Chris Hayes of the Nation has a very nice piece that sums up our predicament. It's the kind of thing you can give somebody who just doesn't get it because its tone is irenic and its analogies apt. There are several excerptable grafs, but I'll limit myself to a few near the end:
... one thing the Obama campaign got right was its faith in America's history of continually and fruitfully tilling the soil of democracy, struggling against odds until, at certain moments of profound progressive change, a new treasure is improbably found.
It was the possibility of such a democratic unearthing that gave Obama for America its moral force. The most inspiring thing about the campaign had nothing to do with the candidate and everything to do with average citizens from Dubuque to Atlanta who were taking the time and energy to search for a small piece of that treasure. Likewise, the message of the Obama campaign was as much about empowerment, reinvigorating democracy and changing the ways of Washington as it was about the central planks of his agenda. It's for this reason that the greatest disappointment of his first year is the White House's abandonment of this small-d democratic impulse in favor of a strategy almost wholly focused on insider politics.
What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization.
Couldn't agree more, and yet what will such a re-democratization look like? First step toward solving the problem is to understand its nature. Earlier in the piece Hayes asks, "So what, exactly, is it that ails us?"
In pondering the answer, it's useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that's warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands.
This maldistribution of power is the foundation of all our problems, and it's got significantly worse in the last thirty years because of the dismantlement of the New Deal compromise. The New Deal system wasn't perfect by any means, but it was good insofar as it established a rough balance between capital and the public interest. That balance no longer exists for complex reasons, among them being that enough Americans bought into the Reaganite propaganda that government taxes and regulation were fetters on the American spirit. The result was to create a public mood that permitted the dismantlement by both Republicans (and Dems like Clinton) of many of the public interest protections hard won in the period from the 1930s through 60s.
Yesterday I put up a clip from Frank Capra's 1936 "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town". It was interesting that it drew a comment from Patrick who contrasted it with the Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy buddy film "Boom Town", which celebrated the wildcatter capitalist spirit. "Boom Town" is an interesting movie for us now because it describes what the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins think about what makes America great. If you don't get that, you should watch this film--not primarily to criticize it, but to understand what it seeks to celebrate.
"Boom Town" represents a mentality which is the best side of what might be described as the Republican soul. It draws from a deep archetype that shapes the American character--the ornery, independent, self-reliant risk taker, the man or woman of initiative, of Yankee ingenuity and practical intelligence, the man or woman who hopes for boom times, but scraps his way through the bust times, and is always willing to start over no matter how many times she fails, to get up no matter how many times he gets knocked down.
Who doesn't admire those characteristics? And yet it becomes a caricature of itself when Americans rigidly identify themselves with these characteristics look down in contempt on those who for whatever reason are not able to pick themselves up or start over. And it is an absurd vanity when people who are shaped by these characteristics refuse help when it's needed and offered.
That's what Capra understands and what most Americans with a lick of sense understand--we all have to stand on our own two feet, and we need one another's help when times are hard. To refuse help is to refuse to be human; it's a vanity, and it's as "sinful" as the sloth that refuses to do what's necessary to pull one's own weight.
Conservatives are muddled when they see it as either/or: Either you stand on your own two feet, or you are shiftless bum. For them there's no middle ground, there's no place where we all help one another to stand on our respective feet, where our looking out for one another is not done to foster dependency, but because it enhances the humanity of both the giver and the receiver. It's the basic credo that soldiers understand: No man left behind.
Our problem of course is that as a society we don't have that kind of group cohesiveness; we have the habits of a nation that has been profoundly divided along racial and ethnic lines. Conservatives embrace the No Man Left behind ethic when it is one of their own, but not when the man left behind is black, brown, or Semitic.
Capra's movies celebrate that broader understanding of what it means to be human. In the clip I posted yesterday Cooper/Deeds isn't putting those men on the dole--he's giving them a chance to stand on their own two feet. It's a way for him to recover some of his diminished humanity as well as to help others whose humanity has been diminished for other reasons. Deeds understands that both the rich and the poor suffer insofar as they are living in a world where things are out of balance.
Now a conservative reading this might agree that we all have an obligation to help one another, but, they'd argue, it's not the government's job to do that. Such help and support is given by families, friends, neighbors, and through the churches and other volunteer-driven institutions in the private sector. And I think an argument could be made that to the degree that government takes over this role, the rest of us can see ourselves as taken off the hook for our responsibility to help one another out in more direct ways. We look at a brother or sister in need, and say, "Let the government take care of it."
And no matter what the government does, there are myriad opportunities for all of us to help more directly. But the hard fact is that even a million points of light are not sufficient to deal with the scale and complexity of need. I don't think we need to argue about whether governments screw things up and can often make things worse. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't. Either way, governments are the only entities that have sufficient resources to make a difference when the scale of the problem is so great that it cannot be handled by parties in the private and volunteer sector. The disaster in Haiti right now is an obvious point in case--like Katrina, this is as much a governmental/social organizational disaster as it is a natural one--but the disaster that is healthcare in this country and environmental degradation throughout the world are also points in case. These and so many more require remedies coordinated and implemented at the governmental level.
But the American people have often had a hard time getting behind that idea, in large part because they have bought into the "Boom Town" mythos, in which the free individual is central and the government and its regulations an unnecessary impediment, in which every American has the possibility to become a millionaire if he has the moxie to try.
But the re-democratization that Hayes and all sane Americans long for can't happen until we can imagine American society as a nation of both self-reliant individuals whose dignity lies in standing on their own two feet and pulling their own weight on the one hand, and on the other, a society in which we see ourselves as helping one another to stay on their feet and to give one another a helping hand when they stumble. And we have to see that solidarity across racial, religious, and ethnic lines. Living in a fairly cosmopolitan area, it was an education for me the last several years to learn how difficult it is for many Americans to break out that tribalism, but it continues to be a profound obstacle to the development of a bottom-up people's movement to counter the power of the country's power elite.