Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.
Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
The struggle of ordinary people for a decent living, for security, is as old as the republic, but it’s taken on a new and urgent edge. Instead of shared prosperity our political system has now produced a winner-take-all economy.
We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we’ll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we’ll not save democracy from its own inertia.
The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.
Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there’s no use even trying.
Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don’t talk about what democracy means – what it bestows on us.
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have raised ignorance to ideology and stupefied an entire political party. No more roguish and rowdy band of predators ever did more to demean and despoil the democracy on whose carcass they feed.
