On the eve of the first anniversary of President Obama's inauguration, it's become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us. The 2008 election was all about "Hope." But Hope is simply not cutting it.
What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well intentioned -- that change is going to have to come from outside Washington.
This realization is especially resonant as we celebrate Dr. King, whose life and work demonstrate the vital importance of social movements in bringing about change. Indeed, King showed that no real change can be accomplished without a movement demanding it.
As Frederick Douglass put it: "Power never concedes anything without a demand; it never has and it never will."
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Similarly, before the start of WWII, legendary labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, lobbied FDR to promote equal employment opportunities in the defense industry. Roosevelt was sympathetic but made no promises. Randolph responded by taking his cause to the American people, organizing a massive march on Washington. Concerned about the impact the march would have on the country's wartime morale, Roosevelt got Randolph to call it off by issuing an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to watch over hiring practices.
And since the days of FDR and LBJ, the system has only gotten more rigged, and the powers-that-be more entrenched. As Janine Wedel shows in Shadow Elite, the power of special interests to thwart meaningful change -- often by co-opting the rhetoric of change but producing in its name a further consolidation of the status quo -- has never been stronger. The health care bill's path from fundamental reform to fiasco is only the latest example.
A year ago this week, Obama proclaimed, "We gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."
One year later, wracked with conflict and discord, and battered by petty grievances, false promises, and worn out dogmas, we stand on the verge of passing a giant boon to health insurance companies and calling it "reform."
The reason we are given? What else: the votes just aren't there for a real reform bill.
That's where Hope 2.0 comes in. If the votes aren't there, the people need to create them. Just like King did. They need to build a movement. And to make that happen, we need to adopt another of the great lessons of Dr. King's life: elevating the role empathy must play in our society.
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While taping last week's Left, Right & Center, I was discussing Jeremy Rifkin's powerful piece on empathy. Tony Blankley teasingly retorted: "Evolution, cruel as it is, determined that empathy is not a survival trait." And if you watched the Big Bank CEOs testify on the Hill last week, you would agree that empathy has not been a trait necessary for success, let alone survival. But if we are to continue to survive -- maybe not as a species, but certainly as a thriving democratic society -- human evolution has to, well, evolve. And we are going to need all the empathy we can get. Without it, we'll never be able to create the kind of national consensus required to tackle the enormous problems that face us.
Watching the CEOs, I was stunned by the utter lack of even a feigned sense of empathy for those whose lives the banks have destroyed. Only a complete inability to feel empathy could explain the fact that the bankers are not just back to operating at their old bonus levels, but at their old smugness levels as well.
One year ago, writing about former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and his now infamous $1.2 million office redecoration in the midst of the economic collapse, I bemoaned the Marie Antoinettes of the Meltdown, and our era of Not Getting It.
Little did I realize just how small-scale Thain's outrages would now seem, and how much worse things would get in the ensuing year. Lloyd "Doing God's Work" Blankfein and his fellow "too big to fail" CEOs -- with their utter cluelessness about the public's anger over what they've done and continue to do -- take Not Getting It to a whole other level.
Luckily for them, society has evolved, and we express our anger differently than we did in Marie Antoinette's day. "Off with their bonuses" is a lot less painful than "off with their heads."
But the question is, can this righteous -- and entirely justifiable -- rage be productively channeled to produce a real movement for reform, or will it be hijacked by tea party wackos and dangerous demagogues? ...
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