Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall and Redeeming Promise of Our Country - Hardcover

Greider, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594868166 ISBN 13: 9781594868160

Verlag: Rodale Pr, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

A cautionary assessment of how the author believes America is straying from its democratic ideals and faltering in a rapidly globalized world community challenges policies that are based on a priority of making America "number one" in the world while examining the economic and political forces that have brought about contemporary problems. 40,000 first printing.

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WILLIAM GREIDER is the best-selling author of five previous books, including One World, Ready or Not; Who Will Tell the People; and Secrets of the Temple. He has written for the Washington Post and Rolling Stone and has been an on-air correspondent for six Frontline documentaries on PBS. Currently the national affairs correspondent for The Nation, he lives in Washington, D.C.

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CHAPTER ONE

FAIR WARNING

I have some hard things to say about our country. Beyond recession and financial crisis, we are in much deeper trouble than many people suppose or the authorities want to acknowledge. Because I think Americans always deal better with adversity if they have a clear understanding of what they are confronting, this book will address the gloomy circumstances and rough passage I see ahead for the American people.

Everything around us is changing, and Americans must change, too. First, we must be honest with ourselves, face the hard facts, and put aside some comforting myths. Then, we must find the nerve to take responsibility again for our country and democracy. Taking responsibility means having the courage to step up and reclaim our power as citizens. We have to relearn what many in earlier generations knew: how to assert our own ideas and values on what the future should look like, how to make ourselves heard amid the empty noise of politics, how to avow our convictions as aggressively as necessary to alter the course of history.

Americans will get through this. Our country has been through far worse in the past. We can emerge from it in promising new ways, not necessarily richer, but wiser and joined more closely together as a people, more able to realize fulfilling lives. If we do the hard work. If we change.

* * * * *

We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know or feel in their guts is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them.

This book is about harsh truths that were mostly not addressed during the long and intensely reported campaign for the presidency. A few marginal candidates did challenge the orthodox version of American greatness, but their also-ran status ensured they would not be widely heard. Most politicians looked the other way and stuck to familiar themes of patriotic optimism. The news media did not help much, either, by generally adhering to conventional thinking and ignoring dissenting opinions. Under these circumstances, citizens are more or less on their own, and remarkably, they do often find their way to the truth about things. In these very difficult times, I hope this book will help them.

Our newly elected president's victory and inauguration have stirred the national spirit--a new president always renews our optimism--but during the campaign Barack Obama did not stray far from the accepted assumptions about the American condition. He promised big changes on many important issues and, like most Americans, I hope for his success.

But the ominous historical circumstances moving against the nation pose adversities that dwarf any single leader. One damaging myth Americans ought to abandon is the naive notion that the celebrity power of the presidency can somehow solve our problems. That faith has been disappointed again and again in recent decades. First, the new leader is built up with miraculous powers, then cast down when he fails to prevail.

Blaming politicians is a healthy American pastime and I intend to do a lot of it, but I want to suggest a more complicated perspective. Politicians are human. That is, they are fallible, prone to folly and error, subject to all of life's usual confusions. I have spent my adult life around government and politics, working as a reporter and dealing closely with the people who have power and make the decisions that govern the nation. Many are earnest and fun to be around. Some rise to noble stature and are courageous and wise even when their causes do not prevail. Many politicians are spear carriers and merely follow routines. Others are corrupted by power and go for the money. They are a mixed lot, but so are we all.

Knowing this about them and knowing the obstacles they face within the deformed political system, I feel a measure of sympathy, especially for the conscientious few who struggle heroically to make the governing system function as it should, serving the general welfare as servants of the people. I do not blame them when their efforts fall short.

The political behavior I do not forgive is failing to give people fair warning. This is the very least we should expect from a system that describes the American people as "sovereign" citizens and proclaims the United States a "self-governing" democracy. Those who govern ought to tell people what's coming so they at least have a chance to get out of the way.

Modern politicians routinely evade that obligation on matters large and small. I have frequently observed the silence that comes over Washington when Congress, the White House, or one of the federal agencies enacts a measure that will deliver a damaging blow to many citizens. The insiders know what's ahead and may even have participated in making it happen. Yet they do not share the bad news with the public in a timely manner.

Evasion is merely one symptom of the deep decay in America's representative democracy. The political system functions well enough for some purposes and some interests, but it does not honor its democratic obligations--usually, it doesn't even try. A wide gulf has opened between the governing and the governed. I once described this poisoned relationship as "mutual contempt." Americans in general are blunt about their disgust with the political order. But people in power don't think so much of ordinary citizens, either. They don't express this openly for obvious reasons, but their contempt is reflected in their behavior.

More than 15 years ago, I wrote a book--Who Will Tell the People--that explored the bleak reality of representative democracy. It helped ordinary citizens understand why their representative system has lost much of its meaning and how democratic principles are routinely betrayed in everyday practice. The book was not warmly received by governing elites. By governing elites, I mean more than the elected officials. The term is meant to include the deep ranks of influentials in and out of the government who exert disproportionate influence on the decision-making--the policy makers and professional experts and party functionaries, the lobbyists and lawyers and the financial and business sectors they represent, the academic thinkers and major media. These opinion leaders did not much like how my book depicted them.1

The deformities in our democracy, they complained, were not caused by Washington, but by the people. Office holders are compelled to take evasive actions, they explained, to fend off lazy and inattentive constituents, voters who randomly act on irrational impulses and make impossible demands. Blame them, not us. Democracy "works," I was assured, by giving the people the screwed-up government they deserve.

The governing classes' sour view of the governed still prevails. The democratic condition has not improved but deteriorated further. So has the public's regard for the system. Democracy is broken and most Americans seem to know it. Even in Washington, this is no longer news.

* * * * *

I start with the failing democracy because it is the soggy mattress thrown over everything else this book will discuss. The immobilized political system that allows powerful interests to exercise virtual veto power over major reforms is not a new condition. But the stakes of failure and paralysis are much higher today because the country is on far more dangerous ground. The public yearns for the enormous changes that are required on many fronts. Yet the status quo is stuck, deformed by the concentration of power and unwilling to respond with anything more than limited gestures.

Electing a new president and shifting control to a different...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rodale Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1594868166
• ISBN 13: 9781594868160
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar