One side pits winners and losers against each other in a race for the American Dream, while the other wonders what might be possible if we work together to form communities, build schools and create a culture of mutual respect.
Since the beginning, two narratives have warred for the soul of America. One is the “We’re Number One” America, in which the American Dream is a competition with few winners and others who bask in their reflected glory. This is the America of land grabs, robber barons and get-rich-quick schemes.
The alternative is the story of democracy in which America is a place of cooperative endeavor where people form associations, build schools, congregations, libraries and towns and fight for “liberty and justice for all.”
The novelist Marilynne Robinson was getting at this alternative in her conversation with President Obama last September in Iowa, reprinted in the New York Review of Books. “Democracy,” she said, “was something people collectively made.” Making democracy created a culture of mutual respect.
I learned this understanding of democracy as a young man working for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the civil rights movement. In Hope and History, King’s friend and sometime speechwriter Vincent Harding described the movement as “a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy in the United States.” It showed “the deep yearning for a democratic experience that is far more than periodic voting.”
To continue reading this article by author and Public Achievement founder Harry Boyte, go to: billmoyers.com/story/the-fight-for-americas-soul/
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