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How to Win in a Gilded Age

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

Election time finds me a little tired and nauseated as I finish watching Bill Moyers’ chronicle of Washington’s ‘Christian’ bribery circles. Tom DeLay, Mark Foley, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and possibly Grover Norquist took millions from the American people in the name of God. These Pecksniffs sold their bodily efforts and minds to the highest bidders, and their victims were poverty-stricken Texas and Louisiana Indian tribes, family-values Christians all over America, and Chinese Communist sweatshop-employed women in the U. S. Marianas. Now I think of Dante’s hell and its circle of the hypocrites wearing holy robes of painted gold on the outside and heavy lead within, barely moving their weights as they act out hypocrisy’s heaviness and tiresomeness.

Men in cloaks of painted gold/lead within are running us. Now Republicans wring their hands about DeLay’s sidekick, Mark Foley, and his pedophiliac tendencies. Did Speaker Hastert know? Gee whiz!

Now Democrats muse about whether they ought to support a get-out-of-Iraq timetable or go after Rummy. Should they say a little something about Condi’s knowing about the coming terror-strike? Did John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld know? Gee whiz again!

Both parties favor virtue and family and babies and being nice — big time.

While today’s Washington burns with Republican greed and Democratic incompetence, we progressives fiddle.

Folly kills as many of our own in Iraq as 9/11 killed — dozens of times as many Iraqis, perhaps 500,000 and more. Time magazine reports that U.S. ships capable of mining Iranian harbors set sail for Iran on October 1. The Nation says that the ‘October surprise’ will be the invasion of Iran. Our country tells our Pakistani allies that we will bomb them back into the Stone Age if they don’t behave. It contemplates bombing Iran and North Korea. And yet we continue to fiddle.

Few in the leaden cloaks can face the big issues: global warming; the poverty of one in eight Americans and one in four African-Americans; globally the poverty of the more than three billion people who live on less than two dollars a day; the meanness and selfishness of our political culture. While we babble about family values, the American family disintegrates, torn by requirements that both spouses work — without childcare help — to get food and a decent domicile and education. Internationally, the family — save for the European family — disintegrates, torn by the pressures of poverty, war and refugee status.

Internationally as well, the arms trader makes big money for the United States and Russia. None of our national leaders testifies about the blood-cost to the world’s youth.

Genocide is the order of the day in the Congo and Darfur. Still, no congressperson acts seriously.

No one lays down a comprehensive strategy for peace in the Middle East, but our leaders do make their daily debating points. A strategy would require, at the very least, the UN’s guaranteeing Israel’s and Lebanon’s total border security; its — and our — providing serious economic and human development funds that reach the people in the underdeveloped sections of the Middle East — parts of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq; its — and our — implementing a serious development plan for the underdeveloped countries of Central Asia. A serious plan would require support for secularist forces in Turkey, a federal solution in Iraq which would give some oil money to the Sunnis and bind the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds loosely to the Iraqi central government while guaranteeing Turkey’s borders with the Kurds.

Finally, there is Iran. Serious negotiation would require a U.S., that asks other countries to forego nuclear weapons and self-determined nuclear power, to work with the UN and the international community to forgo these itself. ‘Nuclear’ is our tool of dominance.

But when the Soviet Union, early in the UN’s history, called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and later included proposals for a serious regimen of inspections, we declined. We needed the nukes, we thought, because of massive Soviet superiority in tanks and ground forces. How is Iran’s logic when facing us — and in possibly seeking nuclear weapons — different from ours when we faced the Soviets?

Progressive forces may win the next House elections. There is enough anger around about Foley, Hastert, Rove, Bush, the Iraq War, shaky economic conditions and government corruption to win ten elections. We should win, but is winning it?

(Don’t get me wrong. A victory of progressives over the radical right may keep us from some wars, some concentrations of wealth, corruption and venality.)

But for real change to come, progressives need to announce, “This is the vision we are fighting for over the long haul,” and then fight for it over the long haul.

And it will be a long haul — present failure being no excuse.

Look at William Jennings Bryan, as he appears in Michael Kazin’s A Godly Hero. Bryan is the one American who lost three presidential elections — in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Defeat hurt, but did not stop him. In defeat, he put in place, for the Democratic Party’s platforms and ultimately for the nation, a vision of laws requiring the government to control monopoly power; to regulate currency to stabilize the economy (a pre-Keynesian Keynesianism) and create the Federal Reserve system for popular control of money and banks; to protect the organizing rights of laboring people; to install a progressive income tax; and, to some degree, provide for women’s suffrage. Even his silly Scopes battle was motivated by a fear of Social Darwinism and Nazi-style eugenics.

Ultimately Bryan lost in his efforts to make America an anti-imperialist power. He tried to make it, like present-day Switzerland or Sweden, the center of a drive for peacemaking — a supporter of an effective League of Nations and Versailles Treaty.

On his successful side, Bryan hardly saw any of his goals realized when he was a congressman or Secretary of State. But in his speeches and his newspaper articles, he prepared the way. He sowed. The harvest came with the progressive part of Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s presidencies — the latter years after his death.

We can complain about the elections Bush and Cheney stole (they probably stole Florida in 2000 and, based on Robert Kennedy Jr.’s research, Ohio in 2004). I do believe that we live in a quasi-tyranny now — stolen elections, the denial of habeas corpus and torture ratified as national policy. But complaining does nothing. We live in a quasi-tyranny because millions of us have not acted — have not registered to vote, have not voted, have not taken others to the polls, have not held coffee klatches with our neighbors to influence them, have not asked our candidates to take clear and clearly articulated stands. We have not asked, “Who is paying for you guys’ campaigns, your living high on the hog and driving BMWs in Washington?” We have not leafleted or demonstrated or marched on Washington to flush the sewer of our government into the sea of anonymity.

We may not see this cleansing in our lifetimes. If we start now, our children — like those who came after Bryan — can see a different story. We can overcome, over the long haul. My grandfather, Andrew Olson, left Sweden when it was a semi-feudal autocracy. He hated it so much that he went back to bring his old father to America so he would not have to die there. Sweden is now one of the world’s centers for progressive Peace & Justice policy and activity. But its changing took thousands of people’s work, elections, strikes and coffee klatches over many decades.

We also can overcome.

Just as with Bryan, it’s the work of a lifetime.

But we have to be willing to begin.