in American society but still love America with all their hearts.
THE SHAM OF CENTRISM
Some blame the Democrats’ steady eclipse on the party’s being out of step with an American electorate grown more conservative and suburban. But this is more assertion than explanation. It doesn’t say why voters have shifted their allegiances. Suburban life may be quieter than city life, but it’s not intrinsically more Republican.
The biggest losses for Democrats since 1980 have been from America’s giant middle and working classes—mostly, white workers without four-year college degrees, and especially white men. They were part of the old Democratic base. Some became “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s. Since then, many of them have moved steadily into the Republican camp.
Not incidentally, these are the same people who have lost the most economic ground since the late 1970s, as the American economy shifted.5 Naturally, they’ve been anxious and frustrated. Many of them were also appalled at the student radicals of the sixties—their casual sex, loud opposition to the Vietnam War, and apparent rejection of traditional American values. And they were put off by a Democratic Party that seemed all too eager to help poor minorities and advance the aspirations of college-educated women, but do little or nothing for them.
Radcons have eagerly stepped into the void, blaming Democrats and “liberal elites” for coddling blacks and other new immigrants, welfare cheats, anti-American traitors, communists (now, terrorists), gays and lesbians, criminals, feminists, and the rest. They’ve repeated these charges so often that they’ve become a mantra. Broken down piece by piece, the allegations start to crumble. But left unexamined, they offered a simple explanation—and an easily proffered solution to a complex problem.
Democrats could have responded with bold plans for getting all Americans better and more secure jobs, better schools, more affordable health care and child care, and better retirement security. They could have delivered a populist message about the responsibility of corporations to help their employees in all these respects, and of wealthy elites not to corrupt politics with money. They could have embraced serious and far-reaching campaign finance reform. But Democrats did very little of this. In some respects, they did just the opposite. Many Democratic candidates, dependent for campaign contributions on the same corporate and Wall Street interests as Republicans, didn’t want to offend their sponsors. Others were intimidated by the rising clamor of radical conservatives who accused them of “taxing and spending.” By the nineties, Democrats were promoting tax cuts and balanced budgets.
Many Democrats claim they have to move to the “center” to be elected, and that polls show that Americans have become cynical about government. Well, yes, Americans have grown cynical. But the cynicism is largely because government has been so ineffective in responding to the crisis faced by a large portion of working Americans. And that cynicism is fed by a steadily growing cacophony of radical conservative pundits and talk-show hosts.
It takes no conviction and less courage to move to the political “center,” as defined by prevailing polls of likely voters. If you want to be a malleable politician, you campaign from the center. But if you want to be a leader, you define the center. You don’t rely on polls to tell you where to go.*15 At best, polls tell you where people are, and it’s pointless to lead people to where they already are. The essence of political leadership is focusing the public’s attention on the hard issues that most would rather avoid or dismiss. We know the problems that need fixing.
Centrism is bogus. There’s no well-defined, consistent political center in America. The rush by many Democrats in recent years to the so-called center is a pathetic substitute for clear thinking and candid talking about what the nation needs to do, and why. And then, once in office, doing it. Meanwhile, the “center” keeps shifting further right because Radcons stay put while Democrats keep meeting them halfway.
In the months leading up to the 1996 election, I frequently ran into Dick Morris in the White House. Morris, you may remember, was Clinton’s pollster and political adviser who famously advised him to “triangulate”—that is, to find positions equidistant between Democrats and Republicans. I argued that this robbed Clinton of any mandate for a second term. Morris argued there wouldn’t be a second term unless Clinton moved to the center. I still believe Morris was wrong. Clinton could have told Americans the truth—that the economic boom of the nineties was mainly enriching a small minority; that most Americans were doing only slightly better than before; that when the boom went bust we’d still have to face the underlying structural challenges of an economy and society concentrating more and more wealth and power in fewer hands. He could have said that America in the mid-nineties finally had the wherewithal to do what the nation couldn’t do before—expand prosperity by investing in our people, especially in their education and health. I think Clinton could have been reelected on this mandate. But he was reelected without any mandate. As a result, the nation was confused about what needed to be accomplished, and easily distracted by Radcon fulminations against a president who lied about sex.
By the late nineties, the federal budget was showing large surpluses. But the only thing Clinton or Al Gore, and most other Democrats, could think to do with the extra money was to pay off the national debt a year earlier. Polls showed that’s what the suburban “swing” voters wanted.
But that’s over now. What isn’t over is the political nonsense of centrism. Supposedly 40 percent of Americans lean liberal and 40 percent lean conservative. If I hear another pundit say the real action is with the 20 percent upscale suburban “swing” in the middle who have no strong political commitments, I’m going to scream. When Democrats mute their message to attract these “swingers,” Democrats lose more potential voters who decide that driving to the polls isn’t worth the cost of the gas to get there.
Much of the old Democratic base that didn’t become Republican has just stopped voting. The largest political group in America isn’t Democrats or Republicans or even upscale suburban “swing” voters. It’s people who don’t vote. In 2002 only 33 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in races for the House. Republicans got 17 percent of eligible voters; Democrats, 15 percent. The turnout of core Democratic constituencies plummeted, even among minorities and the poor. What did Democrats talk about in 2002? They hardly talked about the poor economy, or the dwindling and overstressed middle class, or the widening gap between the rich and everyone else. They didn’t focus on irresponsibility in executive suites, or rail against tax breaks mainly for the rich. They didn’t warn of the perils of unilateral preventive wars. They didn’t build support in poor and working-class communities. They did none of this because they were courting the upscale suburban swing voters and wooing money from the big boys.
In the presidential election of 2000, three-quarters of voters with family incomes over $75,000 a year went to the polls. But the lower down the income ladder, the lower percentage of people who voted. Sixty-nine percent of those earning $50,000 to $75,000 a year bothered. Only 38 percent of households earning less than $10,000 did.6 If voters with family incomes under $25,000 had cast their ballots at the same rate as those above $75,000, more than 6.8 million more voters would have gone to the polls in 2000. Most of them would have voted for Al Gore, and Gore would have won handily—not just the popular vote, but also more states, which would have given him the election for sure.
Interestingly, turnout in the Republican primaries of 2000 actually surged. Republicans temporarily tapped into traditional nonvoters because John McCain wooed them with his moral heroism and energized them with his anti-establishment, tell-it-like-it-is, give-’em-hell message. The message wasn’t the xenophobic bile of Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan. It was about grabbing government back for the people. Bill Bradley was the Democrat’s anti-establishment candidate, but he didn’t mobilize the nonvoters because his message had no “give ‘em hell” in it. Nonvoters know you can’t change a corrupt system by being polite. The only way to speak truth to power is with the moral fervor of a true reformer.
The big differences in American politics today are between those with courage and those without it, those who can inspire and those who can’t. Among the former are the late Paul Wellstone and John McCain—politicians with deeply held views who are passionate about what they believe. They don’t care much about the polls, they love this country, and they have a fair degree of contempt for Americans who are powerful but don’t really give a damn about America or about most other Americans. On the other side is a large group of hard-boiled poll-watchers and ass-kissers who spend most of their time raising money from people and groups with a lot of it.
When he died tragically in a plane accident, Wellstone was locked in a tight race for the Senate. Just weeks before, he had voted against Bush’s carte blanche resolution to go to war in Iraq. Most people in his home state of Minnesota had backed the President, so Wellstone’s vote was politically risky. I phoned him to say I admired his courage and hoped it wouldn’t cost him the election. “Not a chance,” he said, with his characteristic buoyancy. “My polls rose after the vote.” I asked him why. He explained that the people of Minnesota supported him because he stood up for what he believed and was always ready to lay out the arguments behind his beliefs. “Besides,” he added, “I wouldn’t be an effective candidate otherwise. Saying and doing what I believe is right energizes me.”
Democrats have to stand up and be counted. And while they’re at it, Democrats also need to have fun, and conduct their politics with a sense of hope and humor. All the negativism and anxiety is a bummer. Who wants to join a funeral procession? We need a new generation of happy warriors. The world does not have to go to hell. Taking the long view, the achievements of the last century were extraordinary—largely because of reforms liberal Democrats championed. I’d hate to be a Radcon Republican because Radcon Republicans hate government, and now they run it. Can you imagine being in total control of something you detest?
THE GROUND TROOPS
To reignite the Democratic Party and transform it into a political movement will require the time and energy of a lot of people who are fired up enough to make this sort of commitment over a long term. Where are they?
Radcons have found many of their ground troops in the religious right. Can liberal Democrats find their own ground troops in the religious left? Large numbers of people who are active in their churches or synagogues are deeply concerned about the moral breakdown at the highest levels of business and politics and the widening gap between have-mores and have-lesses. They’re distressed by the emergence of the belligerent, negative patriotism I’ve described. But their congregations are scattered and disorganized, and often reluctant to engage in politics directly. Quakers do demonstrate against the war. Unitarian Universalists organize food co-ops and homeless shelters. Catholic bishops, once a clear and strong voice for social justice, are mired in sexual-abuse scandals and anti-abortion politics. Jews watch out for Israel. Black Baptist churches try to keep their children out of trouble. Methodists and Presbyterians run bake sales and take up collections.
I don’t want to be unfair. Liberal-leaning religious groups are doing a lot of good in their communities. But most are afraid of getting involved in anything resembling “politics” because they don’t want to appear to be partisan or divisive. They don’t want to risk that some prominent members may withhold contributions, or bolt. They worry about losing their not-for-profit tax status. All this is perfectly understandable, but wrong. Many of these same congregations and denominations had no compunctions about being politically active three decades ago. The National Council of Churches—the fifty-million-member group representing mainline Protestants, Orthodox churches, and the major African-American churches—effectively mobilized support for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. The Catholic Church, in the wake of Vatican II, was deeply involved in workers’ rights, affordable housing, and social justice. Jewish congregations steadfastly supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The stakes today are as high, if not higher, as they were then.
If liberal ideals are to prevail, or even come into reasonable balance with those of radical conservatives, those who constitute America’s religious left will need to become more active, more cohesive, and more directly engaged with politics. They have to understand that evangelical Christian fundamentalists are waging political war. The Christian right is intent on imposing its views on the rest of us about abortion, homosexuality, prayer in the public schools, creationism, and the inherent evil of Islam. They’re energizing the Republican Party across the South, Midwest, and many western states. Now is the time for the religious left to join forces with liberals and Democrats, and speak and act with the moral urgency our times deserve.
Members of organized labor have been ground troops for the Democratic Party for many decades, but unionized workers continue to shrink as a proportion of the total workforce—now making up less than 10 percent of the private sector, as I said earlier. The recent efforts of the AFL-CIO to put more resources into union organizing drives is encouraging. Still, too many unions are bent on preserving old jobs at any cost, and have cast free trade as their major nemesis. Unions need to get behind a broader reform movement to salvage American politics from the Radcons.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) are representing just those who are most marginalized in the emerging economy—hotel workers, hospital workers, workers in large retail stores, janitors. And they’re succeeding, with some huge victories over the last few years. The SEIU, in particular, is the closest we have to a “movement” union. It’s the most diverse union in the AFL-CIO. Its ranks are full of Latinos and blacks, as well as whites. Its leadership is young. It’s organizing like mad. It’s recruiting and training a lot of young people. If it can keep growing and show some more political muscle, it could have a major role in transforming the Democratic Party.
Minorities—blacks, Latinos, and Asians—are becoming a larger portion of the American population and a significant liberal Democratic voting bloc. They were only about a tenth of the voting electorate in 1972, but grew to almost a fifth of all voters by 2000. At this rate, they’ll account for nearly a quarter of voting Americans by 2010. They need to be mobilized and made a permanent part of this new political movement. If the venom that Radcons continuously spew into the airwaves about these minorities hasn’t been enough to get them involved—they mustn’t be allowed to be intimidated—a bold program focused on economic development of poor cities, affordable housing, good schools, and good jobs should be.
Working, single, and well-educated women constitute other potential ground troops. Most already vote Democrat. Most oppose the Radcons’ position on abortion and contraception; they want help with child care and health care; they often feel badly treated by businesses that fail to accommodate the need to balance work and family; they oppose big tax breaks for the rich; and they disapprove of bullying militarism. While they don’t have a lot of time to put into grassroots politics—their jobs and families consume them—they’d make time if they felt it was well spent.
Liberals need to be careful not to place too much reliance on the elderly. Over the next two decades, the “greatest generation” retirees will be replaced by aging boomers, who’ll be the largest, noisiest, and most demanding political constituency in American history. Tens of millions of boomer bodies will all be corroding simultaneously. If you think prescription drug coverage is a big deal now, wait until medical science promises boomers we can look young, have sex like rabbits, and party until we drop at the age of a hundred. Across the land there’ll be outcroppings of Med-Meds—think of Club Med combined with a medical facility: snorkeling all morning followed by extra oxygen in the afternoon. Worse yet, most boomers haven’t saved a dime for retirement. All their equity is in their homes. And home prices will take a dive when the boomers all go to sell at about the same time.
In other words, brace yourself. We’ll be lucky if the Democrats (as well as a lot of Republicans) don’t sell out completely to aging boomers. Increasingly, the fault line in American politics will be generational. Who will represent the young? Who will inspire them? Who will enable them to discover the joy of politics?
Young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five are doing more voluntary work in their communities than any generation in living memory. They’re tutoring poor kids, staffing after-school programs in poor schools, helping in soup kitchens, teaching in disadvantaged school districts. All this, yet they’re cynical as hell about politics. We’ve got to get them involved.
I have this debate all the time with my sons, especially Adam, who has been working for the last few years with juvenile prisoners and parolees in Providence, Rhode Island. Adam believes that the best way to change America is through local organizing that brings people directly together to improve their communities. I value what Adam does and I’m proud he has the courage of his convictions. I also tell him that if he and his friends turn their backs on national politics they’re ceding it to the Radcons—with disastrous consequences for every poor and working-class community in America.
As I told you, I lost the race for governor of Massachusetts in 2002. I got in too late to organize a grassroots effort that might have made up for my lack of campaign funds. Maybe I’m just not a very good politician. But I did at least inspire a lot of young people to get involved. They worked tirelessly in my campaign. They saw how politics can affect the lives of ordinary people in very practical ways. They felt the joy and excitement of politics, and also its disappointments. I wouldn’t have done nearly as well as I did without them.
Here’s some really hopeful news, and I learned it while running for governor. Liberal idealism isn’t dead. It’s just waiting to be ignited (among young people, minorities, the poor) or reignited (among the middle-aged and jaded). Millions of people are yearning to get involved and change the way politics is practiced. It doesn’t matter whether they call themselves Progressives, Greens, Democrats, or Independents. They want the system cleaned up. They want government to work better and for more people. They yearn for political leaders who are authentic, who’ll stand up for what they believe in, who aren’t afraid to take on sacred cows and tell it like it is, who have new ideas that are commonsensical. They’re deeply worried about where the Radcons are taking the country.
There’s the kindling and the lighter fluid. All it will take is a match.
This is much bigger and more important than the future of the Democratic Party or even the future of liberalism. It’s really about the future of our democracy. Our democracy is in terrible trouble right now. Power is in the hands of a tiny group of people who are using the threat of terrorism to impose their crimped vision of a corporate commonwealth. Large corporate entities are more politically potent than they’ve been at any time in living memory.
Parties are means, not ends. The question is: Can Democrats turn themselves into a national movement to take back our democracy? Can they give voice to those without a voice? Can they regain their passion, courage, and soul?
The Radcons dominating the Republican Party know exactly what and whom they stand for. Democrats don’t. And when you know who you are and what you believe, you’ve got a much better chance of winning, even if you’re wrong.
Some people say we don’t need a vital politics to be a vital society. All we need is grassroots moral activism, spearheaded by community groups, socially responsible businesses, not-for-profits, religious organizations, and compassionate volunteers. All these forms of “civic engagement” are important, but they do not comprise an alternative to politics.
Throughout our history, civic activism has been the precursor, and the propellant, of political movements. A bit more than a century ago, American liberalism appeared similarly eclipsed, despite mounting social problems. As today, vast fortunes were being amassed, yet median wages had stopped growing and the poor were getting poorer. New technologies (steam engines, railway locomotives, the telephone, steam turbines, electricity) were transforming America, pulling families off the farms and immigrants from abroad and depositing many into fetid slums. Robber barons and Wall Street magnates were consolidating their empires. The richest one percent of the population owned more than the remaining 99 percent put together. Government was effectively up for sale to the highest bidder and politics had sunk into the swamp of patronage. The broad public was deeply cynical. “What do I care about the law: Hain’t I got the power?” huffed Cornelius Vanderbilt.7
All seemed perfectly justified, as we’ve seen, by the convenient doctrine of social Darwinism. Some Americans turned to blaming immigrants and foreigners. The American Protective League was formed—viciously anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant. The Ku Klux Klan was revived. America also turned imperialistic. With the sinking of the Maine in 1898, Spain, a third-rate colonial power in Cuba, was depicted by the McKinley administration as the world’s most wicked despot. America quickly conquered the Philippines, another Spanish domain, and spent the next several years trying to quell a guerilla resistance that claimed the lives of four thousand Americans. Those who opposed the Spanish-American War were attacked as “ultra-pacifists.” As the century closed, America seemed to be turning its back on liberal democratic ideals.
But as the new century dawned, the air began crackling with reform. Muckrakers such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell exposed corruption, and the middle class demanded fundamental change. Small businessmen had had enough of the monopolies, and joined forces with trustbusters. Wisconsin’s crusading governor, Robert La Follette, enacted legislation regulating health and safety in factories; Oregon limited the hours of work for women (no more than ten per day). Suffragists marched. Campaigns were organized for pure food and drug laws, workers’ compensation, a minimum wage, a graduated income tax, and civil service reform. A progressive movement began to emerge. Liberal politics gained new life and meaning.
What happened? Indignation, which had been rising steadily, suddenly exploded and flooded the country. Morality and common sense simply couldn’t abide the way things were going. Yet instead of opting for revolution and radical change, Americans preferred to spread the benefits of the emerging industrial economy, thereby saving capitalism from its own excesses.
If I’m right, and the historic parallel holds, another era of liberalism is on its way. Liberals will indeed win the battle for America because they are closer than Radcons are to the true American ideals. If Democrats can see and feel this resurgence, they will be the party of the future. If not, well, it will bubble up some other way, although maybe not with the same speed or force.
The most important thing for each of us to know is we’re not alone in all this. There are tens of millions just like us—Americans who have had enough of the radical conservatives: their intolerance, their mean-spiritedness, their moral righteousness, their arrogance toward the rest of the world. But they see little or no alternative—many are almost as fed up with comatose Democrats: their lack of conviction, their spineless shift toward a rightward moving “center,” their weak-kneed incapacity to tell it like it is.
The most important thing for us to do is get involved. We may not all call ourselves “liberals,” but we share the same liberal values. We have reason on our side, and we need fire in our bellies. And when you and I join with others, and commit ourselves to the long-term struggle to revive our democracy and rededicate this nation to the liberal ideals on which it was founded, we will win.