The Big Picture

Vertigo in the Eighties

Everyone knows that this is a tough time to be working for social change in these United States. But that is not because of any shortage of activity. In the last five years, millions of Americans have entered struggles for justice and peace in different ways and with different levels of commitment. Many of those people have become active for the first time through the explosions of concern around issues such as the nuclear arms race, the U.S. war in Central America, racism at home and abroad, and the assaults on women and the poor that have marked the Reagan era.

But all this activity has, frankly, done little or nothing to slow the juggernauts of war and injustice. We all know the litany of horrors--contra aid, Star Wars, rollbacks of civil rights for minorities and women, broken obligations to the poor and unemployed, and so on. The sad fact is that on every front progressive forces in the United States are meeting defeat, and for the most part we have no idea how to turn things around in the short term.

By now many of us are probably feeling that the political ground has shifted beneath our feet, and we're not sure how to walk on this new terrain. Vertigo and exhaustion could be considered the movement watchwords of the day. In such a time of disorientation and defeat, it can be expected that many who have joined the struggle in recent years will simply give up and go along.

MEETING DEFEAT, however, does not have to mean being defeated. On one level that is simply an expression of the theological paradox that is at the heart of Christian faith: that Jesus--not in spite of, but because of, his abject and total defeat--is ultimately victorious over the powers of death. Part of the good news of the last five years is that a very large percentage of America's newly activated dissidents are people who believe that Christian paradox. These people have become politically active out of a living moral and religious commitment that, at its best, is independent from immediate prospects for success.

But for individual commitment, even more so a coherent movement, to survive a time like this requires more than religious enthusiasm or moral fervor. We also need a deeper, longer-term understanding about the nature of the struggle we're involved in and a bigger picture of how it is unfolding.

That is especially true today, because in fact the political ground has shifted beneath our feet in some very significant ways. The litany of evils that we often exhaust ourselves combatting are all merely symptomatic of a historic trend that is under way in U.S. political life.

In broad terms, our corporate elite is trying to recapture and reconsolidate the ground lost in the 1960s and 1970s to domestic reform and Third World revolution. The battlefields range from Central American villages and Geneva negotiating parlors to U.S. day-care centers, union picket lines, and the mass media. But they are all part of the same protracted war.

If our commitment is defined by a specific goal or issue, for instance, stopping the nuclear arms race or getting the United States out of Central America, then if the desired changes don't materialize, we can rightly consider ourselves defeated and our efforts futile. However, if we see each specific issue as part of an overall system of wealth and power and define our activism as part of a lifelong struggle to turn that system around, then, short of total nuclear war, there are no ultimate defeats or victories. There is only a succession of battles waged around different specific concerns at different times, all of which, successful or not, contribute in some way to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called, "That long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world."

The Nature of the Beast

It is certainly the case that the people who run America think globally and systematically about their course of action. They are, after all, sitting astride an empire that requires trade, raw materials, labor, and markets from across the planet. Protecting that economic reach, of course, requires a global projection of military power. And the maintenance of a global military capacity ultimately requires that the citizens of the mother country (that's you and me) be convinced, through a combination of material rewards and cultural conditioning, that the whole imperial enterprise is worth the cost.

Managing a project of such scope and magnitude obviously requires more than just crisis containment. It requires grand conceptual frameworks and imaginative ideological constructions that must constantly feed upon reams of data, multiple reams of analysis, constant probing of the popular psyche, and endless contingency plans.

Elite universities, corporate research departments, and a whole universe of think tanks work full time compiling, sifting, and shaping this official picture of the world. Then it trickles down to media professionals and politicians. Finally, at the other end of the process, there emerges a "consensus" regarding things like deregulation of natural gas prices or "democratic reform" in El Salvador.

Somehow the policies that come out of this process always seem to serve the interests of the corporate elite that set the agenda. The process by which policy is shaped and public consent manufactured is simply the natural interaction of economic interests, ideology, and raw coercive power through which rulers everywhere have always maintained their dominion.

For the first 20 years of the American empire, from 1945 to 1965, consolidation and management Of the global system went pretty smoothly. The first step of the process was to create a permanent state of war with the Soviet Union and an omnipresent international communist threat. This was necessary to, in the famous words of the late Sen. Arthur Vandenburg, "scare the hell out of the American people" in order to ensure a war-weary public's acceptance of a permanent war economy, peacetime conscription, and an institutionalized nuclear threat. Anti-communism also provided the all-encompassing ideology needed to cloak the imperial project in the language of freedom and democracy.

After a brief period of political and cultural repression and retooling, the Cold War liberal consensus emerged unchallenged. That "consensus" delivered a period of unprecedented prosperity at home and a kind of global stability abroad built on nuclear terror and covert interventionism.

A symbiotic relationship existed between the "cold peace" and the boundless prosperity of that period. America's wealth depended on free access to the markets, labor, and raw materials of other countries. That required intervention against nationalist forces in the Third World. It was also necessary to neutralize the Soviet Union's potential as the only countervailing force, and the nuclear threat offered the only way to do that short of another exhausting world war.

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

But there were at least two glaring contradictions built into this strategy. In setting themselves against the nationalist aspirations of the Third World, our rulers were from the very beginning marching against the all but inevitable tide of history. That fact finally became evident in the villages of Vietnam. Meanwhile, on the home front, a generation of prosperity and the messianic Cold War rhetoric of freedom and democracy combined to create a revolution of rising expectations.

Black Americans were the first to recognize the gap between America's rhetoric and its actual behavior. Perhaps because they were largely locked out of the nation's prosperity. When blacks began to demand that America's fabled freedom and wealth be extended to them, they also brought to the surface and galvanized the vague unease many young white people were feeling about American life.

In the early 1960s, these two forces already formed a powerful current of dissent centered around the demand that America deliver on its democratic promises. By 1965, when the United States began full-scale war in Vietnam, the currents of dissent had become a flood of outraged rebellion.

As it spread from blacks to draft-age youth, the nature of the protest deepened. A civil rights movement that started out demanding black voting rights in the South began to attack the legitimacy of a system that left almost all blacks everywhere economically disenfranchised. An anti-war movement that started out calling for negotiations and a bombing halt quickly realized that the United States was the aggressor in Vietnam. The demand for negotiations was replaced by a call for unilateral withdrawal, not just from Vietnam but from all of America's Third World fortresses.

In challenging an economic system ruled solely by private profit and denying America's right to project its military power anywhere in the world, the great social movements of the 1960s were taking on the most fundamental institutions and assumptions of the empire. And much of the movement's leadership was coming to see the inextricable connection between inequality at home and warfare abroad.

By 1975 America was a beleaguered and clearly declining empire. The Vietnam War was lost and so was the myth of U.S. invincibility. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) was rewriting the ground rules of the international economy on terms decidedly unfavorable to the West, and suddenly the postwar resurrection of Japan and West Germany was beginning to challenge a U.S. economy weakened by the endless war. A corrupt president had been driven from office in humiliation. And the Watergate-related investigations had also exposed parts of the secret and undemocratic intertwining of government institutions, corporate wealth, and covert action by which the United States and much of the world had been ruled for 30 years.

The black and anti-war movements had been largely silenced by the death of Dr. King, the end of the draft, and concerted state repression. But the disruption they had created in the society continued to reverberate through the events of the next several years.

The ideological energy previously generated by America's "free world" crusade was utterly exhausted. Even U.S. citizens could no longer easily believe that America was a uniquely moral and democratic nation ordained by its very virtue to rule the world. When, in the waning days of his rule, Henry Kissinger tried to force a U.S. intervention in Angola, an outraged public and Congress flatly refused, ignoring all the "great man's" talk of oil supplies, shipping lanes, and strategic balance.

Yankees and Cowboys

Clearly, from the perspective of our ruling class, something had to be done to turn this receding tide. One answer was Jimmy Carter. To all appearances this relatively obscure Southern governor burst onto the national scene out of nowhere in the early months of 1976. But in fact he had been recruited to run for president by David Rockefeller himself in 1974. He was subsequently "created" as a national figure by appearing, for no apparently newsworthy reason, on the cover of Time magazine.

In Carter the Eastern-establishment elite saw a white Southerner who'd won strong black support in Georgia and could potentially ameliorate the dangerous anger and alienation of black America. It saw a man with fundamentally conservative economic views. Most important, in Carter the corporate kingmakers saw the morally serious Sunday school teacher who could conceivably make Americans again believe in the righteousness of their system.

As candidate and president, Carter became the vehicle for the sector of our ruling elite that considered it futile to try to turn back the economic and political shifts of the previous decade. Instead, they accepted an era of limits and sought to preserve the essentials of their wealth and power through pragmatic accommodation to the changed circumstances.

These old-money, Eastern-establishment "Yankees" tend to look at the world across the Atlantic Ocean, for a combination of financial, historical, and geographic reasons. They are the heirs of the great robber barons--Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Mellon, Harriman, et al.--whose fortunes were largely made in the 19th century. As a result, their financial and political destiny tends to be intertwined with the European colonial powers of that era.

Their dynasties, which began in oil, coal, railroads, shipping, and heavy industry, now form the backbone of the system of international finance. That is a world which revolves around New York, London, Paris, and Zurich; and in it the fate of Saigon had counted for very little except as an expensive and ultimately inconvenient symbol. The captains of finance yearned more for stability than for new conquests.

On the global stage, the Eastern elite's accommodation to the new realities was called trilateralism. Its basic principle was that Japan and Western Europe should be promoted to the status of senior partners roughly equal with the United States. Together the three capitalist superpowers could effectively manage the international economy and reach consensus positions on similar businesslike accommodations with the Soviet Union, China, and troublesome Third World populations.

In foreign policy Carter's establishment advisers counseled a program of moderately enlightened reform, including the much-vaunted human rights policy. Military aid was cut off to dictatorial regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala, while equally heinous crimes in more geo-politically significant places like Iran, the Philippines, and South Korea were ignored.

On the domestic side, there were institutional reforms like affirmative action and tougher business regulations. These were aimed at restoring confidence in the virtue of our foreign policies and defusing potentially volatile issues like women's rights, continuing racial discrimination, and growing environmental concern.

But the Carter-era program of accommodation and reform ran aground. That was partly a matter of Carter's incompetence and b ad luck, but it also reflected the growing power of the new-money Sunbelt elite. Its still-expanding dynasties I had mostly begun since the onset of I World War II and tended to be based f in minerals, construction, defense industries, agribusiness, the postwar suburban retail services boom, and electronics.

The members of this new "Cowboy" elite tended to look at the world across the Pacific, to the emerging economies and expanding markets of East Asia, which naturally caused them to be considerably less sanguine about the loss of I Indochina and the rise of Japan f than were the trilateralists. And their concentration in the South-I western United States left them I naturally more concerned about Latin America the Yankees.

But the key difference is that the Cowboy empires were still dynamic and in need of room to grow. They were inherently more interested in conquest than stability.

The Carter administration's acceptance of limits in the Third World, economic parity with the Japanese, and military parity with the Soviet Union was anathema not only to the Cowboys' vestigial Wild West ethos but to their concrete and immediate economic interests. Out of that combination, one can glimpse an ideological offensive emerging. And the Cowboys didn't need Time magazine to create their candidate; Hollywood had done it for them years before.

THE CONSTELLATION of forces that gathered to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980 could already be seen in skeletal form in the collection of Western millionaires and Far Right ideologues (then considered crackpots) who made up the Goldwater campaign of 1964. But in 1964 the as-yet-unnamed New Right was out of step with history. Its adherents insisted on seeing Communists at America's doorstep and rampant moral decay within, at a time when most Americans saw only clear skies and sunshine.

But despite Goldwater's humiliating defeat, the Far Right didn't give up or go away. It began painstakingly building its own institutions and cultivating its own new constituency in full confidence that, when the time was right, it would be ready to replace the weary Eastern establishment and the Democrats' badly frayed New Deal coalition.

With the generous financial support of men like Adolph Coors, Justin Dart, and the renegade Mellon in-law Richard Scaife, the New Right established its own network of think tanks and policy institutes like the Heritage Foundation, the Rocky Mountain Fund, and the Hoover Institute, with the latter even gaining a foothold at prestigious Stanford University. When they were still unwelcome and weak in the Republican establishment, New Right operatives like Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, and Howard Phillips built their own political action committees to perform the traditional political party functions of candidate recruitment, campaign financing, and cadre training.

Through these institutions the New Right leaders uncovered and developed issues that conventional politicians were ignoring and which had the capacity to galvanize previously unidentified constituencies. Early in the Carter administration, the fruits of this work could already be seen in New Right agitation against the Panama Canal and SALT II treaties on the now-familiar theme that America was becoming "weak." They also saw the baby-boomers-having-babies mini-boom coming and were the first to adopt "family" and "family values" as effective political buzzwords.

But the greatest of these was abortion. The New Right recognized it as the kind of issue that can permanently alter the political landscape. The right-to-life issue peeled off a significant layer of formerly Democratic, white working-class Catholics into the Republican column, and it cemented the New Right's profitable alliance with the TV preachers. Most important, it infused the New Right with the moral energy of one of this era's only genuine grassroots social movements.

The New Right's electoral successes were built on cleverly crafted appeals to feelings of patriotism, love for family, and religious faith, which are natural and healthy parts of human life. But, in the wrong circumstances, those feelings can also be manifested as xenophobia, racism, and a violent terror of the dissenter or the "different."

While Reagan has worked the high road of lofty American values, his allies--including New Right members of Congress, TV preachers, and the "independent" New Right political action committees--have bulldozed their way down the low one with ads and speeches appealing to racism, subtle or otherwise, and to the most hateful sort of national chauvinism. In New Right rhetoric, it is common to identify dissent with terrorism, stir irrational fears of a unisex ERA future, and attack homosexuals in ways that border on incitement to violence.

But whether on the high road or the low, the purpose is the same. In essence the Reagan administration and its many allies have been redoing the task that was accomplished so well at the onset of the empire 40 years ago: instilling national unity (i.e. stifling dissent), constructing a moral and ideological language and fervor around America's imperial mission, and using the Soviet threat to "scare the hell out of the American people." And beneath the rhetoric is the same long-term agenda of assuring the absolute right of corporations to do whatever they please to workers, farmers, communities, or the environment at home and their right to do business wherever they please abroad under the protective umbrella of U.S. military power.

America is Back

To reassert the agenda of free enterprise and empire in an age of expensive energy, strong international economic competition, Soviet military parity, and still-proliferating Third World revolutions requires, as the saying goes, "hard choices." The first thing required to reconsolidate the empire in the '80s is a lowering of the expectations that had been raised by the Third World revolutions and domestic social movements of the previous two decades.

In the international arena, that has meant firmly demonstrating that the United States has recovered from the Vietnam syndrome and is willing and able to use its military power to keep other countries from veering out of our political and economic influence. That was the point of the Lebanon disaster, the Grenada invasion, and is the point of the creeping entry into war against Nicaragua. The current administration campaign to win support for anti-communist "freedom fighters" around the world takes the interventionist policy one step further in attempting to actually roll back the changes that occurred from 1975 to 1979.

The drive for all-fronts military superiority over the Soviet Union is, of course, intimately related to this bring-back-Vietnam syndrome. By now the nuclear arms race and the U.S.-Soviet enmity have taken on a near-mythic life of their own. But it is still the case that the United States wants unchallenged superiority over the Soviets, including a nuclear first-strike capacity and Star Wars, not because our leaders especially want to incinerate the Soviet people, but because that capacity is considered an insurance policy against Soviet interference with our plans for the rest of the world.

With plans to use U.S. military power around the world also comes the need to ensure against undue interference from the American people. On that front, the Reagan administration has bypassed Congress and promulgated a series of executive orders broadening the power of federal agencies to act against domestic dissent.

The renewed U.S. militarist drive throughout the world is related in several ways to the domestic social and economic components of the New Right agenda. One of the most obvious and most important connections is the simple fact that when you allow military spending to absorb $300 billion a year from the federal budget, there is little left for things like preventing hunger, educating children, or providing health care.

But the Reagan administration hasn't begun rolling back government social services simply because of the defense budget. It is also doing this as a matter of principle. On one level, many of the Reaganauts do have a genuine, almost religious, faith in the myth of a free-market economy and the corollary doctrine that the market works best when the size and scope of government are reduced to a bare minimum. But at a deeper level, the shrinking of the social safety net is also a response to global economic and political changes.

Since it is becoming more difficult to extract profits abroad because of foreign competition and the occasional revolution, U.S. corporations need to wring more wealth from the domestic work force. When there is a comprehensive social welfare system, including decent supports for the unemployed, it is much easier for workers to demand better wages or working conditions and to take risks, like going on strike, to attain their demands. When the social supports are drastically curtailed and it becomes clear that it is every man, woman, or child for themselves, workers become more docile, and the unemployed become willing to accept the lowest-paying and most demeaning jobs.

WITHIN THIS OVERALL picture of lowering expectations lies the unique plight of the masses of blacks in America. The disenfranchisement of black Americans is so deeply rooted in our social, political, and economic institutions that it can't be redressed in any significant way without radically disrupting those institutions. Simply opening the way to decent jobs and adequate housing for the decimated urban black communities would require public intervention in the economy at a level that the most liberal corporation head would find intolerable. And that's not even considering the wholesale disruption of leadership elites in every area of society that would come with a just representation of blacks in their number.

Unlike its predecessors, the Reagan administration has faced this reality. As a result it has dispensed with the pretense of piecemeal reform and is seeking instead to forge a new business-oriented black leadership from the small number of blacks who made their way up in the 1970s.

Apparently the strategists of the Right hope that if the pool of future black leadership can be disconnected from the aspirations of black people as a whole, then those left at the bottom will remain disorganized and hence harmless in their discontent. In the interim, their proposals to deal with the immediate and potentially explosive problem of unemployed black youth is-to lower the minimum wage and build more jails.

In a similar fashion, the shapers of the current offensive have perceived the long-term implications of feminism more astutely than did their moderate predecessors. By now feminism is much more than the National Organization for Women or the National Women's Political Caucus. It is a widespread consciousness among women in every sector of society that they have a right to full equality with men.

So far the organizational forms haven't caught up with the consciousness. But if they ever do, women's demand for full and equal participation in society would require, just as a beginning, changes in the organization and even the definition of work that would turn our economic institutions upside down. And the strategists of the Right see the fact, embedded in polling data though not yet translated into organized political reality, that women at every level of society place a much higher priority on creating a just and compassionate social order at home than on controlling other nations through the accumulation of military power.

The New Right has moved to counter the feminist threat through a variety of tactics. One is co-optation through tokenism. Ronald Reagan appointed the first female justice to the Supreme Court. It's in the history books, and the Republican Party can, and will, crow about it for the next 20 years. And with two women senators (to the Democrats' zero), Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole waiting in the wings, and Jeane Kirkpatrick cast as a female Kissinger, the Republicans have more women in positions of perceived prominence than do the Democrats. There are excellent odds that one of those women will be the 1988 vice-presidential nominee.

Meanwhile, the real agenda of the Reagan administration has been visible in the dismantling of affirmative action and the quiet gutting of government-supported programs, from job training to battered-women's shelters, that make possible women's independence. And down on the low road, Reagan's surrogates, including Vice President Bush and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, fan the flames of male backlash with rhetoric incorporating all the worst male stereotypes about women.

The Right has also been very successful in using the legitimate moral concern many people feel about abortion to counter the wider range of demands for women's rights. It is clear that politically the mainstream feminist organizations have made things much easier for their opponents by casting abortion-on-demand as their make-or-break litmus-test issue.

Moral Rearmament

The most important accomplishment in the reign of the Right thus far is not to be found in specific policy changes. In that regard they've won some and lost some. But their greatest success by their own estimate has been in changing the atmosphere in which political discussion is conducted. This can be seen in the fact that on every issue the leading Democratic 1988 presidential contenders are steadily inching their positions rightward.

The New Right forces have a comprehensive vision of America and its place in the world and articulate sweeping long-term goals. They unashamedly cast that social vision in the language of moral values and even religious faith. And they have the financial resources to get their message heard. As a result, they have tapped into the deep and legitimate need of the American people for a sense of direction, meaning, and commonly held values in public life.

The morality of the Right is often hypocritical at best and narrowly exclusivist and even theocratic at worst. But in the moral vacuum that U.S. politics has become, the appearance of people who seem to actually believe in something, regardless of the content of that belief, is enough to shift the center of debate.

That is so because liberalism, which constituted the political center of gravity for the last 50 years, has largely reduced public life to the value-free balancing of interest groups accomplished through self-perpetuating and faceless bureaucracies. As a result, there developed a widespread perception among ordinary citizens that America was simply adrift and that their values and aspirations didn't count for much anymore. That left a perfect opening for a political movement that says it will restore "traditional values" and for a president who says he seeks a "spiritual revival" in America.

The rise of politics rooted in people's cultural traditions and religious values is not simply, or even primarily, an American phenomenon. It is a global current that can be witnessed in Poland's Solidarity, the base communities of Latin America and the Philippines, and freedom churches of South Africa. Yet as the repression and bloodshed that have grown out of the Islamic revolution in Iran indicate, it is a phenomenon that exists for both good and ill. But in all these widely varying contexts, the common denominator that emerges is the failure of narrowly secular, technocratic political systems--whether communist or capitalist--to meet people's needs for justice and democracy.

In our own country, too, the phenomenon of "religious politics" cuts both ways. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and a host of others preach a religion of the state, lending the name of Jesus to the latest initiatives of the Reagan White House. At the same time, the most substantial opposition to the Reaganauts comes from people of faith.

Currently there are only two voices granted recognition by the mainstream media that are speaking unequivocally against the rightward tide. One is the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the other is the Baptist preacher-politician Jesse L. Jackson. In the real world, which usually lies beyond the view of the three networks, a significant body of Christians--black, white, and brown and across the denominational and theological spectrum--are going about the business of welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, making peace, and speaking prophetic truth against the powers that create oppression and war. Several months ago an article in The Nation, a vehemently secular magazine, estimated that of all those involved in significant work for social change in the United States, at least two-thirds were working from a religious motivation.

THOUGH IT MAY not feel like it from day to day, we too are part of the big picture of where our country is going. Long-term political and economic reality seems to suggest that if America continues to define its national purpose as the accumulation of material wealth and domination of other nations, and if it continues to retrench, reconsolidate, and crack down every time that purpose is threatened, the end result would be either a disastrous war or the erosion of such democracy as we have.

If the United States is to turn from its present course, it must discover a sense of purpose, and even mission, other than accumulation and domination. We must begin to answer the old question of what kind of country this is going to be through such monumental challenges as extending the notions of democracy and equality, building a truly multi-racial society, overcoming sexism, and developing a sustainable economics that serves our people and allows us to share our wealth responsibly with our neighbors. In the U.S. context, such a radical change of direction can only come as the result of a political movement strongly rooted in our best cultural and religious traditions.

Even within the harsh realities of the current political and cultural atmosphere, we should see ourselves and our commitments as among the possible seeds of such a movement. And, in that view, what's needed from us now is not just better legislative strategies or more creative demonstration scenarios. We also need much more than in recent years to find ways to address the cultural and spiritual assumptions that form the very foundation of our country's current direction.

Urgent struggles around life-and-death issues will continue. And we may very well continue to lose many of them. But if we believe in the God of history, we know that the results of our efforts are not in our hands anyhow. All we can do is speak and act as faithfully and wisely as we can and try to do so in ways that hold out the possibility of a new direction, should more people become ready to pursue one.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.