by Bill Moyers
There’s a chorus of voices—The Wall Street Journal editorial page, conservative talk radio, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, CNBC’s Kudlow and Cramer—all blaming Obama for the bad economy. How can the right thrive on such amnesia?
What could be more absurd than the people who brought this country to its knees now being the chorus of dissenters? The fact that they are the lightning rod for popular anger is worrisome, because if these bailouts and stimulus fail, if the country sinks deeper into what could be a very long period of stagnation, if popular anger is monopolized by the demagogues on the right, you could see a real resurgence of the more rabidly extremist wing of the Republican Party, especially the anti-immigrant economic nationalist wing.
When you live near the border of southern California, as I do—or in the southern cities and areas of the Midwest—you can see the John Birch Society and its ilk being invigorated into the Republican Party. The vacuum left by the fall of the Soviet Union has been filled by good old-fashioned nativism—immigrant-bashing. No group is so vulnerable right now as the immigrants whose labor has sustained the California economy for the last generation, legal or unlegal.
They have the fewest entitlements. They have the weakest safety net. And their jobs are the ones that are being impacted most directly because they work in construction services or industries that are highly sensitive to the business cycle. Some have gone back to Mexico. But it doesn’t make sense for most people to go back. The border economy has really collapsed. The tourist economy along the border is dead. The maquiladoras, the border assembly plants, are laying off. These people took huge risks to get to the United States, and they’re expected to go back to a country where there are even fewer jobs and fewer hopes?
How are people surviving? Well, in some cases, they cram five into a room. They’re standing in front of Home Depots hoping for a job and hoping they won’t get picked up by the police or the immigration service. But it’s very likely our southern border and Mexico are going to become further destabilized than they already are. And this will provide more ammunition for the right-wing myth of the economic crisis as a stab in the back: blame immigrants, blame liberals, blame the imaginary “socialism” of bank rescue plans that are in fact fully endorsed by capitalist journals like The Economist or the Financial Times.
There’s so much talk from the right raising the specter of socialism. I thought I might as well talk to a real socialist about what the term means. I cannot find anyone in this country advocating the abolition of private markets or nationalizing the major industries. Is anyone you know arguing for supplanting capitalism?
I am.
You are?
Look, I’m a kind of old-school socialist in the way that Billy Graham’s an old-school Baptist. I do genuinely believe in the democratic social ownership of the means to production. But that’s religion. That’s the religious principle.
And in practice?
Well, the role of the left—or the left we need in this country—is not to come up with utopian blueprints of how we’re going to run an entirely alternative society, much less to express nostalgia about authoritative bureaucratic societies like the Soviet Union or China. I think the left’s mission is really to try to articulate the common sense of the labor movement and social struggles on the ground. So, for instance, you know, where you have the complete collapse of the financial system, and where the remedies proposed are privileging the creditors and the very people responsible for that, it’s a straightforward enough proposition to say, “Hey, if we’re going to own the banking system, why not make the decisions and make them in alliance with social policy that ensures that housing’s affordable, that school loans are affordable, that small business gets credit?” Why not turn the banking system into a public utility?
Now, this doesn’t constitute an anticapitalist demand. But it’s a radical demand that asks fundamental questions about our institutions, about who holds the economic power. During the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s there was a period when the Resolution Trust Corporation was organized to buy up the abandoned apartments and homes and then sell them at fire sale rates to private interests. For a year or two it had the means of resolving much of the housing crisis in the United States. Why shouldn’t the federal government basically turn that housing stock into a solution for people’s housing needs? Sell them directly to homeowners at discounts or rent them out? In other words, the role of the left is to ask the deeper questions about who has power, how institutions work, and propose alternatives that seem more commonsensical in terms of satisfying human needs and equality in this society.
Frankly, President Obama and the liberal Democrats that still exist should actually welcome a revival of the left. It only strengthens them in a way. It’s like being Martin Luther King without having Malcolm X. The problem with the Democrats is they fold. They end up conceding power and a veto ability to the Republicans when they don’t need to do so. I’d welcome something of the spirit of Roosevelt when he took on the right wing of his own party as well as the right wing of the Republican Party.
FDR was called a socialist. They said he was conducting a class war. Now Obama is being accused by conservatives of launching a class war because he wants to return the tax rate to 39.9 percent, where it stood in the Clinton era. How would you have him deal with this charge of class war?
You deal with it by saying, “Yeah, we want class war, too.” And here’s what class war means—the only possibility of getting this country out of the crisis, the only possibility that really deep-set reforms can occur, including the protection and renewal of the productive base of the economy, is for working people to become more powerful. We need more protests. More noise in the street. At the end of the day, political parties and political leaderships tend to legislate what social movements and social voices have already achieved in the factories or the streets—in the civil rights demonstrations, for example. The problem is that so many progressives, so many liberals, now treat the new president as if he were El Commandante. We line up and follow his leadership. He, meanwhile, is maneuvering in a relationship of forces where people on the left, progressives, even the Black Caucus don’t account for that much. He’s appeasing Blue Dogs. He’s having to deal with Republicans, and to an absolutely unnecessary extent, he’s following the template of the Clinton years. And of course the Clinton years were the years of the closest collaboration between the financial industry and the White House that produced financial deregulation.
The best thing the president has done is the stimulus. The worst thing has been to continue the bailout along the same lines that were initiated by Bush’s treasury secretary, Paulson. The majority of the American people truly rejected that bailout. They see it as rewarding the very people who ignited the crisis in the first place.
So what would you have us do?
Deglobalization, as people call it.
Reversing history?
Well, history can be reversed. The saddest thing about my own dad, who was a meat-and-potatoes guy, 1930s straight unionist, loved Roosevelt, is that he grew up in the early twentieth century believing in American history. Every time the American people struggled and won a new right, okay, that became a foundation for another struggle. Then, in the Reagan years, he saw history going in reverse. His union pension fund went bankrupt. The particular industry he worked in basically became defunct. And it was harrowing to me to see my father, who was the most patriotic guy I ever knew, struck by the realization that we’re always fighting for principles and rights and they can be taken away. History can go in reverse. But by the same token, where does it say in the Bible that we should live in a globalized economy where the world’s run by Wall Street or the authoritarian leaders of China? I haven’t seen that text, have you?
No, but people with ideas like yours have been marginalized. No coverage in the press. No participation in the public debates. I’m curious—what made you so radical?
Well, in my case, there really was a burning bush.
And that was the civil rights movement in San Diego, where I grew up, in the ’50s and ’60s. And when I was sixteen my father had a heart attack. I had to leave school for a while to work. And the black side of my family by marriage, they got me to come to a demonstration of the Congress of Racial Equality—COR E—in front of the Bank of America in downtown San Diego. It literally transformed my life, just the sheer beauty of it and the sheer righteousness of it. Now, I won’t claim that every decision or political stance or political group I joined as a result of the civil rights movement was the right one. But it permanently shaped my life. Another turning point in my evolution toward the left was a conversation with an old friend of yours, a great Texas populist newspaper editor, Archer Fullingim. I was in Austin for a spell in 1967 and listened in awe as Fullingim gave a great speech about corporate power and the media. Many of my friends were becoming Marxists of one exotic stripe or another, but I was more interested in the history of the Peoples Party of the 1890s. Fullingim’s electrifying speech reinforced my romantic belief in a Populist revival, so I made a pilgrimage to see him in southeast Texas. He was sitting on his porch out in Kountze, capital of the Big Thicket country, carving a gourd. I said, “Archer, can we revive the Populist Party? Can you lead the Populist Party?” And he looked at me. And he said, “Son, you’re one of the dumbest pissants I’ve ever met.” He said, “The Populist Party is history. Corporations run this country. And they run the Democratic Party. And you better figure out this stuff for yourself.” And it’s what I’ve been trying to do since.
Listen, to be a socialist in the United States is not to be an orphan, okay? It’s to stand in the shadow of an immense history of American radicalism and labor, but with the responsibility to ensure its regeneration. I actually think the American left is about to receive a huge blood transfusion in the next year or two. It has to, because the existence of the left, of radical social and economic critiques, with an imagination that goes beyond selfishness, is necessary to have any kind of serious debate in this country.
You wrote recently, “I believe great opportunities lie ahead for the rebels of the world to swell our ranks and take the fight forward. A n ew gen eration of young people is discovering that their political engagement counts.” Where are you seeing that?
Well, I have no difficulty finding hope. Hope kind of seeks me out. I’ve seen things in my life that I couldn’t really believed had happened: black working people in the South standing up for themselves, antiwar GIs opposing stupid wars. When you’ve see such things like these happen in your life, you can never be pessimistic. There’s an enormous legacy of the American left and of American radicalism in general that has to be nurtured and continued and passed down for new generations to shape in new ways.
REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT
There was a Jeremiah Wright before there was a Barack Obama, and it turns out, as you will see, that we actually had encountered each other, briefly, in 1965. But I was first aware of him as a churchman more than twenty years later, when the PBS documentary series Frontline went to Chicago to profile the minister who had become pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ.
The young and well-educated Reverend Wright could have had his pick of large, prosperous congregations but instead chose one with eighty-seven members in a largely black neighborhood of working-class and poor people on the South Side of the city. By the time Frontline showed up, the congregation had grown by thousands. There were soup kitchens for the hungry, day care for children, drug and legal counseling for the afflicted, and mentoring for the young. Jeremiah Wright called on the faithful to remember “the lowest, the least, the left out,” and they did.
Wright was a builder, but he was also a boat rocker: he preached against corrupt politics, gang violence, and white supremacy. And he worked to build his people’s pride. He installed stained-glass windows depicting the biblical stories that took place in Africa. And he asked parishioners to rededicate themselves to God, the black family, and the black community, to live up to Trinity’s motto: “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.”
A young Barack Obama came to Chicago in the mid-’80s and went to work on the South Side as an organizer. He was a religious skeptic who sought out Jeremiah Wright for his knowledge of the neighborhood. Soon he was attending Sunday services. In his book Dreams from My Father, he described his first service at Trinity:
People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters. ... And in that single note—hope!—I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharoah, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people in to futu re gen erations and into a larger world.
In 1988 Obama was baptized at Trinity as a Christian. Twenty years later, his membership would become a political liability, as incendiary sound bites lifted out of context from Wright’s sermons became fodder for Obama’s opponents and the media: Wright suggesting the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were payback for American policy, Wright repeating the canard heard often in black communities that the U. S. government had spread HIV among the residents, Wright seemingly calling on God to damn America.
“That’s not the man I know,” my friend James Forbes told me on the phone after a week in which those inflammatory excerpts—most of them a few seconds in length—dominated the news. Forbes, one of the country’s most influential preachers and now senior minister emeritus of New York City’s historic Riverside Church, befriended Wright years ago through the fellowship of their faith. “You should interview him,” Jim said. “Arrange it,” I answered. And he did.
Jeremiah Wright and I met in New York at the height of the controversy. It was his first television interview during this period. We agreed to talk at length, and to end up dealing specifically with the controversial views that were now dogging him—and Obama—in endlessly repeated sound bites. First, however, I wanted to know about the man, the ministry, and the church.
—Bill Moyers
Let’s start with first things first and provide my viewers with some background about you. I’m sure they want to know more about you than we’ve seen in those fleeting video clips. When did you hear the call to ministry? How did it come?
I was a teenager when I heard the call to ministry. I grew up in a parsonage. I grew up a son of, and grandson of, a minister, which also gave me the advantage of knowing that there were more things to ministry than pastoring. I had no idea that I’d be preaching or pastoring a church at that teenage year. As a matter of fact, I left Philadelphia for Virginia Union University. It was during the civil rights movement, and that movement showed me a side of Christianity that I had not seen in Philadelphia. I had not seen Christians like those I saw in Richmond, Virginia, who loved the Lord, who professed faith in Jesus Christ, and who believed in segregation, saw nothing wrong with lynching, saw nothing wrong with forcing Negroes to stay in their place. I knew about hatred. I knew about prejudice. But I didn’t personally know Christians who participated in that kind of thing.
And how did you react?
It made me question my call. It made me question whether or not I was doing the right thing. It made me pause in my educational pursuit. I stopped school in my senior year, and went into the service.
You served six years in the military—two as a marine, and four in the navy as a cardiopulmonary technician. That’s where our paths crossed for the only time. I have a photograph of President Lyndon Johnson recovering from gallbladder surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital. You’re right there beside him, behind the IV pole, monitoring the president’s heart. And right behind you is a very you
ng me. I was the president’s press secretary.
That’s right. And you know the president had to be operated on early and be out of surgery before the stock market opened. He wanted the world to know he was wide awake and talking. So the rest of us had to show up to scrub in at three o’clock in the morning. When he awakened, we did not move him to recovery as we would other patients. We kept him right there for security reasons, Secret Service all around, all over the operating suite, and nobody else allowed in there.
After about an hour and a half, I went to get some coffee. And as I was coming back from the lounge, I saw guys talking into their wristwatches. I was nodding to them, speaking to them, and as I turned to go back into the operating room, they grabbed me, knocked the coffee out of my hand—it burned me—twisted my arm up behind my neck, and one of them starts screaming into his phone: “I got him. I got him.” I thought: “Got him? Got him? Who’s him?” And I’m screaming in pain. Right then my assistant comes running up. He sees me jacked up that way and he starts laughing. I said, “Joe, don’t laugh. Tell them who I am.” And Joe says to the agent, “He’s part of the team. He’s been here all morning.”
Standing right there beside the president of the United States!
Guy looked at me, pulled my mask up over my face. “Oh, yeah.”
Quite a story—and I never heard it. After the military you graduated from Howard University and went to the University of Chicago Divinity School for a master’s in the History of Religions. Then came the invitation by that struggling little church on the South Side of Chicago to be its pastor. When you looked out on that handful of worshippers that first Sunday morning—eightyseven members, I understand, although I’m sure all of them weren’t there—