Across America candidates are lining up for the next round of House and Senate elections in 2006. Republicans are trying to maintain the momentum built up over years of civic action, but their party struggles with the costs of victory. There is no place to hide when you control all three branches of the federal government and much of the backdrop of lobbyists, experts, and media who shape public life. The country is, more or less, in Republican hands.
Democrats, the genuinely loyal opposition, would love to take advantage of Bush administration fumbles, but party leaders seem unsure about how hard they should hit the president, and even more uncertain about proposing detailed alternatives to his policies. So far, as Democrats gather with their own cadres of the very rich and the very smart, they hope the Republican coalition will unravel, and that they can help the process along by highlighting administration double talk and incompetence. But Democrats of influence-all of them as far as one can tell-do not even imagine that they could change the national agenda or reshape the political culture. Instead, they raise a lot of money, talk about the use of modern technology, and worry about the marketing problem-How can they find another Bill Clinton who can actually persuade people that the Democrats can do a better job achieving the shared goals of national prosperity and national security while making them forget about shallow Republican promises of “moral renewal”?
Smaller government, tax relief, strong defense, and family values: that’s been the GOP’s winning formula. Sticking to that message, Republicans win elections at every level. Appearing to depart from that agenda turned the Democrats into the minority party. In a few places Democrats have been able to repackage the Republican message in more attractive dress. Still, they would not dare tell the people that we need stronger government, higher taxes, less military defense, and families who will replace their all-too-private values with values of public compassion and solidarity. Yet that is exactly what we need.
We need stronger and better government at every level to protect the ever more endangered public interest. Health, education, the environment, food and product safety, energy-all of these areas of public policy require better and smarter politicians and civil servants, held responsible for their commitment to the common good, not private interests. Last month’s disaster in New Orleans reminds us of what we sometimes forget: how important it is to have honest, competent officials to care for our common interests, our schools, roads, and public safety at least. Americans may have grown cynical about politics and government, but the fact is that our common interests, national and international, are intimately tied to our most personal interests and dreams.
Remember that government is the only instrument available to us to match the very real power wielded in all markets by corporations and the very rich. Only stronger government backed by informed and organized citizens can make democracy a possibility in a very undemocratic political economy. That is even truer when trade unions shrink and public-interest groups have their backs to the wall. Smaller government serves big interests, strong government and organized citizens give the rest of the people a chance. Remember FDR!
Hard as it is to say, we need less unilateral national power abroad, military and otherwise, if we are to share responsibility for the security of an interdependent human family. If international organizations don’t work well and networks of allies are frayed, we have to repair them. The unilateral pursuit of national security leads to military commitments and imperial overreach that will bankrupt our country, morally and financially. As one American internationalist said recently, superpowers can initiate many actions, but for those initiatives to succeed, we need friends. The truth is we cannot be both free and secure unless others feel secure. In the future, like it or not, national security must give way to common security. Only our addiction to weapons, including nuclear weapons, blinds us to the truth about our common global security, a truth evident to almost everyone else on earth. President George W. Bush delighted in charging that John Kerry was willing to share decisions about war and the fight against terrorism with others. John Kerry never said anything remotely like that-and it is a shame.
We will have to pay more and fairer taxes to get a healthy environment, public safety and security, better schools, affordable health care, housing and transportation, a secure old age, and many other goods that are far too expensive to be attained by most people through their own resources. The demand to privatize public responsibilities sounds good when it comes with promises of lower taxes, but it is a formula for massive inequality, irresponsibility, and unfairness. Government indebtedness, driven by low taxes, is being used to starve the public sector, right down to your neighborhood school.
Better public finance is the number-one democratic need. A fair and effective system of taxation is needed to pay for public programs of health care, energy provision and conservation, environmental and consumer protection, and to insure that free trade is also fair trade for everybody. A tax system that is fair and adequate to our needs in our local communities and in our world is absolutely essential. And, it won’t be cheap. But privatizing schools, health care, safety, pensions, and all the rest are, for most of us, much more expensive, even beyond our reach. Strong government, adequately funded, is essential.
To get all this we need informed and committed citizens. The current debate about family values is almost always cast in terms of forging a moral defense against the wider popular culture, with good reason. But the culture, like the economy and the government, is ours, not somebody else’s. We say, though we don’t always seem to believe it, that we get the government we deserve. The same can be said of the economy and the culture. If we want to participate with our neighbors in shaping a rich culture, a fair economy, and a responsible government, then we have to get to work. We have to organize, and make our voices heard, not with pabulum and platitudes, nor with a sugar-coated version of the Republican mantra, but with the hard-edged truths of what good citizens have to do in a complex, dangerous, and rapidly changing world. So we need to affirm family values, yes, but we must do so while elevating values like solidarity and social and political responsibility-good citizenship. We need good people, and families are where they come from. All of us as individuals must value the public good as well as our own goods, including the good as defined by our communities of faith. In the end the family values that matter most are the values of the human family, united now as never before.
Stronger government, higher taxes, common security, and responsible families: How’s that for a campaign platform? Try to run on that platform! If you do, Democratic consultants will tell you, you will earn one title: Loser. Yet, after the meeting, one or two political professionals will admit that this platform is long on truthfulness even if it is short on market appeal. Dig below the surface a bit and we will find many people who recognize that there is such a thing as the public interest, that there is a common good that is local, national, and global. But the common good can only be made real if it is the goal of persons, families, organizations, and, yes, governments. If the cost of a politics that embodies the public interest-cost in time and talent as well as the treasure of citizens-were honestly set forth, would voters rally to that standard? The question tests our faith in democracy and our trust in one another. Yet in the end democracy requires that we act on that faith and trust. Democracy requires all of us to take responsibility for our history. Let’s find a party that will help us do that.
