- First, the separation of church and state. We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.
- Secondly, liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.
The current degree of concentrated wealth in America is a direct threat to our well-functioning democracy. We can see it in the symptoms every day, in terms of campaign financial contributions streaming in to mostly the Bush campaign from corporations. We also see the enormous effect that large corporations have, and the enormous power they wield in Washington simply by virtue of their size and economic power.
- Liberals, thirdly, have always represented opportunity and equality of opportunity, whether it be access to affordable health care, or good education, or a fair chance to get a good job.
The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It’s equality of opportunity. There’s a fundamental difference. So condemning the working class and the poor to lousy schools and to a health care system that is increasingly skewed toward the privileged violates these basic tenets of liberalism, as does a tax break that is overwhelmingly benefiting those who are already very rich at a time in our nation’s history when the gap between the rich and everyone else is wider than it’s been in over a hundred years.
- And finally, liberals believe in a foreign policy that is multi-national and collaborative, working through the United Nations, NATO and our major allies, seeking to prevent violence and war through spreading middle-class prosperity rather than through the simple assertion of our military might. Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world.
The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives. The fact is that most Americans support these basic values. They represent mainstream America. The problem is that the radical conservatives are better organized, have more money, and have monopolized more of the airwaves and broadcast media than liberals. Also, the Democrats have been so weak-kneed and have lacked the courage of their convictions.
I’ve spent half of my adult life in public office. I have run for elective office. I’ve spent the other half of my adult life as a student and scholar of the American political and economic system. So I don’t use those words carelessly. I use that example to illustrate the difference between public and private morality. Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms. It’s not government’s business what people do in their private bedrooms. But public morality is quite distinct. And liberals ought to be sounding the alarm about a breakdown of public morality at the highest reaches of corporate America in terms of the looting of corporations, executive salaries that are preposterously out of proportion to what they ought to be, and also corporate contributions and lobbying, and pollution of American politics. These are the real moral failings today, and they need to be understood as such. There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.
This is a time when progressives, liberals, people who share these values, need to become more involved than they have at any time since the Vietnam War. The populism that Republicans use is an artificial, superficial populism. It’s a populism that doesn’t really respond to the deep needs of working Americans. In fact, the median wage for workers without college degrees continues to drop, adjusted for inflation, particularly when you consider the erosion -- the steady erosion -- of health benefits. Republicans want to blame affirmative action. They want to blame women and feminists. They blame immigrants, just like they want to blame the French and Germans and anyone else who was not with us in our war in Iraq.
The blame game is a cheap and dangerous form of populism. It doesn’t respond to the underlying issues, the underlying problems. It simply channels people’s anger toward others. It’s divisive. It separates Americans from one another and it separates us from the rest of the world. The kind of populism that Democrats used to espouse was a populism that focused on the genuine needs of working people for better jobs, for health care, for better education, for better opportunities, and the needs of people around the world for expanded opportunities as well. And that’s the kind of populism we need. A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW: June 14, 2004
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