“The right story will set our course for a generation to come,” says Bill Moyers in a speech (text, video) given on December 12 in New York under the auspices of The Nation, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the New Democracy Project.
I found the following paragraphs particularly important:
Reagan’s story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control–a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.
And that is not how freedom was understood when our country was founded. At the heart of our experience as a nation is the proposition that each one of us has a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As flawed in its reach as it was brilliant in its inspiration for times to come, that proposition carries an inherent imperative: “inasmuch as the members of a liberal society have a right to basic requirements of human development such as education and a minimum standard of security, they have obligations to each other, mutually and through their government, to ensure that conditions exist enabling every person to have the opportunity for success in life.”
The quote comes directly from Paul Starr, one of our most formidable public thinkers, whose forthcoming book, Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism, is a profound and stirring call for liberals to reclaim the idea of America’s greatness as their own. Starr’s book is one of three new books that in a just world would be on every desk in the House and Senate (emphasis mine)
That, you see, is why I’m a progressive. The purpose of government is not to make the rich richer, but to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to meet their basic needs and strive for their wants. With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes, and of course all of us have to give back to the society that sustains us, rich and poor alike. That is the social contract.
Neocons tend to go on about family values and community values. What
can possibly speak more to the issue of “values” than having everyone
participate, via the proxy of government, in a fair distribution of
basic services to every member of society? Why is it acceptable to
tithe in Sunday services and give alms to the poor but anathema to use
the government to distribute aid fairly, without regard to the
geographical and bias limits inherent in individual or local gestures
of goodwill?
