They Have Trampled Our Constitution Underfoot

Bill Moyers, Doubleday

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists:
"No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them." Here is my
bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely
democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege
to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept
of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks
Lincoln's sacred belief in "government of the people, by the people, and
for the people"; mocks the democratic notion of government as "a
voluntary union for the common good" embodied in the great wave of reform
that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the
philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that "freedom"
simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that
taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the
incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government
itself becomes the enabler of privilege -- the philosophy of an earlier social
Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs -- is as subversive
as Benedict Arnold's betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary
Lease: "The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining
the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the
great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping
its plain provisions underfoot."