Pass It On – Bill Moyers in Remembrance

Bill Moyers, the acclaimed journalist and advocate for public broadcasting, died today at age ninety one.

It is worth looking at Moyers’ chapter of his autobiographical Moyers on America: A Journalist and his times, which is quite relevant twenty years later. In the chapter, ‘This Is Your Story. Pass It On,’ referring to the privatization of public lands, which can then be sold at a discount to corporate cronies, he wrote that this is “the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible,, that has occurred in our lifetime.”

He continues that he can’t explain the rage of the Conservatives who want to “dismantle every last brick of the social contract.” He is rightfully puzzled “as with the right-wing wrecking crews blasting away at social benefits once considered invulnerable, Democrats are fearful of being branded as ‘class warriors’ in a war that the other side started and determined to win”.

Dwelling on how hard is to resolve the class war, Moyers – the exceptional journalist – continues that he doesn’t “know how to reconfigure Progressive politics to fit into an age of sound bites and polling dominated by a media oligarchy whose corporate journalists are neutered and whose right-wing publicists have no shame”

Moyers, providing a history lesson, says that “while the social dislocation and meanness that galvanized Progressives in the nineteenth century are resurgent, so is the vision of justice, fairness, and. equality. No challenge to America is greater than to open suffrage and the marketplace to new and marginal people — and this is the Progressive vision. It’s a powerful vision if only there are people around to fight for it. The battle to renew democracy has enormous resources to call on — and great precedents for inspiration.”

Listing these precedents, and what it takes to “get back into the fight” – complete with several bullet points – Moyers condludes his chapter with the though “ideas have power — as long as they not frozen in doctrine — but they need legs.”

Listing the progressive ideas such as the the minimum wage; conserving national resources including air, water, and land; women’s rights and civil rights’ trade unions; social security, and other social nets, Moyers reminds us that all of these were

launched as citizens’ movements, and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and in the face of bitter opposition and and sneering attacks. Democracy doesn’t work without citizen activism and participation. Trickle-down politics is no more effective than trickle-down economics. Moreover, civilization happens because we don’t leave things to other people. What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight as if the cause depends on you. Allow yourself that conceit– to believe that the flames of democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in one citizen’s hand.

With one more quote from a journalist from the nineteenth century, Moyers concludes his chapter with these words: “This is our story, the Progressive story of America. Pass it on.”