What Is To Be Done? Take Hold of Our History
We must lay claim to or, better, reclaim America’s past and—without discounting the terrible tragedies and ironies that have marked the lives of so many Americans—articulate the truly radical story of America.
“America needs something more right now than a “must-do” list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story… the leaders, and thinkers, and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people… The right story will set our course for a generation to come…”
“Tell it—for America’s sake.”—Bill Moyers, A New Story for America(2006)
The time has come. The crisis intensifies, and the struggle is being joined. Abraham Lincoln’s warning of 1862–“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth”—speaks ever more directly to us. But keep listening. Lincoln did not merely issue a warning to his fellow citizens. Believing they already essentially knew what he was to say, he reminded them of who they were and made it perfectly clear to them what they had to do to overcome the crisis and prevail against the enemy they confronted. He told them that winning the war and sustaining the Union required not simply defeating the Confederacy, but also making America’s revolutionary promise all the more real for all the more Americans. He told them that to truly secure the United States they had to end slavery. He called on them to make America radically freer, more equal, and more democratic.
The time has come for us to do the same. The time has come for us to remind ourselves of who we are and what that demands. The time has come for us to take hold of our history and make America radical again.
The resurgent democratic energies and agencies we are sensing and seeing reveal that Americans not only continue both to believe in America’s revolutionary promise and to feel the radical impulse imbued in American life by the Revolution and sustained by the struggles of generations, but also yearn to defend American democratic life. Thus, they challenge not only a treacherous and reactionary president and his party. They challenge us—the democratic left—as well.
Even as we draw inspiration and encouragement from America’s progressive and radical story, we should never forget what our forebears never forgot, that the America we seek lies not in the past, but in the future that we are struggling to make.
They challenge labor unionists, progressives, radicals, socialists, and true liberals to do what we have failed to do for the past 50 years. They challenge us to finally fulfill the fearful expectations that in the 1970s drove the corporate powers that be and their conservative and neoliberal champions to declare war on the progress of American democratic life and pursue to this day class-war and culture-war campaigns against the democratic achievements of generations; the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; and the very memory of how those achievements were secured and those rights were won. They challenge us to unite in a coalition—call it a “popular front” if you wish—to liberate the Democratic party, the historic Party of the People, from the Money Power and to take up the fight to truly assure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all Americans. A coalition determined to not only win elections, but also harness the powers of democratic government, subject capital to ever greater public regulation and control, and push the nation all the more in a social-democratic direction.
We cannot delay. We must start doing what we have not been doing. We must embrace our history and recognize that we are radicals at heart. And we must build a coalition of democratic forces which is committed not merely to restoring the democratic legacy of generations and the rights of workers, women, and people of color, but also, if we are to truly secure them, to radically or, if you prefer, progressively extending and deepening them. We must address the needs of the commonwealth and its citizens by re-appropriating through taxation the wealth transferred from working people to capital and the rich. We must empower labor both private and public to organize and bargain collectively and to elect union brothers and sisters to corporate boards. We must make ourselves more secure by demilitarizing and de-weaponizing everyday American life and by establishing a system of universal national healthcare. We must enact the Equal Rights Amendment and guarantee a woman’s right to control her own body. We must not simply abolish the Electoral College, but actually enact a constitutional amendment guaranteeing citizens the right to vote. Moreover, we should redeem FDR’s vision of an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans.
We must, however, do more than come up with a “must-do list” that will appeal to and draw together diverse interests. We must do what America’s finest radical and progressive voices have always done in the face of crises and forces determined to stymie, or bring an end altogether to, the progress of American democratic life. We must recover and proclaim anew the revolutionary promise projected in Common Sense, the Declaration, the Preamble, and the Bill of Rights so as to call out the powers that be and call forth our fellow citizens.
We must do what our greatest democratic poet Walt Whitman did on the eve of the Civil War when he wrote in his continuing epic, Leaves of Grass:
YOU just maturing youth! You male or female!
Remember the organic compact of These States,
Remember the pledge of the Old Thirteen thenceforward to the rights, life, liberty, equality of man,
Remember what was promulged by the founders, ratified by The States, signed in black and white by the Commissioners, and read by Washington at the head of the army,
Remember the purposes of the founders,––Remember Washington;
Remember the copious humanity streaming from every direction toward America;
Remember the hospitality that belongs to nations and men; (Cursed be nation, woman, man, without hospitality!)
Remember, government is to subserve individuals,
Not any, not the President, is to have one jot more than you or me,
Not any habitan of America is to have one jot less than you or me.
We must do what Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues did at Seneca Falls in 1848 when they stated in the Declaration of Sentiments that “all men and women are created equal”; what Frederick Douglass did in 1852 when he asked his fellow Americans “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”; what Lincoln did most eloquently at Gettysburg in 1863 when he projected a “new birth of freedom” to assure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”; what Eugene Debs did when he called forth Paine and other radicals and progressives to champion the causes of labor and socialism; what Franklin Roosevelt did in proclaiming the Four Freedoms and envisioning the creation of an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans; and what Martin Luther King, Jr. did when demanding a fulfillment of America’s revolutionary promise on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.
Moreover, we must lay claim to or, better, reclaim America’s past and—without discounting the terrible tragedies and ironies that have marked the lives of so many Americans—articulate the truly radical story of America, the truly radical story that is America. The story of how, in the face of fierce opposition, and despite all of our terrible faults and failings, generations of Americans native-born and newly-arrived, men and women in all their extraordinary diversity, have struggled both to realize the nation’s fundamental promise of equality and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and to enlarge not only the We in We the People, but also the powers of the people. Indeed, the story of how our greatest generations confronted and transcended mortal threats to American democratic life in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s-40s (not to mention the 1960s) by making the United States radically freer, more equal, and more democratic. And we must tell that story in a way that enables us to not only appreciate why we feel the democratic impulses and yearnings we do, but also to recognize and embrace our many and diverse struggles to make real the nation’s promise past and present as ours not respectively “theirs” alone.
Finally, even as we draw inspiration and encouragement from America’s progressive and radical story, we should never forget what our forebears never forgot, that the America we seek lies not in the past, but in the future that we are struggling to make. And in that spirit, we should recall, if not publicly recite, lines such as these from Langston Hughes’ 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again”:
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
The time has come to take hold of our history and make America radical again. The time has come not merely to take back America, but all the more to make America America.
Note: This article is based on the Afterword to my 2020 book Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again.
