Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
What are we to say of a great nation, the wealthiest the modern world has ever seen, that can no longer dream of, much less enact, “big things,” even when the world’s leading scientific body, and indeed this nation’s own scientific assessments emphatically declare that what must be done has no precedent in terms of scope and urgency? And will require vast changes in economic arrangements as well, the economic now being inseparable from the ecological.
What are we to say of this great nation which can no longer protect its own citizens from mass murder with battlefield grade firearms, not even its elementary school children, some of whom now carry Kevlar armored back packs as a last resort?
What are we to say of one of the world’s oldest legislative bodies, where the winners of its elections are denied any chance to enact their programs based on fear of the precedents set by the successful New Deal legacy from the 1930’s: that success might be appreciated and remembered by its citizens, so enactments must be denied at all costs, resulting in complete legislative paralysis? Or, more generously, where the deepest held values about the economy and proper role of government are as wide and incompatible as in the failed institutions in Western Europe in the 1930’s?
What are we to say of this great nation when the most watched HBO series, for eight years or so, Game of Thrones, features what one insightful cultural critic called a Hobbesian worldview, with its “war of all against all”? Fintan O’Toole went on to write that “at its most basic level, Game of Thrones is a far-right fantasia. Its apparent world view is the one that is taken for granted in far-right thinking: that there is no such thing as society, only a crudely Darwinian struggle for existence and domination in which one must kill or be killed, enslave or be enslaved. The vision would not be out of place in Mein Kampf and it informs (if that is not too flattering a word) the rantings of every white nationalist psychopath.” You are invited to visit the full piece by O’Toole: www.irishtimes.com/…
What are we to say, of this “Epic for our Times” when it presents itself wrapped in a pastiche of pseudo Middle Age trappings, complete with magic dragons and face shifting personae which cannot give us any clue into how its society and its power institutions run? In other words, an Epic for Our Times totally absent on advice about our own power structures. Its final episode didn’t offer much beyond hope for a “good” King or Queen. Wouldn’t an Epic on Weimar Germany or the American 1850’s, sliding towards Civil War, been a bit more on target? Well, yes, but of course that’s why fantasy loves the Middle Ages. Game of Thrones was not an exception in mood: I found the same “Hobbesian” bleakness in the series that ran contemporaneously alongside it: the Walking Dead; Breaking Bad; Boardwalk Empire; Black Sails; Spartacus (these two at least had egalitarian themes);Outlander, and the Handmaidens.
Does this sound like a setting, or an “Age”— where a few tweaks to the Clinton-Obama legacy can meet the demands of our time, and let us try to name that time: the Age of Inequality, the Age of the Sixth Extinction, the Age of Mass Shootings...of the looming next Super Power about to displace us, China?
Which reminds me of the best course I took during my undergraduate days at Lafayette College in the late 1960’s. It was on Revolution, and taught by a charismatic old white man with a British accent, George Heath, the best college lecturer I ever heard. Dr. Heath was not a revolutionary, and he demanded a lot: an essay on each of the major Revolutions we studied: the English, the French, the American, the Russian, the Chinese and the Cuban. And then one grand long paper at the end, “pick your own.” My point in mentioning this now is not to toss Revolutionary rhetoric or fears around; the term has become a bit too casual on the left, although I suppose it’s fair to say that the scope of what is in the Green New Deal Resolution could qualify as a peaceful one in the making. No, I’m raising this old course of mine — I still have my copy of Crane Brinton’s classic on the theme, first published in 1938, “The Anatomy of Revolution” ...because I think the most useful thing in the course was how the struggling old regimes, the Ancien Regimes, could not meet the needs of their times, and offer the leadership and scope of changes which the circumstances demanded.
I think FDR sensed that history too, and, quoting a British poet in his second Inaugural Address in January of 1937, a quote which I have never heard before, said that “’Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.’” (thanks to Douglas Brinkley in “Rightful Heritage.”)
For ten years I’ve been reading about what the New Deal did and didn’t do, and how it might inspire our time to rise to its great challenges. When I was asked to address a gathering of young interns participating in Congressman Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD, D-8) Democracy Summer, I was going to, among other things, leave them with a reading list to take home. Instead, it turned into something more, with a lot of my heart and soul and head in it…wrestling with the works reviewed, because so much is as stake, and so much isn’t being discussed, out here in Western Maryland, Trump country, or in the mainstream outlets.
And giving twenty or so candidates one minute speeches and 15 second replies to the issues of our age...is a travesty of full democratic debate, a shallow illusion. I learned a lot more about Kamala Harris in Dana Goodyear’s long article in the New Yorker— “First Person” (in the July 22, 2019 print edition) than I did even at her brightest moment on stage in grilling Joe Biden. I kept wondering if she would ever say something substantial in the article about escaping from our current economic assumptions, but there was no discussion of the political economy whatever, no mention of the difficulty we must face down in fully integrating (yes, a different form of “integration,” probably harder than “busing”) economics with ecology.
Best to you all, and I hope my idea of an adequate “Compass in the Storm” provides if not a full course correction, at least some decent “readings.”
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD