by Van Jones
10
OCCUPY THE HEART SPACE
THE OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTS AND the 99% movement struck an immediate chord with the American people. Three weeks into the occupation of Wall Street, the majority of New Yorkers—nearly 70 percent—had a favorable opinion of the protestors. A month later, a national poll by USA Today showed Occupy well ahead of Congress in terms of approval ratings. More than a thousand Occupy-themed groups sprang up in cities and towns everywhere, following the example set by those in New York City. As Al Gore said, Occupy Wall Street is a “primal scream of American democracy.”
Similar to the Tea Party, Occupy and the 99% have created a narrative befitting this moment, one of economic crisis. The handmade signs and personal sagas shared on the “We Are the 99%” Tumblr say it all. Their pain and outrage moved the nation. But the question remains: Can a movement succeed, powered solely at the emotional level by grief and righteous indignation?
Obviously not. The mainstream media has overlooked much of the beauty, joy, and hope that has always been shining around the edges of the anger and the hurt. Those qualities—already inherent in the movement—must now be strengthened and brought forward. For the movement to permanently capture the heart and move the soul of the American people, other powerful emotions—such as pride, patriotism, and compassion—must be placed closer to center stage.
In this chapter, I suggest three themes that should help the 99% occupy America’s Heart Space. They are:
• Own “deep patriotism” and the next American Dream.
• Challenge and undermine “cheap patriotism.”
• Speak as the 99% for the 100% (not the 99% against the 1%).
DEEP PATRIOTISM
One cannot lead a country that one doesn’t love. To occupy the Heart Space, those of us who are fighting for the 99% should own the language of a deeper patriotism. Our movement already resonates with people who are mad at corporations, or who love the Earth, or who worry about the plight of the poor, or who seethe at the oppression of marginalized groups. We must continue to champion such causes. But we should follow the example of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and do so while laying full and explicit claim to the greatest ideals of our nation.
Those of us who are fighting for the 99% should own the language of a deeper patriotism.
Our republic is dedicated in principle to justice and equality—the very things we are fighting for. When we fail to situate our arguments firmly within the highest values and best traditions of our own country, we needlessly miss opportunities to stir the nation. Everyone knows we love those Americans who are struggling; they also need to know that we love America itself.
For decades now, one end of the political spectrum has tried to monopolize all explicitly patriotic language and symbols. Too often, those of us on the other end have let them do so. Many have been wounded and worn down by the jingoistic ways that some of our opponents have used notions of “God and country” as a weapon against those struggling for diversity, compassion, and inclusion. For too long we have heard the charge of anti-Americanism being leveled against social justice causes and marginalized constituencies; sometimes we speak and act as if we have accepted the false claims of our opponents that the “real Americans” exist on only one side of the political divide.
But I can see no objective evidence that hard-core right-wingers love the United States more than anyone else does, at least not the country that actually exists, the one made up of the Americans we actually have today. To the contrary, they seem almost entirely unhappy with, scornful of, or disgusted by practically everything and everybody in twenty-first-century America.
On the other hand, those attracted to the 99% movement, almost by definition, want to embrace the whole country. We love the nation we have, as it is actually emerging and developing, in all of its multiracial, multifaith, gender fabulous, Twitter-addicted, and body-pierced glory. Yes, some small-minded people have tried to hide their intolerance behind the flag. But that kind of cheap patriotism should not be the only kind of patriotism with a megaphone (or a people’s microphone) in America.
The 99% can embrace a deeper patriotism. After all, the millions who identify with the 99% are the ones actually fighting, in Dr. King’s words, “to make real the promises of democracy.” In essence, we are standing up for the supreme patriotic principle: “liberty and justice for all.”
And many of us take that “for all” part pretty seriously. We don’t mean “liberty and justice for all,” except for those lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those immigrants or those Muslims. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, or Latinos. We don’t mean “for all,” except for those women. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the Appalachians and rural poor. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the elderly or the disabled. We don’t mean “for all,” except for the afflicted, addicted, or convicted. When we say “liberty and justice for all,” we really mean it. That kind of principled stand is evidence of a deep patriotism.
Deep patriots don’t just sing the song, “America the Beautiful,” and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty—from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters, and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots don’t just visit the Statue of Liberty and send a postcard home to grandma. We go beyond admiring symbols; we defend the substance. We defend the principles upon which that great monument was founded—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to breathe free.”
The behavior of the cheap patriots is particularly instructive here. If terrorists threatened to blow up the Statue of Liberty, or developers threatened to level it to build a strip mall on Ellis Island, everyone in America would be up in arms. And yet some who call themselves patriots desperately want to blow up the principles inscribed at the base of that statue. That kind of cheap patriotism must be replaced by a deeper patriotism rooted in an acknowledgement that attracting the wisdom and work ethic of all peoples is what has made America great. If an embrace of immigrant newcomers was good enough for our grandparents, it should be good enough for our grandchildren. The skin color of today’s immigrants may have changed, but our national values should not.
Deep patriots include people in the business community who want to create jobs in the United States, don’t dodge their taxes, invest in the country, and run corporations that respect our air and water. Deep patriots defend the institutions that make a middle-class society possible, including public education, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and a stable economic environment for businesses to grow and prosper. Deep patriots love and respect everyone in the country, regardless of the person’s skin color, sexual orientation, income, faith, or tattoos.
Deep patriots love the whole country, red states and blue states—including everyone in the Tea Party.
Deep patriots love the whole country, red states and blue states—including everyone in the Tea Party. That’s right: in fact, we love them so much that we do not want them to have to live in the high-risk, low-protection, puny-government world they say they want. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to live in neighborhoods in which, when they smell smoke, they can’t find a firehouse for twenty miles—because of the budget cuts that they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to see their grandchildren going to schools with forty kids in a classroom, six books, and no chalk—because of the budget cuts that they fought for. Deep patriots don’t want Tea Party members to have to wait seven minutes—or fifteen minutes—for someone to pick up the phone when they dial 911. When grandma collapses, a government employee (yup!) should answer on the very first ring.
We don’t want the Tea Partiers to suffer through the catastrophe that would result from their victory. Deep patriots don’t just fight against our opponents. We fight for them, too.
CHEAP PATRIOTISM
It is important to challenge directly the
flaws and limitations of cheap patriotism. The Tea Party, in particular, has been guilty of promoting this shrunken, negative, and limited version of American values. Left unchallenged, this is perhaps the most dangerous ideology in the country right now.
Please note: the real fight is not between “liberals and conservatives.” I purposely do not call the advocates of cheap patriotism “conservative.” After all, conservatives conserve things; they don’t smash things. These cheap patriots have taken a wrecking ball—painted it red, white, and blue—and now are trying to smash down every institution that made America great. Our parents and grandparents fought for certain protections—for laborers, for the environment, to restrict corporations—because they saw the devastation that occurs without those safety measures. The cheap patriots want to destroy our forebears’ achievements. They want to smash down the safety net, public schools, worker’s rights, civil rights, women’s rights, even the scientific method and rational discourse. They want to flush down the toilet all of the wisdom of the last century, and yet they still be called “conservatives.” I don’t think we should pay them that compliment.
They insist that the government is trying to take over the economy. That would be a bad thing, if it were to happen. But that is not happening. In fact, the very opposite thing is happening: the corporations are trying to take over our government. And the ultra-libertarian ideology of the Tea Party offers us no defense against that outcome. In other words, the real threat to our liberty is gathering around conference tables in the boardrooms of global corporations. A purely negative, “don’t tread on me” version of economic liberty, which worships unrestrained free market at all costs, actually makes it harder for the country to defend itself from corporate domination.
The agenda of the cheap patriots would essentially hand the United States over to global corporations to do with us as they will, in the name of the free market. Their version of liberty creates a society in which the market is free and the people are not. Their version of liberty actually ensures and guarantees domination. Not domination on the part of the government, but an equally pernicious form of domination on the part of corporations that will quickly wind up owning the government.
These are corporations that love to pimp America, taking advantage of all our resources, but not giving anything back. They are American corporations only when it is convenient for them. They are American corporations when they want to use our courts to enforce the fine print in their contracts. They are American corporations when their intellectual property rights are threatened in Asia and they want legal recourse. They are American corporations when it is time to fight some overseas war for oil. That is when these companies are American companies.
But when it is time for them to pay their taxes, suddenly all of those dollars wind up in some tax shelter in somebody else’s country. When it is time for them to create a job somewhere, surprise, surprise, all the jobs they want to create are in somebody else’s country. When it is time for them to invest in new infrastructure and build factories, they cannot seem to find the United States of America on a map.
The American Dream works only when good employers are willing to pay good wages and fair taxes. The refusal of these unpatriotic corporations to pay either jeopardizes the American Dream.
Do you know what we used to call a country where global corporations were free to do whatever they wanted to do, where unions were systematically undermined, and where the government was being starved of tax revenue and other resources? We used to call those places “Third World countries.”
That is the vision that the cheap patriots hold for the United States. Their agenda would turn America into a textbook Third World nation: no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of. That’s their utopia. They paint that up in all these patriotic colors and call it economic liberty. But it would be economic slavery.
If they want to live in a country like that, they are free to move to one. There are plenty of places in the world that already work that way. Just be forewarned, if you move there, you will end up working for pennies a day; you could be fired legally for any reason or for no reason at all; your kids will drink poisoned water; your kids’ toys or your appliances might kill a family member; your neighborhood will be cloaked with toxic air.
America is a spectacular country because we’ve made it a priority to protect labor, equal rights, the environment, and the consumer. That’s what makes America great. That’s what makes America special. We do not excel only in the area of economic performance; we excel across the board. The cheap patriots want to shrink our zone of national achievement to GDP growth alone and sacrifice every other national value and accomplishment.
The cheap patriots seem to despise most of the American people, hate America’s achievements, and fear America’s government. How come such people get to be called patriots, but not us?
Pursuit of justice, without regard for individual liberty, can lead to governmental tyranny. But pursuit of individual liberty, with no concern for justice, can lead to corporate domination. The ideas needed to defend our freedoms cannot be one-sided and simplistic.
To the cheap patriots, we can say this:
Our problem is not that you are too patriotic. In a country as great as ours, there is no such thing. Our problem is that you’re not patriotic enough. You have your arms around only one section of America. What about the rest of us? You have not embraced the full set of American values. You are talking about liberty, liberty, liberty. That is great. But our Pledge of Allegiance does not stop with the word “liberty.” It says, “liberty and justice for all.”
99% FOR THE 100%
Finally, the very framework of the 99% needs some clarification and moral nuance. As I said in the introduction, a movement that defines itself as the 99% against the 1% cannot succeed in America. But a movement that defines itself as the 99% for the 100% cannot fail.
The 99% versus the 1% argument falls short in a lot of ways. The vast majority of Americans do not oppose their fellow Americans, simply because they are rich. To the contrary, more than perhaps any other people on this Earth, Americans admire success. What we detest is greed. We like economic winners; we hate economic cheaters. We cheer economic innovation; we despise financial manipulation. Like most people, I don’t hate rich people who buy yachts. (The workers who build those yachts are happy.) Americans don’t mind when wealthy Americans buy expensive toys; we do mind when they try to buy governors and members of Congress.
There is a reason that both the right and left love Steve Jobs (for all his flaws) and hate Bernie Madoff. There is a reason that the original Occupiers claimed the space at Wall Street, not Silicon Valley. They respect successful entrepreneurs who create sleek and useful products.
We don’t mind when wealthy Americans buy expensive toys; we do mind when they buy governors and members of Congress.
Within limits, we like the risks and rewards that come with living in a market economy; we don’t mind having winners and losers, but we go ballistic when anyone tries to rig the game. If some of today’s super-wealthy outrage us, it is not because of their material success. It is because of their moral failings.
Furthermore, we expect everyone in America—the 100 percent—to do their best, to be good neighbors, and to contribute to the success of our country. In return for enjoying the support of the greatest nation on Earth, we expect those who do well in America to do well by America. We expect them to pay appropriate taxes, create good jobs here at home, to give something back to this country. In a crisis (such as the present one), we expect everyone to pitch in and help out without whining about it all the time. Those who live up to these duties and expectations have long held a place of honor in our society. Americans always stand with those wealthy patriots who stand with us.
Setting ourselves against the 1% has a logical and a moral limit: there’s always a top 1% to be against. Take down the present top 1%, and there’s another 1% just below th
em. The real enemy is not the wealthy, but the corrupt. The real enemy is not the 1%, but rather those who stand with only the 1% and against the rest of us. And many of the 1% are on our side. Like Warren Buffett, there are many patriotic millionaires who think that corporations and the wealthy should be paying their fair share, who know the financial sector should be better regulated instead of rigged against the average investor. There is no need for us to set ourselves against people who actually agree with us. We need everyone in our country to be involved in healing our economy and fixing our democracy. That is our moral challenge: to ensure that everybody is a part of the solution.
In pursuit of this goal, if the 99% movement chose to embrace an American value—defending the American Dream—it would be even more powerful.
The villains are the worst of the 1%: those who care only about those at the very top, and care nothing about the rest of America.
The threat is that these villains will kill off the American Dream of opportunity for all.
The heroes are the 99 Percenters who care about the 100% and are willing to defend the dream.
The vision is the American Dream reinvented, restored, and renewed.
If we are willing to take that kind of stand, and be the 99% for the 100%, willing to fight anybody who wants to hurt America, but also willing to embrace anybody who is willing to be a part of the solution, then this movement will make history. We will be the generation that refused to let the hopes of our forebears die and who found a way to rescue and rebuild the American Dream.
CONCLUSION
America Is Rich and the Dream Still Lives
WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO SURRENDER OUR COUNTRY to the dream killers.
Obama’s supporters went from “hoping” too much in 2008, to “moping” too much in 2010. We skipped the important step in the middle: the one in which we launch the big, uncompromising fight-back for the things we believe in.