GrannyD who has lived through history we seem to study and about which we speculate has the following to say about the current divisions of the country:
My recent campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire was a great adventure, and its eventual outcome was fairly well-known even before we began--though we worked hard to win. Would I have decided to run had I known in advance that I would not win? The answer is yes, I would have still done it, for life itself has a predictable outcome, and it is not in our final day that meaning comes to our lives, but in the days spent along our way.
As to the politics of my effort, I will tell you that I am an old Progressive-Populist, and that tradition has crossed both the Republican and Democratic lines, and now the Reform and Green lines, too, but it is considered more of the left, now, than the right.
I understand that many of you hold far different political beliefs, and, rather than bend my remarks to the agreement of all, let me instead help you see inside the thinking of a particular kind of belief system that has been important in America since just after the Civil War, when farmers banded together to fight the railroad, banking and meat packing monopolies by forming their own political party.
That party, the Populist Party, which was largely based in rural America, joined forces with the more urban-based Progressive Party at turn of the 20th Century. The leaders of this powerful new movement, which sprang for the most part out of the town of Madison, Wisconsin, included Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette, whose seat in the U.S. Senate is now held appropriately by Russ Feingold, a solid reformer whose campaign finance reform bill I walked across America to support. When La Follette raised the Progressive movement to great power in America, leaders like Theodore Roosevelt were quick to see the future and danced quickly in front of that parade.
Out of that movement we got the monopoly-busting anti-trust laws, which largely came undone in the Reagan Administration, the labor laws which gave America the strongest and most prosperous middle class the world had ever seen—also which came undone in the Reagan Administration, with later help in the Clinton Administration. And from the Progressive-Populist Movement we got environmental clean-up laws, worker safety laws, and the Social Security System, which ended the long era of elder destitution that had been increasingly a fact as industrialization overran the family agrarian roots of our nation.
My father and mother were solid Republicans, and they celebrated and participated in many of these reforms. Most Americans, through most of my lifetime, have seen the federal government as a necessary tool for working Americans to provide for justice and its prosperity.
All those beliefs and accomplishments are now coming undone or are under attack. Social Security will be the next to fall, perhaps, and we see it coming, as America becomes again what it was in the first days of industrialization: a nation of the very rich and the very poor--the exploiters, who own the politicians, and, on the other side, the exploited, whose great power to move history smolders silently, waiting for the oxygen of leadership and political opportunity.
It is interesting to those of us on the left that the American vote no longer breaks down as a division of the exploiter and the exploited. People seem happy to vote for those who do everything possible to export their jobs, give their common wealth to the already too-wealthy, and undermine their social safety net programs, their right to organize, right to privacy, and on and on.
http://www.grannyd.org/(click on Speeches)
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