by Bill Moyers
DOUTHAT: The Democrats are much healthier. And it’s very likely that we’re headed for a period of Democratic dominance, maybe four years.
Sure, there’s a swelling of support for Obama and there was strong support for Clinton despite the Lewinsky affair. I’m not a practicing Democrat. I don’t defend the Democratic Party. In fact, I look at the party in Congress and how beholden it is to wealthy interests, corporate interests. Democrats have lost their ties to working people.
DOUTHAT: A deeper problem for the Democrats is they’re going to probably sweep into power this November. They already swept into power in Congress. They’re going to have a large majority. But the question is, what do they do with it? When political movements take power, it helps to have a defined agenda.
This was why Ronald Reagan was so great. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, everybody knew it was a revolution because Reagan had been going around saying the same things for fifteen years. People knew what he stood for. The challenge for the Democrats is, yeah, there are some new ideas. There are some old ideas from back in the 1970s that they’re rehabilitating. But when you watch the primary season, Barack Obama goes out and attacks free trade. And then when the general election comes, it’s time to pivot and be for free trade. I think that the only good news for the Republicans right now in this moment of near Democratic triumph is that the Democrats are not positioned to establish a twenty-year majority.
EDWARDS: There’s one other big problem for Democrats here. As I said, the Republican label is really hurting, and the Democratic label right now is very popular. But liberalism is not popular. In these by-elections this year, where Democrats were picking up seats that had been held a long time by Republicans, those were not liberal Democrats who were winning those seats. The country is not turning to the left. It’s just turning against the Republicans.
DOUTHAT: Although to be fair, the Democratic majority that existed when you came of age, Bill, did depend on conservative Democrats. Sometimes having some ideological distinctions in your majority is a sign that you’ve got a really big majority.
The subtitle of your book is How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. We share a concern that ordinary working people in this country are having real trouble making a living wage. The paucity of jobs that pay living wages is the great moral as well as economic crisis in America today, and neither party has fully addressed that. Conservatives won under Nixon with the “Silent Majority.” Reagan won with “Reagan Democrats”—the working class that came over to the Republican Party. But I don’t see what any of those people have gotten from the conservative revolution because they’re worse off today in real wages, adjusted for inflation, than they were thirty years ago when you came to power.
DOUTHAT: I’ll push back on that argument a little bit. I think there are a lot of ways in which the working class is better off than they were in that era. I think just looking at wages is misleading because one of the things that’s happened, thanks to free trade, thanks to policies that Republicans have championed, is prices. The cost of living has fallen dramatically across the board for Americans. If you look at the goods the poor and the working class buy versus the goods the rich buy, the goods that the poor and working class buy today are vastly cheaper than they used to be.
You’re not saying that workers face wage stagnation?
DOUTHAT: No, workers do face wage stagnation. But those wages do, in fact, buy more goods than they used to buy. There are ways in which the working class is better off. But yes, on the big picture I agree with you. Republicans need a tax policy that helps people investing in America’s future in another way, people struggling to raise families. So in the book we talk a lot about making the tax code more family-friendly, making it easier for people to have two kids, to have three kids, to put those kids through school.
Have working people benefited from these tax cuts to the rich? We have greater gaps between rich and poor today than we did in 1929.
EDWARDS: And apart of that is that our focus has changed. We used to be a party that prided itself on being the party of small business. We were for entrepreneurs, and we were for free enterprise, and more and more we seem to have become a party that idolizes big business, that supports big business in every way it can. Actually, if you go back to the Goldwater years, we were a party very much like what Ross is saying we need to become. And we got away from it.
It seems to me that both parties have contributed to the instability of working people today.
DOUTHAT: It’s true. But I think one of the things that’s changed in America over the past fifty years is you now have a mass upper class in a way you didn’t before. It used to be you had the rich, you had the middle class, you had the working class, and you had the poor. Now there’s been an explosion of wealth for highly educated Americans—Americans with college degrees, but especially with postgrad degrees—over the last thirty years. You see it especially in big cities on the coast. You see it in New York. You see it in Washington. You see it in Boston. And this has created a real constituency both for the Republicans and for the Democrats for policies pitched to these voters.
Look at what Bill Clinton pushed. He would get up and give speeches about the need to make college affordable, right? And that’s obviously a really important thing. But the way they went about making college affordable was by pushing for scholarships that went to upper-income families because that’s a big constituency that likes getting merit-based scholarships, that likes getting financial aid to help them out. But that isn’t where the American public education system actually ought to be focused.
If capitalism promotes inequality, as it does, shouldn’t democracy try to strike a balance and promote fairness?
EDWARDS: Capitalism, in theory, does not promote inequality.
But in practice.
EDWARDS: What capitalism promotes is that if you are willing to invest your time and money to provide a service, a benefit, a product that is useful, you’re going to get a reward for it, and that’s going to cause you to do more. And you’re going to create jobs. We have allowed the system to grow to where it has nothing to do with free trade. So we support people like Ivan Boesky and Boone Pickens and these predators ...
Mickey, some of your conservative critics say you’ve gone soft.
EDWARDS: Right.
That your plans for reclaiming conservatism laid out in your book would take policy positions that John Edwards would love. You’re against the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act. You would have the government protect abortion rights and the right of states to sanction gay marriage. You’re suspicious of NAFTA and big business. And you’re against the No Child Left Behind Act. One of my colleagues asked me, why isn’t Mickey Edwards Obama’s running mate? Because these are positions that would fit very comfortably on that side of the spectrum.
EDWARDS: Those are positions that for decades conservatives believed, conservatives championed. Keeping certain things out of the hands of the federal government, allowing people to make their own decisions, I haven’t moved. I am where I was when we started out as conservatives. I’ve been a loyal Republican all my life, but my loyalty to my party does not transcend my loyalty to the principles that got me into politics in the first place.
DOUTHAT: And there’s a tendency in American politics to say, well, if you’re not for George W. Bush, you must be for Barack Obama.
EDWARDS: Absolutely.
DOUTHAT: No Child Left Behind, right? You brought that up. That’s a good example. Why do you oppose No Child Left Behind? I assume it’s because you think the federal government shouldn’t be messing around with state education systems. Why do liberals oppose No Child Left Behind? Because it didn’t spend enough money messing around with state education systems. So there’s a huge diversity of political views that don’t fall neatly into a “you’re for Obama” or “you’re for McCain” kind of camp.
EDWARDS: There is a line here. The people who are
attacking me are post-Reagan people. I don’t even know what they represent, but it is not conservatism.
They call themselves conservatives. Don’t you think Rush Limbaugh considers himself the voice of conservatism?
EDWARDS: Well, I’m sure he considers himself the voice of everything. But look, the fact is the people who created the conservative movement, the people who were the Goldwater-Reagan people who wrote those platforms, insisted that the District of Columbia have a vote in Congress. In Arizona, Planned Parenthood gives an annual Barry Goldwater Award. Why? Because we believe in the free choice of people.
DOUTHAT: I’m certainly not part of the Republican power structure right now. Mickey and I disagree on a lot of stuff and represent kind of different visions for the Republican Party. But I think Rush Limbaugh would pretty much hate us both.
EDWARDS: Yes!
DOUTHAT: And that’s a problem. But there is a tendency, too, among conservatives to pine for the golden age. When Ronald Reagan took power, after a couple of years people were already saying, “He’s betraying conservatism,” and—
EDWARDS: Let Reagan be Reagan, right?
DOUTHAT: Let Reagan be Reagan. The revolution is always being betrayed.
EDWARDS: I’m not longing for a golden age. I’m longing for adherence to the Constitution of the United States because when we talk about American exceptionalism, that’s what it is. It’s not our wealth. It’s not our military. What makes us exceptional is our form of self-government, that keeps most of the major powers—whether to go to war, what our tax policies ought to be, how much we spend—keeps them in the hands of the people through their representatives.
What’s the one thing that Republicans could do to win over the stagnating working class?
DOUTHAT: I think the biggest thing Republicans could do to win them over is to marry the language of family values—the pro-family party—to an agenda that goes beyond abortion and gay marriage. Being a pro-family party, being on the side of the American family, especially the working-class family, has to go beyond those. We have to look at health care. We have to look at the tax code. We have to look at all these areas that affect the well-being of American moms and dads and their kids.
It has to do the things that liberals have been talking about?
DOUTHAT: It doesn’t have to do the things that liberals have been talking about, but it has to address the issues that liberals have been talking about in a conservative way. If you read our book, you won’t find a lot of specific policy proposals that liberals embrace. This is why I’m not writing speeches for Barack Obama. He isn’t going to sign up for the policy ideas that I support. But he is talking about the right issues.
Your book is subtitled Reclaiming Conservatism. What’s the most important thing conservatives can do to reclaim their philosophy?
EDWARDS: We have to start standing for principle. We need to go back to “What kind of a government did we create?” You know, I came out of a very poor background, and I agree totally that we need to be addressing the concerns of the working class. But we have a system of government that keeps power in the hands of the people through their representatives. And we can’t lose that. That’s what we have to do. We have to stand for principle again instead of being a party that only stands for “How can we defeat Democrats?”
GRACE LEE BOGGS
Grace Lee Boggs has lived in the same house in Detroit for more than half of her ninety-five years. She has seen that city, which had been the arsenal of democracy during World War II and had put America on wheels in the auto boom that followed, decline around her. Even before the riots of 1967—she calls them “a rebellion”—carmakers were merging and moving out of town to get close to new markets. Automation arrived and squeezed skilled workers out of a livelihood. The city’s middle class headed for the suburbs; in the 1950s Detroit’s population dropped by almost 200, 000 people. Grace Lee Boggs was not among them; she would not be moved.
Despite the tumultuous changes around her, she remains a buoyant believer in grassro ots demo cracy. In the last century, she has been a part of almost every major movement in the United States: labor, civil rights, black power, women’s rights and environmental justice. Activists one-third her age have to run to keep up with her.
In 1992 , she and her late husband—autoworker and organizer James Boggs—worked with other activists to found Detroit Summer, described as “a multicultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up.” And in 2004, she helped organize the Beloved Communities Project, “an initiative begun to identify, explore and form a network of communities committed to and practicing the profound pursuit of justice, radical inclusivity, democratic governance, health and wholeness, and social/individual transformation.”
Even as she has remained rooted in one neighborhood and one house, and writing an always spirited blog, she seems constantly on the road, speaking, cajoling, inspiring, prodding, and admonishing others to organize, organize, organize. Over her long life she has tried one radical idea after another, embracing some, discarding others, fashioning new ones of her own in her passion for a more humane and egalitarian America. Her passion springs from her own fascinating life story. She was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to immigrant Chinese. During the Roaring Twenties her father ran a popular Chinese restaurant on Broadway near Times Square, but to buy the land for their first house across the river in Queens, he had to put the deed in the name of an Irish contractor because Asians were prohibited to own land there. Every week Grace spent hours at the local library, winning a Regents scholarship to Barnard College and ultimately earning a doctorate in philosophy from Bryn Mawr. Quite a trip, considering that when she was born, the waiters in the family restaurant suggested that she be taken away and left on a hillside because “she’s just a girl.”
—Bill Moyers
And that’s a true story—the waiters saying, “Dispose of her”?
Yes. I attribute some of my activism to being born female above a Chinese restaurant, where I quickly got the idea that a lot of things in this world needed to be changed.
Yet you came to identify, over the years, far more with the black American world than with the Chinese American world.
When I was growing up, Asians were so few and far between as to be almost invisible. The idea of an Asian American movement in this country was unthinkable.
What I’m trying to figure out is how it is that the daughter of a Chinese entrepreneur in New York City goes to Bryn Mawr at a very early age, gets her Ph.D. in 1940, before the Second World War, becomes a Marxist theorist, an activist in the socialist movement, moves on to become a disciple of Martin Luther King, and having outlived all those theories and those characters and leaders, is still agitating for what she calls “democracy.”
I had no idea what I was going to do after I got my degree in philosophy in 1940. But what I did know was at that time, if you were a Chinese American, even department stores wouldn’t hire you. They’d come right out and say, “We don’t hire Orientals.” So the idea of my getting a job teaching in a university was really ridiculous. I went to Chicago and I got a job in the philosophy library there for $10 a week, and I found a little old Jewish woman right near the university who took pity on me and said I could stay in her basement rent-free. The only obstacle was that I had to face down a barricade of rats in order to get into her basement. And at that time, in the black communities, they were beginning to protest and struggle against rat-infested housing. I joined one of the tenants’ organizations and thereby came in touch with the black community for the first time in my life.
One of your first heroes in that community was A. Philip Randolph, the charismatic labor leader who had won a long struggle to organize black railroad porters in the 1930s. With World War II going on, he was furious that blacks were being turned away from good-paying jobs in the booming defense plants. He took his argument to President Roosevelt, who was sympathetic but reluctant to act. Rand
olph told him that “power is the active principle of only the organized masses,” and called for a huge march on Washington to shame the president. It worked. FDR backed down and signed an order banning discrimination in the defense industry. All over America blacks moved from the countryside into the cities to take up jobs, the first time in four hundred years that black men could bring home a regular paycheck. You watched all that unfold.
And when I saw what a movement could do, I said, “Boy, that’s what I wanna do with my life.” It was just amazing. I mean, how you have to take advantage of a crisis in the system and in the government and also press to meet the needs of the people who are struggling for dignity. Very tricky.
It does take moral force to bring on political change.
Too much of our emphasis on struggle has simply been confrontation and not enough recognition of how spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling.
Power never gives up anything voluntarily. People have to demand it.
Well, as Frederick Douglass said, “Power yields nothing without a struggle.” But how one struggles, I think, is now a very challenging question.
You learned a lot from Jimmy Boggs, the man you married in 1954. He was a radical activist, organizer, and writer. You couldn’t have been outwardly more different—he was a black man, an autoworker from Alabama, and you were a Chinese American college-educated philosopher. But the marriage lasted four decades until Jimmy died, right?
Yes. I owe a great deal of my rootedness to Jimmy, because he learned to write in a community where nobody could read and write. He picked cotton and then went to work in Detroit. He saw himself as having been part of one epoch, the agricultural epoch, then the industrial epoch, and now the postindustrial epoch. A very important part of what we need in this country is that sense that we have lived through so many stages and that we are entering into a new stage where we could create something completely different. Jimmy had that sense.