One side pits winners and losers against each other in a race for the American Dream, while the other wonders what might be possible if we work together to form communities, build schools and create a culture of mutual respect.

Harry Boyte was only 19 when he joined Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference - a youthful white North Carolinian working as a field secretary and lieutenant to Dr. King alongside equally young black volunteers who formed the front line of the civil rights movement.'

The experience taught Boyte that "everyday politics" can change history, and he has spent his adult life teaching and proclaiming that the talents of ordinary people - "from the nursing school to the nursing home" - are essential to democracy. He founded the movement Public Achievement which now empowers young people in more than 20 countries and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota (now the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, where he serves as senior scholar in Public Work Philosophy.)

Among his many books my favorites are Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life, which one critic said "restores the dignity of real politics" (yes, I will add - even in the Age of Trump), and The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference. He's in South Africa right now, and I reached out to him for a response to the polarization and vituperation now roiling American politics.
- Bill Moyers
BY HARRY BOYTE | DECEMBER 16, 2015
The Fight For America's Soul

Since the beginning, two narratives have warred for the soul of America. One is the "We're Number One" America, in which the American Dream is a competition with few winners and others who bask in their reflected glory. This is the America of land grabs, robber barons and get-rich-quick schemes.

The alternative is the story of democracy in which America is a place of cooperative endeavor where people form associations, build schools, congregations, libraries and towns and fight for "liberty and justice for all."'

The novelist Marilynne Robinson was getting at this alternative in her conversation with President Obama last September in Iowa, reprinted in the New York Review of Books."Democracy," she said, "was something people collectively made." Making democracy created a culture of mutual respect.

I learned this understanding of democracy as a young man working for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the civil rights movement. In Hope and History, King's friend and sometime speechwriter Vincent Harding described the movement as "a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy in the United States." It showed "the deep yearning for a democratic experience that is far more than periodic voting."

Today there are new outcroppings of the democracy story but they do not yet merge into a narrative of democracy as a way of life. "We're Number One" America dominates, coming especially from Republican candidates. It has antecedents.

In 1941, Henry Luce, the publisher of Life and Time magazines, wrote an influential essay called "The American Century." He was scornful of democracy ("Whose Dong Dang, whose Democracy?" he sneered). He saw the American Dream as meaning opportunities for "increasing satisfaction of individuals." And he accused Americans of vacillation in the face of the looming war with the Nazis. "The cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Republican candidates today channel Luce. Marco Rubio's campaign theme is, in fact, "A New American Century." Donald Trump pledges to "Make America Great Again" and presents himself as winner-in-chief.

But bashing Republicans isn't going to revitalize the alternative.

Franklin Roosevelt's vice president, Henry Wallace, responded to Henry Luce in a speech, "The Century of the Common Man," in New York, May 8, 1942. Wallace had been a Republican businessman until he became Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture and then vice president. His family had deep roots in the populist farmers' movement in rural Iowa.

Wallace saw the war against fascism as being about democracy, not American dominance. He envisioned an egalitarian democratic post-war world in which colonial empires would be abolished, labor unions would be widespread, poverty would end, and the US would treat others with respect. "We ourselves in the United States are no more a master race than the Nazis," he said. "There can be no privileged peoples."

Wallace's Century of the Common Man drew on the widespread sense of democracy as a way of life built through work that incorporated public meanings and qualities. Citizenship as public work is based on respect for the productive potential of everyone, regardless of income or education, race, religion or partisan belief.

For instance, the men and women participating in programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), involving more than 3 million young men in public-work projects, acted out of practical self-interests, not high ideals. They needed jobs. But their work also had democratic overtones. As people made a commonwealth of public goods, they became a commonwealth of citizens.

The CCC brought people together across differences. As Al Hammer told me in an interview for Building America, a book co-authored with Nan Kari, "The CCC got people like me out into the public. It gave me a chance to meet and work with people different than me from all over the country -- farm boys, city boys, mountain boys, all worked together."

Public work was educative in other ways. C.H. Blanchard observed that "the CCC enrollees feel a part-ownership as citizens in the forest that they have seen improve through the labor of their hands." Participants often developed a strong sense of public purpose. Scott Leavitt of the Forest Service explained that "there has come to the boys of the Corps a dawning understanding of the inspiring and satisfying fact that they are taking an integral and indispensable part in a great program vitally essential to the welfare, possibly even to the ultimate existence, of this country."

Government public-work programs were part of many efforts that activated civic energies during the Great Depression. These ranged from unionization of the auto industry to civil-rights struggles, from cultural work in journalism, film, and theater to rural electrification and projects to halt soil erosion.

These efforts extended far beyond government, but government programs could be catalytic, a pattern displayed in New Deal for the Arts, a National Archives exhibit now online. The exhibit celebrates the cultural work of thousands of writers, sculptors, musicians, photographers, painters and others.

Government cultural work provided jobs but also conveyed a message of hope and collective agency that signaled a shift in conventional wisdom. "The people," seen by intellectuals in the 1920s as the repository of crass materialism and parochialism, were rediscovered as the source of democratic creativity. "The heart and soul of our country is the common man," said Franklin Roosevelt during the 1940 campaign setting the stage for Wallace.

Cultural workers in and out of government conveyed the story of democracy as a way of life, background for Wallace's speech. Subsequently the journalist Ernie Pyle's reports from the front lines of World War II about "GI Joe" generated the wide public perception that the war was about democracy, not superiority. At the end of the war, mainstream commentators regularly called for modesty and expressed appreciation and respect for other nations' contributions.

The culture of democratic respect has eroded. And as work has come to be seen only as a means to the good life and not of value in itself, the public dimensions of work and recognition of the importance of workers have sharply declined. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi describes the changing identities of men, from African-American shipyard workers to television executives and evangelicals, as work has been devalued. They live "in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured only by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture." Public visibility of work that contributes to communities and builds the commonwealth has largely disappeared.

Below the surface of anger and division today, a myriad new stories of "making democracy" are growing again. But in this election, no candidate on his or her own is going to weave them into the democracy story. Bernie Sanders, the most vocal about "revitalizing democracy" by challenging the billionaire class, sticks to the basics. "We know what democracy is supposed to be about," said Sanders in his announcement speech. "It is one person, one vote, with every citizen having an equal say."

The poet Walt Whitman had a different view. "We have frequently printed the word Democracy," he wrote in Democratic Vistas, "Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened. It is a great word, whose history remains unwritten."
It is time to recall the greatness of the word democracy. And to reawaken the story.
Published under creative commons. First published on BillMoyers.com http://billmoyers.com/story/the-fight-for-americas-soul/

(New York) This is a classic map of the “barbarian invasions,” taken from Wikipedia. I certainly grew up looking at maps like these. The story they illustrate goes like this. First, there was a Roman Empire with armed borders all around the periphery of the Mediterranean. Inside its borders, the people were Romans who spoke Latin and/or Greek and were ruled from Rome. Beyond were barbarian peoples who behaved very differently. At a certain point, the borders collapsed and various barbarian peoples swept in, taking up residence in portions of the former Empire. They brought new languages, myths, and cultures with them. Their descendants still constitute the majority populations of most parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant to this day. The newcomers ceased to be barbarians once they stopped moving, because then missionaries were able to radiate back out from Rome and Constantinople to teach them Christianity, Latin and/or Greek, and other elements of ancient civilization.

I had already begun to realize from various scraps of evidence (even including news reports of genetic data) that this model was quite wrong. Now reading Peter Brown’s brilliant book The Rise of Western Christendom, I understand the current synthesis. It denies that there were vast movements of peoples from one place to another around the time the Roman Empire ended. Rather, the population within and around the territory of the old official Empire went through a series of cultural, political, and economic changes until the Imperial system was gone. These changes often germinated within the borders rather than coming from outside. People who were, in some important sense, Romans turned (over the course of several generations) into people who thought of themselves as Franks or Bulgarians.

To elaborate a bit: The Roman Empire was always much more culturally and linguistically diverse than I was taught in grade school, and much more loosely governed. Local elites always ran things in their own ways. Brown notes that even though Egypt was a crucial province that encompassed one of the biggest cities in the world, Rome posted only one official there per 10,000 residents. Egyptians governed Egypt. The official borders made little difference, since the culture, economy, and political order on both sides was just about the same. However, the Empire was important economically because it taxed everyone within its borders and used the proceeds for armies and official building programs (both of which also enriched an upper class). When the Empire lost its taxing capacity, that changed the flow of goods and greatly reduced levels of construction and production.

The Empire was also important culturally because it offered a set of ideas that could be used by local elites. Among these ideas: Rome was the center of the world (urbs et orbis), the Emperor was the most powerful mortal of the day, Latin was the language of law, and there was a difference between Roman subjects/citizens and barbarians. Those ideas were never exactly true or false—they were closer to orienting value judgments. Over time, they lost their force, and then the same elites who had governed as Romans started to govern as, for instance, Franks. In place of stories about Rome, they started to tell mythical stories about their ancestors’ migrations from primordial homelands beyond the old borders, and those myths continue to influence Europeans to this day.

Meanwhile, profound changes in culture and behavior developed within the Empire. For instance, in the third and fourth centuries, civil wars were almost constant. They were fought by soldiers who pledged personal loyalty to leaders (claimants to the Imperial throne) and moved around regions like northern Italy and the Balkans, often pillaging. They dressed increasingly in ways that we associate with the “Dark Ages.” Brown says these soldiers wore “Embroidered trousers, great swinging cloaks, large gold brooches, and heavy belt-buckles.” They probably spoke various languages other than Latin. We might once have viewed them as barbarians who had somehow come inside the frontiers of the Empire and threatened its security. But a better theory is that they were Roman soldiers who were gradually developing the organization, behavior, and even dress that we associate with the post-Roman era. That is a great example of the new synthesis.