Thom Hartmann

On your radio show, you probably talk to a broad spectrum of listeners. Are you picking up any discontent with what’s going on in this country today?

I think that if you look at the grand arc of the history of the United States, from before the Revolutionary War until today, you notice that there have been significant turning points. There was one in the 1770s that led to the Revolution; there was one in the 1830s that — around the time of the failure of the First National Bank and the election of Andrew Jackson; there was one, obviously, at the Civil War; there was one during early Reconstruction; there was one in 1901, when Teddy Roosevelt was elected and began the Progressive Era; one in 1918, when that era ended and the conservatives took over again; one in 1929, when the Republican Great Depression happened; and then again in the early ‘30s when Roosevelt was elected; World War II obviously a turning point.

But I’d say really, from 1935 until 1980, there was one primary paradigm that was established in this country that was very similar to the one that was from 1776 to 1830, which was, we’re all in this together; we are a nation of barn builders, of community builders. We’re here together to make things work. And that fundamentally changed in the 1830s and it led to the Civil War, ultimately, and it also changed in 1981, with the election of Ronald Reagan, who said, “There are no good people in government; if there were, they would have been hired by private industry.” I mean, that’s an actual quote. The nine most dangerous words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” The idea that it’s not a “we,” it’s a whole bunch of “me’s.”

And so, for the last 26 years we have been living in the midst of one of those conservative micro-eras that we had from 1830 to the Civil War, from 1886 until 1900, from 1918 to 1932, and now since 1980. They are the exceptions to the rule in the United States; they are the times when the robber barons emerge, when great wealth emerges, when the middle class gets wiped out. And in the middle of them, you know, 10, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, people really don’t even notice that they’re happening. But at the beginning and end of them, there is this extraordinary sense of change that’s happening. And there’s no doubt, I think, in anybody’s mind that the early ‘80s were a revolutionary period; Reagan was doing away with the anti-trust laws, I mean, he was radically transforming America.

And I would submit to you that that sense of radical change is afoot right now, in large part because we’re coming to the end of the third or fourth, relatively brief, but nonetheless major conservative era in the United States. This one lasted 26 years so far, 27 years. And that when that flip happens, when those changes happen, they happen because there is an enormous level of discontent. And frankly, when we flip into the conservative areas, they typically happen because of high levels of discontent. And I would say that the level of discontent in the United States right now is probably, you know, historic. It’s-it’s right up there with the levels of discontent that brought about the Revolutionary War, that coincided with the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Great Depression.

I think it’s vastly underestimated and underrated, particularly by the pundits in the media, who have a huge stake in maintaining the status quo rather than seeing the kind of transformation that actually is happening happen. For example, the Pew study: “Would you be willing to pay more taxes to have national health care, single-payer national health care system?” and “Do you believe that health care should be a right, not a privilege?” Over 65 percent of Americans, no matter how you phrase the question, no matter how you frame the question, say yes to that. That’s not just a small majority, that’s a significant majority.

And yet, over the last couple of weeks, and on an ongoing basis, but over the last couple weeks in particular, since Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” came out, the media pundits on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN — none of them have mentioned those polls. Not once. There has been no discussion about what the radical middle wants, what we the people want. And I think it’s frankly because — well, you have your media is making tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions in advertising revenue from the very companies who that screwing us on health care, just as one example. So why would they point out that most of us don’t want that system? Because it benefits them, not us.

What I’m hearing from my listeners is that people are really upset, they’re really angry, they’re really frustrated. And I think in a large part, when you hear and you sense and you see that level of frustration and anger, it comes out of a feeling of powerlessness. And there’s a broad sense of powerlessness and helplessness in the United States, that the system is no longer in our hands, no longer in our control. And I think that is heralding the beginning of the taking back of the system by the people. Even that was probably longer than what you wanted.

From your perspective, what were the founding fathers responding to when they framed our Constitution and broke with England? How revolutionary was this great experiment?

If you look at the seven thousand year, more or less, history of what we call modern western civilization, virtually all of it was characterized by the idea that it was appropriate and even natural that there would be kings and there would be serfs, that there would be the owners and the owned. And to a large extent, the American Revolution was a repudiation of that, these people were children of the Enlightenment, they were reading Rousseau and Locke, and they were convinced that kingdom and domination and hierarchy were not appropriate forms of governance. And it was a hugely radical experiment, this American democracy, hugely radical. And, now nearly a hundred countries have followed our lead in one way or another, in various forms; some very well and some not so well. But it’s demonstrating that they were right, in my opinion.

In your opinion, what is Independence Day about?

In the context of freedom and independence, Franklin Roosevelt, in ’36, in the summer of ’36, I think it was July in Philadelphia when he was re-nominated to run for president. In his acceptance speech, he said, “That very word ‘freedom’ implies freedom from some external restraining force,” and then he goes on to talk about how in 1776 we fought against an external restraining force that was a British aristocracy and multinational corporation, East India Company, and now this was in ’36, we’re facing a new aristocracy, a new restraining force in the form of what he referred to as the new economic aristocracy, the economic royalists, and that it was our obligation — our duty — to overthrow the economic royalists.

And my sense is that if you look at the genesis of the American Revolution, in early 1773, Thomas Jefferson published “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” which was basically a booklet on how to be a good British citizen in North America. Ten months later, after the Boston Tea Party, after the citizens of Boston and up and down the East Coast decided to take on a multinational — or a transnational, a global corporation — Jefferson had changed his mind. He had been radicalized, and he was talking about independence, as were most Americans. We initially declared independence not against the king, but against the East India Company with the Boston Tea Party. That led to the king pushing back and saying, no, we’re going to use military force to defend this company with the Boston Port Act, punishing the city of Boston. Boston defied the Boston Port Act, and that led directly to the American Revolution.

We started this country as a revolt against economic tyranny and economic domination. We have fought that battle several times in the history of this country, and we’re fighting it again now.

Democracy is an evolving experiment; are we at another critical juncture in the evolution of democracy?

That’s a good question. Yes, we’re at a critical juncture in the history of democracy, and yes, democracy is evolving. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he said in the opening sentence of the Declaration, it talks about the laws of nature and nature’s god; that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all this stuff came out of the laws of nature and nature’s god. And John Adams, who edited the Declaration of Independence, suggested to Jefferson that he should replace that with the Christian God. And Jefferson said no, what we’re talking about is the way nature is; this is nature. When he looked at nature, he saw democracy; he believed that nature was democratic, it was competitive, but it was democratic.

And Adams and the conservatives of the day didn’t agree with that. They saw nature as hierarchical and dominator and they thought that in creating America, what we were doing was following our best instincts against nature. And Jefferson believed that we were following our best instincts consistent with nature, and that’s a debate that’s been going on for a couple of hundred years. And but now biologists are finding that nature actually is democratic; that herds and flocks and schools of animals behave in democratic fashion more often than they do in a dominator fashion.

And democracy is fundamentally being rethought as a natural thing, not as something that has to be, or even should be, necessarily, imposed on people, but that it’s the natural state of humans. And through the suffrage movement, through the abolition movement, through now the gay rights movement and frankly we’re still in the ending echoes of abolition and women’s suffrage. As all of these things happen, what we’re seeing is the fine-tuning, the constant evolution and development of democracy in ways that are more and more consistent with, frankly, that original vision that was held by the more liberal of our founders, Jefferson and Franklin and George Washington, and was held very highly by the philosophers of the Enlightenment — Locke, Rousseau.

To what degree were the founders concerned about economic democracy? Could you speak to the importance of this to their vision, and tie it into what’s going on today?

Economic democracy was at the core of the founders’ vision for this country. Jefferson said, “I look to the people, not to the rich, for the salvation of this country,” and repeated that sentiment over and over and over again, that the only and best power must be with the great masses of people, not with an elite few or a wealthy few. When you look at the history of how people behaved at the Constitutional Convention, you discover that the majority of those who were wealthy were crafting a document that worked against their economic interests. That when you look on a state-by-state basis of the states that ratified the Constitution, that the majority of people of wealth were working against their economic interests. They were working in favor of democracy; they felt that democracy was more important than their own personal wealth.

That’s an ideal that has been embraced many times in America. You know, during the New Deal era, from the 1930s until 1980, uh, even under Republican presidents like Eisenhower. It was considered obscene if a CEO made more than 30 or 40 times what his most lowly paid employee made. It was considered a failure if companies started laying off people willy-nilly just to increase profits. Nobody would have imagined just closing down a factory here and opening it in some other country because labor was cheaper. It would have been an obscenity. And that’s consistent with the view of the founders, that economic democracy has to exist for real political democracy to exist. You can’t separate the two.

And at those times when you do separate the two, and economic democracy starts to die out, those are the times when political democracy begins to die out, becomes seriously at risk. And-and thus, those are the times that people like Jefferson warned about, that’s what Roosevelt warned about — both Roosevelts warned about, it’s what I’m warning about. It’s what, I think, we need to hold as-as one of our primary visions. Franklin Roosevelt, in that 1936 acceptance speech, Franklin Roosevelt quoted an Old English judge as saying, “A necessitous man is not a free man.” You’re not free if you’re hungry. You’re not free if you’re afraid of losing your home. You can talk about political freedom all day long, but if you don’t have economic freedom first, there is no political freedom.

Can you tell us about this squeeze on the middle class that you talk about in your book, Screwed?

The economic royalists that Franklin Roosevelt talked about frankly don’t want there to be a middle class in the United States. And it’s not because they don’t think this is a wonderful country or not because they’re not patriotic, it’s because they think that when the middle class has a lot of economic power, that it also will acquire political power and it will use that political power to try to change the way things are. And so, you had a peak of the American middle class in the 1760s that led to the American Revolution; you had a peak of the middle class in the 1960s and 1970s and what did you have? You had African Americans saying, hey, what about those rights you promised us? You had women burning their bras and saying, we want equal rights. You had gays saying hey, we’re part of this family of man, or of society.

Right across-right across the board. I mean, disabled people claiming rights, everybody was saying, we want to be a piece, and conservatives looked at this, and cities like Watts and Detroit were burning, conservatives looked at this and said, this is terrible! This is chaos; this is not a good thing. We want a stable society. You can’t have a stable society if you have a strong, economically empowered middle class, and you can’t have a stable society if you have a strong, vibrant democracy. Instead, you have a society in ferment.

Now, Jefferson looked at that society in ferment and that strong, stable middle class in the 1770s and said, this is a good thing. You know, from time to time, the tree of liberty needs to be watered by the blood of patriots. He saw it as a good and healthy thing, as an evolutionary process, a birth process. In the 1960s and ‘70s, many of us looked at social change or were part of it and said, this is a good thing; we’re going to make a better world. But the economic royalists, the people who really want to maintain an economic order that is not threatened by that, look at that and say, no, this is not a good thing. And so you had the John Adams and Alexander Hamiltons of the 1700s, and have the Bill Kristols and the William F. Buckleys of today saying, you know, we really don’t want to have this middle class have so much power.

And so, in the Wall Street Journal you have Alan Greenspan, when he was chairman of the Feds, saying that one of the most important parts of his job as chairman of the Fed is maintain a certain minimum level of insecurity among the workers, so that they will not press for wage increases. And the subtext of that is so that they won’t be out on the streets.

Are you aware of any broad stroke numbers or squeeze on the middle class real income compared to what it is today compared to what it was when we were kids — say in the ‘60s or late ‘50s?

Typically, in the United States, with a good union job, as my dad did, working in a tool and die shop, you could raise a family, you could put them through college, if necessary, or if they wanted; you had health insurance benefits, you had a pension, you had a safe retirement, you had a vacation every year, you had the ability to buy a home and have a car. I mean, you had basically what used to be called the American middle class, the American dream.

In 1935, when the Wagner Act was passed, there was a very small percentage of the American population that was unionized. By 1947, when the Republicans first took a bite out of the Wagner Act with Taft-Hartley, 35 percent of the American workforce was unionized. Now, for every union job, there’s typically another job that’s identical to it that’s non-union, because the union jobs set the floor. So you had 75 percent of the American workforce, by 1947, unionized solidly into the American middle class. And from 1947 up until Ronald Reagan became president, there was some attrition because of Taft-Hartley, you had the right-to-work states emerging in the South, but when Reagan came into the White House in 1981, 25 percent of the American workforce was unionized. So half of all Americans had that kind of job that my dad had, you know, where one person could raise a family and be the American middle class.

Reagan declared war on organized labor and on the middle class, frankly, on the economic middle class. And 26 or 27 years later, we’re now down to about 7 or 8 percent of the American workforce being unionized. And maybe 15 or 20 percent of our workforce having that kind of safety and security that extends all the way into their retirement. It’s really a very small percentage. So, that’s, you know, right on it’s face. That’s the destruction of the American middle class.

To the degree that the middle class is imperiled, is that a sign of democracy on the wobble as well? Is the American dream on a wobble?

You can’t have a real democracy without a real middle class, and you can’t have a real middle class without a democracy. The two go together. The extent to which the middle class is under siege right now economically is reflective of the extent to which democracy itself is under siege in America.

Do you have anything to say about how special interests are shaping policy?

The major perversion of democracy in the United States goes back to the mid-1800s, with the idea that a corporation should have the same rights as a person, and then has extended now through a series of Supreme Court decisions up until today, where money is considered to be the same thing as speech, for political purposes. These two notions, that a corporation which can’t vote should somehow be able to participate in elections — which was rejected by the Republican Roosevelt — and the idea that money, whether it’s from a corporation or from a wealthy individual, should-should have powerful influence in the electoral process, are the two primary corrosive and destructive elements within our body politic. They are the things that are tearing us apart.

And, you can look at in the micro, the health care industry lobbying for their interests, while the rest of us get screwed, but it always goes back to the macro. It always goes back to, why do we allow corporations to participate in politics when they can’t even vote? They’re not citizens, they’re not human beings, number one. And number two, why is money considered speech? Money is not speech. Well, right across the political spectrum, I even heard people say, “Oh, we need to vote with our dollars.” Try to influence politics or influence behavior by where you spend your money. That’s crazy! That’s not democracy. That means the people with the most dollars have the most votes — that’s the antithesis of democracy.

How do you think Jefferson and those that felt the way he did would feel about this?

Well, Jefferson explicitly said that if wealth is concentrated to the point where it has the power to influence the state, it should be dissolved. I mean, he was quite explicit about that on a whole variety of occasions, and he wasn’t unique in that. And, you know, the remnants of that today are the estate tax. But back in Jefferson’s time, from the founding of this country until the late 1880s, corporations had to dissolve themselves every 20 to 30 or 40 years; the corporation couldn’t live longer than a working person, and essentially go through probate. So you couldn’t use it as an instrument to aggregate massive wealth and thus empire.

This was something the founders were very concerned about, was the possibility that we would end up with another landed gentry, a new wealthy aristocracy, and they did not want that to happen. And in fact, it didn’t happen in their lifetimes. You can’t name one family that can track its wealth back to the founding generation. These guys left no foundations, they left institutions, like the University of Virginia, which was free for anybody who could qualify to attend. The United States government left us institutions, but they didn’t leave dynasties; they were anti-dynastic.

And, as I’ve said, there’s a been a variety of times in the United States when we’ve re-embraced that vision, when just the few years after the Civil War and the few years after Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901, and then, what, for 40, 50 years after Franklin Roosevelt was elected, we re-embraced that vision. We need to re-embrace it again.

Do you think the makeup of today’s Congress represents the real demographic of American society?

Jefferson talked very often about citizen legislators, and one of the founding principles was that citizens would participate in the political process and be able to. We have a political process now that is so-so badly distorted by the influence of money and corporate money in particular, that the only citizens who can participate are those who are independently wealthy, and who have the ability to run for political office. Or those who are willing to sell their souls to those who are independently wealthy and represent their interests. And it’s a tragedy for democracy and it needs to be changed.

The easy way to change it is to go with voter-run elections. We have them here in Portland, they work very well. Arizona and Maine, you have states where average people are running for office.

How did candidates in Jefferson’s time finance their campaigns?

Well, financing campaigns during the Revolutionary era and afterward was almost a non sequitur. People did not buy campaign advertising, they got volunteers out there, they got people out. They might have printed handbills or fliers, but that was about it. They were pretty low-tech, low-cost efforts.

Well, what’s interesting is that there’s always been this dynamic tension between liberals and conservatives in the United States. In the Revolutionary era, it was Jefferson versus Hamilton and Aaron Burr and John Adams. And one of the slurs that was flung against the aristocracy, the economic aristocracy, was that they were the economic aristocracy. And you get that into the newspaper and people didn’t get elected.

To what degree do you think the mainstream media has contributed to this belated realization by people that we’re “getting screwed”?

The mainstream media is not mainstream. It’s corporate. And you have to get that at the beginning of everything. The problem with corporate money and government is not going to be discussed in the corporate media. The problem of the corporate takeover of our health care system is not going to be discussed by the corporate media. The corporate interests in having a permanent war machine in the United States, a permanent war economy, is not going to be discussed by the corporate media. There is nothing mainstream about the corporate media that refers to itself as the mainstream media; it is the corporate media. It represents a very narrow and very elite band of interests, and by and large, the only people that it will put on television are people who are part of that band. It’s the wealthy talking to themselves.

Even as recently in my lifetime, the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, you had Walter Cronkite, who was — basically earned a decent, upper-middle class salary. He was not a rock star; he was not making millions of dollars a year. It would be interesting to go back and find out what his salary was; I heard once that he was making 55 thousand dollars a year, but I don’t know the original document. But the point is that people in the media now are multi-millionaires. So, when they make choices about what stories to cover, or how to deal with those stories, they’re looking at everything from the point of view of multi-millionaires.

And so you ask, why do people feel disempowered? Well, their primary source of information is from corporate media that isn’t them, doesn’t reflect them, doesn’t talk about them, and doesn’t talk to them. It’s talking to itself.

I mean, I remember 10, 15 years ago, 30 years ago, you had Ralph Cramden, you had the Jackie Gleason show, you had the Lucy show, fourth floor, cold water, walk-up apartments. This was the middle class. The middle class was actually on TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s and early ‘70s. And then this change started happening right after Reagan came into office, and suddenly the houses on TV started being multi-million dollar houses, and the people on TV didn’t have to work for a living so much anymore and they were driving fancy cars. And no longer did TV reflect middle America. It reflected, in the early ‘80s the upper end of the middle class, and basically since then it’s represented the very, very wealthy. You could say that it started with JR and “Dynasty” was a great example of the beginning of it; this celebration of extreme and obscene wealth.

And so, average people watching TV don’t see themselves anymore. They don’t see Archie Bunker, they don’t see Ralph Cramden, they just don’t see themselves on TV. And, whether it be in situation comedies, whether it’s, “Seinfeld” where nobody works for a living.

Anyhow, it’s just — TV does not reflect — in its entertainment, it doesn’t reflect the standards, or by and large the values, of average Americans. And by values, I’m talking about the economic values. And news reporting has now become “infotainment” and very much does not reflect the standards or values or needs or problems of average, mainstream Americans. And that’s why I said the media today is not at all mainstream.

The candidate with the most money wins over 95 percent of the time…given that reality, where is general electoral reform going to come from, like public financing?  Where is that change going to come from?

Well, people ask if public financing of elections is going to come from the top down, and my answer is no, of course not. Nothing ever has. There has never been a successful social movement in the United States that’s come from the top down. And yet we have them. The women’s suffrage movement didn’t start because one day a president woke up and said, “Gee, we oughtta let women vote!” The abolition of slaves didn’t happen because Abe Lincoln said, “Oh, I’m going to free the slaves.” In fact, Abe Lincoln originally ran on a platform of segregation of the races.

It has never gone from the top down; it always goes from bottom up. What happens is, if enough people get out there and get in the streets, literally or metaphorically — and today it’s happening more metaphorically in the blogosphere and on talk radio and whatnot — but if enough people get out there in the streets and form a parade and start marching down the streets and loudly enough and with enough vigor and enthusiasm and energy, some politician is going to say, “Look at that parade!” And they’re going to grab a flag, run out in front of that parade and hoist that flag and say, “This is my parade!”

And all of the sudden you’ll have a politician who is a leader, right, who is talking about an issue. And so, if you want to have public financing of elections, we have to be the parade; we have to create the parade. And I promise you, the politicians will follow along. And after they have done it, they will say that it came from the top down.

That will be the enduring mythology, by the way, is that it happened from the top down. You know, and some politician will lay credit for it, like Lyndon Johnson, who spent his entire career trying to segregate the races and trying to keep the black people as essentially slaves in Texas, signing Civil Rights legislation. Now he actually got up in front of the parade, God bless him. He had a conversion. And that’s what we have to do with every single politician out there, is say, “We’re here, dammit, we’re the parade! Now, get out in front or get outta here!”

Do you think the pressure to raise campaign money has an impact on policymaking that goes on in Washington DC?

Every morning, every United States senator wakes up and his first thought is: “Today I have to raise 20 thousand dollars, or at the end of the next election cycle I won’t have a job.” That’s got to distort their thinking. That’s not good for democracy. That’s not a healthy thing for democracy.

How can we overcome this race for bucks that elections have become?

There’s two things that we need to do. One is, we as citizens need to mobilize, we need to get active, we need to get out there, we need to create that parade, we need to get out on the streets or in the [unintelligible] or whatever and demand clean money and clean elections.

And two, we have to begin a parade, as it were, to change this dominant “nim” that the Supreme Court has supported, in particular since the Buckley vs. Viejo and the First National Bank vs. Bellotti decisions, that somehow corporations are persons and therefore they have the right of free speech and the right to participate in elections, and that money is speech.

These are fundamentally antithetical to the core concepts on which this country was founded. They are the opposite of the concepts on which this country was founded, and the problem is that there are now Supreme Court precedents. And so, it’s going to require some very concerted legislative efforts, and those are not going to come about unless we, the people, start really leaning on our legislators hard. And we need to do it. We must do it. We must take back this democracy.

What is the connection you see between economic democracy and good citizenship?

Well, Abraham Maslow identified this hierarchy of human needs, with safety and security at the bottom and then above that, you know, social needs and intellectual needs, and finally spiritual needs and self-actualization. And wherever somebody is on that hierarchy, everything above that point is invisible to them. If you’re worried about your safety, you’re not concerned about enlightenment. You know, if you’re stuck in the middle of a street and you can’t get through, you’re not sure if you’re going to get hit by a car, you’re not even worried about whether your friends like you.

So, I’m of the opinion that when people have safety and security under control, really and truly solidly under control and they’re not worried about it, then they’re free to look at the higher needs, which include things like participating in a democratic society. And this is one of the reasons why countries where everybody has free national health care, and everybody can go to college for free if they perform well in school.

And everybody has some assurance that their job is going to be safe and secure, and everybody knows that their retirement is going to be safe; in those societies, you find very, very, very high levels of democratic participation.

Whereas in those societies where the majority of the people live below that threshold — what I refer to as Maslow’s threshold — in those societies where the majority of people live below that threshold, you find very little democratic participation. Because people don’t have the freedom to do that; they’re worried about, you know, is my house going to get taken away? If I get sick, am I going to go bankrupt?

And so, those of us who would like to see more democracy need to be working for the economic foundations that create safety and security as a universal state, and that will bring about democratic participation in this country. And those elements in our society that don’t want wide democratic participation in this country — because it works against their economic self-interests, because people will redistribute income — they are working aggressively to prevent us from having access to those things and keep us in a state where we’re largely disempowered.

I have a sound clip I can send you of a guy who was the big direct mail guy behind Reagan’s campaign – where he says,  “So many conservatives have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everyone to vote.” And then he says, “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he says, “elections have never been won by the majority of voters and they never will be.”

He said, in fact, quite candidly, “History shows that as the voting populace goes down, our leverage goes up.” You know, this was his point about — and he was talking to Republicans about disenfranchising people.

And, negative campaign advertising, making people feel powerless, showing them conspicuous wealth that they’ll never have available to them, telling them that the only way that you can really break out of poverty is to win the lottery — I mean, all of these subtle messages continuously put out are messages that cause people to stay below Maslow’s threshold and not to participate in democracy.

How to change that?

We need to encourage people with the possibility of getting here, and a very clear vision for what that kind of society is like, where people actually do feel safe and secure, because those societies do exist on this planet, and they’re not exploitative of their people. And then we need to be changing our political structures and our political institutions in ways that can bring that about, and that’s only going to happen with the participation and the involvement of a large number of people. When enough people get out there and become the parade, and start yelling and screaming and chanting in the streets and saying, “This is it, this is what we want,” then, as I said, some politician will jump out in front and grab a flag, hoist it up, and say, “This is my parade and we’re going to go down the street with this one.”

It’s important to keep in mind, Teddy Roosevelt, the trust-buster, the guy who took on the major corporations, was McKinley’s vice president was basically put into office as a rich, wealthy white guy representing the interests of rich, wealthy white guys; corporations. Franklin Roosevelt, the child of a dynastic family fortune ran on a very moderate platform in 1932. He wasn’t proposing radical change in America in 1932; very, very modest. But then he noticed the parade once he was elected. The people started speaking out and saying, no, we’re not going to settle for just a little bit of change.

Lyndon Johnson became a champion of civil rights because he figured out the direction the parade was going. And in every one of these cases, I don’t believe that these were politicians who cynically changed their position because it was in their political self-interest. I believe that these were people who were influenced by the dominant “nim” of the time; the dominant thought virus of the time. It actually infected them and transformed them.

There actually is a tipping point, there is some sort of morphogenic field, there is some sort of resonance among all of us, and when we do hit that 51st deer, the 51st percent, change happens, and it happens with surprising rapidity.

But it all has to begin somewhere. The American Revolution started with six or eight guys sitting in a bar. I mean, think about it, it all begins with a small group of people. Here we are, let’s start.

Do you have anything to say about democracy in other countries comparing favorably to ours in terms of participatory government?

Well, we need to move toward a “we” society, that that was the original founding idea of this country, rather than a “me” society. You know, the idea of a “we” society rather than a “me” society was the original founding “aim” of this country, the original founding notion of this country. We flipped in and out of periods in the history of this country where we’ve been “we” societies, then we became “me” societies, and then we became “we” societies.

And I think a lot of western Europeans in particular who are very much in “we” societies look at us and say, they call themselves a democracy, and the majority of people don’t even participate in politics because they’re so desperately afraid that they might lose their job that they can’t take a day off to vote? This is a democracy? This is what they’re going to run around the world shoving this down people’s throats with the barrel of a gun?

I mean, when you’ve got something good, you don’t have to force it on people; they will steal it, to quote Dick Gregory.

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