A moral tale from Bill Moyers worth bringing back to the fore again…

Equality is impossible to achieve but necessary to fight for. A more equal society would bring us closer to the “self-evident truth” of our common humanity. I remember the early l960s, when for a season one could imagine progress among the classes and races, a nation straining to accept immigrants for their value not only to the economy but to our collective identity, a people sniffing the prospect of progress. One could look at the person who is different in some particular way—skin color, language, religion—without feeling fear. America, so long the exploiter of the black, red, brown, and yellow, was feeling its oats; we were on our way to becoming the land of opportunity, at last. Today inequality—especially between wealth and worker—has opened like a chasm of Grand Canyon-like proportions.

Ronald Reagan once described a particular man he knew who was good steward of resources in the biblical sense. “This is a man,” Reagan said, “who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who worked in the stores.”

Reagan was speaking of Barry Goldwater, a businessman before he entered politics. It’s incredible how far we have deviated from even that most conservative understanding of social responsibility. For a generation now Goldwater’s political children have done everything they could to destroy the social compact between workers and employers, and to discredit, defame, and even destroy anyone who said their course was wrong.

I’m not one to normally find myself in agreement with Alexander Hamilton, but this is interesting, and telling…

The scale of the disorder in our national priorities right now is truly staggering; it approaches a moral anarchy the Right would defend as the natural order. Alexander Hamilton, the conservative genius of the financial class, warned this could happen. Speaking to the New York State legislature in 1788, he said:

As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature: It is what, neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is common misfortune, that awaits our state constitution, as well as others.

Conservatives who revere the founding fathers tend to stress the last point—that there is nothing to be done about this “common misfortune.”  It is up to the rest of us, who see the founding fathers not as gods issuing edicts but as inspired although flawed human beings—the hand that scribbled “All men are created equal” also stroked the breast and thighs of a slave woman considered to be his property—to take on “the tendency of things ” and to hold our country to its highest, and most humane, ideals.

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