Bill Moyers Journal (2007-2010); 1230; Moyers on Changing Times; Eric Foner and Patricia J. Williams; Kevin Phillips; Moyers on Terkel

This week on Bill Moyer's Journal, at this defining moment, change has come to America. But is it the moment progressives have been waiting for? The architecture is there in place for progressive presidency, but my greater fear about what stands in its way is, again, how we as citizens respond to this. Leadership is critical, but leadership can only grow out of engaged social movements. And Kevin Phillips on Obama's dilemma. How he's going to deal with these competing demands is something he has to discuss with people who are above those demands. Stay tuned.

Funding for Bill Moyer's Journal is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Paulie Gutt Charitable Fund, Park Foundation dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Colbert Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation, Maryland and Bob Clemens and the Clemens Foundation, Bernard and Audrey Rappaport and the Bernard and Audrey Rappaport Foundation, the Petzar Institute, the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Orfala Family Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, providing retirement, plan, products, and services to employers and individuals since 1945. Mutual of America, your retirement company, your own company. From our studios in New York, Bill Moyers. Welcome to the journey. Here at the end of this extraordinary week, one photograph keeps playing through my mind.

I want to share it with you. It's from an Obama rally in St. Louis, Missouri, a couple of weeks ago, 100,000 people. Now look more closely at the background. At that old building with a copper dome, turned green with age. That used to be the courthouse, where slaves were auctioned from the steps. In 1846, Dred Scott and his wife Harriet, both slaves, went there to appeal to the court for their freedom. They said they'd been living in states and territories where slavery was outlawed and so they should be let go. They were, briefly, but soon, were returned to slavery. When their appeal reached the United States Supreme Court 11 years later, Chief Justice Roger Tony refused to free them. He ruled that slaves did not have the rights of citizens because Harriet and Dred Scott were, quote, beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights

which the white man was bound to respect. You know the storm that followed. Civil War, Lincoln's assassination, the failure of reconstruction, Jim Crow, white supremacy, lynching, so much bloodshed, so much suffering, so many martyrs. My grandchildren have a hard time understanding the America I try to describe to them from my own childhood in East Texas. Across the deep south, white still resolved to keep blacks in their place, often with a holy fervor. Above all, they were determined to keep blacks from voting, voting meant equality, power. When black veterans coming home from fighting for their country tried to register, they were assaulted and arrested. In South Carolina, one black soldier riding the bus home after 15 months in the South Pacific, angered the driver with some minor act that struck the white man as uppity. At the next stop, the veteran was taken off the bus by the local chief of police and beaten so badly,

he went blind. The police chief was put on trial and acquitted to the cheers of the courtroom. In one Georgia county, the only black devotee had also just come home from the war. As he said on his porch the day after the primary, he was shot and killed, and a son posted on a nearby black church, boasted the first nigger to vote, will never vote again. Signs like that did not come down easily. It would take Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma. It would take the Civil Rights Act, then the Voting Rights Act, and countless individual acts of heroism. And it would take, finally, someone like Barack Obama, who, if he had been born a generation earlier, could have been lynched for the audacity of hope, but who now saw that America was changing, had changed, is changing, and that he might be the agent for lifting from around our neck this great stone from our past

by refusing himself to be halted or ruled by it. He will, of course, disappoint. All presidents do, and the first black president will be no more exempt from reality and human nature than the 43 white men who came before him. We don't know what he will do in office. He is promised that he will take us there without saying what there entails or what hard choices must be made. We shall see. For now, it is only right that we remember how long it has taken to get here, and the price paid by so many to bring us this far. The reality of it hit me late in the week as I read in the San Francisco Chronicle of a woman named Johnny Marie Ross. Forty years ago, in 1968, she was 19, the mother of two, and she was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. To cope with her pain, she wrote a poem,

quote, so rest in peace in the name of the father and the son for your dream has not ended, but in reality, just begun. When she read her poem aloud in a local church service, young black people from the neighborhood passed the collection plate and sent her to Dr. King's funeral in Atlanta. He was our everything. She told the Chronicle reporters he was our hope for the future. But after his death, she said, we were afraid, like we would be killed if we stood up. That was forty years ago. Johnny Marie Ross, now 59, says she has lived in fear ever since. No more. On Tuesday, she voted, and walked home with a flag in her hand and a song on her lips. Hallelujah, she sang, over and over. Hallelujah. All the way home. Here with me now to talk about

that arc of history are two leading scholars, each at home with issues of race and politics, and each, coincidentally, from Columbia University. Patricia Williams teaches law there. She's worked not only in the academy, but in city government, in Los Angeles, and in the courts. She writes a column for the nation magazine called Dary of a Mad Lawyer. Her books include Seeing a Colorblind Future, the Paradox of Race, and Open House. Eric Foner is the well-known professor of history at Columbia, whose prolific work on the meaning of freedom has been widely acclaimed. Among his books are this one, Forever Free, the story of emancipation and reconstruction. And this brand new one, Our Lincoln, new perspectives on Lincoln and his world. It's been published just as we prepared to observe the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Welcome to the journal. Has Barack Obama's election been a watershed moment for this country? The watershed movement for the world, as we've seen pictures come in from everywhere,

of rejoicing across the planet. And I think it has been a watershed movement also for the civil rights movement, which trajectory has been so marked by tragedy and trauma and by martyrs and murders. And this is one of the most significant moments for its sheer happiness, for its uncompromised ability to rejoice. What do you think accounts for that catharsis that seemed to occur on Tuesday night? No, there's a number of things. I think you agree. I mean, particularly among young people, the sense that really changes in the air and the way both of us saw our students galvanized by this campaign. And I think that feeling just is so widely shared around the country that we really need a new departure given what's happened in the last eight years. And not to be ungracious. I do think it was the suspense of the last eight years. I think there was so much suspense around the conduct of the last two elections, the fear of voter fraud, the sense that this was very close, as it was really very close in the popular vote if not the electoral college,

that the great suspense, and the sense of two elections worth of disappointment, it was like uncapping all that champagne we were holding onto the last eight years. But your students were just kids in 2000. What was it that they so galvanized and about this particular outcome? You know, Obama's campaign is a 21st century campaign. And I think he represents something that is maybe more powerful to young people than even, you know, to our generation. The notion of a society that in which race is still an existent fact, but is not the determinant of people's lives where people, you know, my daughter has friends of all different backgrounds and ethnicities races and it doesn't even matter anymore to them. And I think that, you know, that's a vision of the future of America. And I think young people really, really, you know, found that very appealing.

And I have a slightly different take on it, which is that my students have tons of loans. My students are looking at a future burdened by a great deal of debt. They saw a very distinct crossroads with this election. My students and our students also are live on colleges where the culture wars have been fought with great bitterness and in the language of tremendous division. And I spoke at a gathering of college students yesterday and one of them stood up and said, you know, I'm just exhausted by the language of, the divisive language of the culture wars. And Obama represented an inclusive language. It was a we. Yes, we can't. And it was a pluralistic we and students, even those students who felt that the world has changed. It wasn't just a sense of change. It was a real response, I think, to the way in which campuses have been so divided. And the right has represented those fights on campus. It was very interesting to me this election. Fear mongering didn't work. Willie Horton didn't work. Polarizing didn't work. At least on 53% of the country.

Well, I think the reason is, in a sense, what Pat was just referring to. And people are very nervous about the economy. And that really trumped all of this. And you know, I think as historians, we have to remind ourselves that, despite the watershed fact of a black president for the first time, race is not always and never has been the only determinant of people's actions. You know, you can talk about Willie Horton, but when people are worried about their jobs, about their futures, about the economy, their retirement plans, that's not what's foremost in their minds. And so other considerations came to the fore in this election, which really made it impossible to play the old Karl Rove game of dividing people and appealing to these, you know, hatreds or competitions, et cetera. So, you know, it reminds us race is not the only factor in people's lives and never has been, actually. And it wasn't just that it was impossible to do, because I do think that there was a way in which, you know, Barack Obama at the beginning of this

was sort of the clean, articulate, you know, post-race, above-race, not having the baggage or whatever, I mean, people used all kinds of words to sort of mix him up. But by the end, we're all acknowledging he's a black president. So, I mean, there's a way in which he did get pushed back into the box. But I thought some of his rhetoric was really, really very interesting in terms of pushing that back in the customary ways. So, for example, he engaged the narrative of the immigrant myth. And the immigrant myth throughout our political history has been one of European possibility coming and becoming Horatio Alger, except in his case, it was a black immigrant myth. And so, he deployed it in a way that most African-Americans could never. And it was a wonderful fusion. He also really, you know, he kept referring to his single mother. And many people sort of had to blink and remember that this is not a black single mother, but this is a white single mother. And again, there was this really, there was this fusion that I think flummoxed the traditional tactics of boxing him one way or another. Is it true that he was your editor

at the Harvard Law Review? I submitted a piece that was published in Harvard Law Review back in the day, and he was the student editor for that. And again, I've had many, many editors, professional and unprofessional, and I remember him so specifically. He wouldn't remember me, but I remember him very, very clearly, because he was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met. One of the deepest listeners. And even then, listeners. In other words, he would, you know, when I would say something, I wouldn't, you know, he'd be very sort of quiet, and you know, as his people have described sort of laid back. And then he would come back with this amazing synthesis. He has an amazing ability to hear things at a very deep level, synthesize them and give them back. And even at that time, long before he'd written his books, he also had an ear for language that was very striking to me. And I've always remembered him and was delighted to see him reemerge in this way. Do you think that if a black president doesn't deliver on some radical changes in a system that is truly broken, there could be a backlash against him,

and could race again play its hand? I don't think Obama is going to be judged as a black president, at least at the start. He's going to be judged as a president who, one hopes, can address in a bold, dramatic way the crisis, the economic crisis we face, the foreign policy, military problems we face. You know, that's how he's going to be judged. People are looking for solutions. And I think whether it comes from a black person or anyone else is of less concern to them than whether they get a sense that the country is beginning to turn in a new direction. I think one of the changes he brought is this new coalition. He really did put together a coalition of Trump across all kinds of boundaries, including a fragmented notion of race and ethnicity and really new discussions of linguistic groupings. And my sense is that there will be some backlash, just because we haven't seen the bottom of the economic downturn. And history tells us that people are looking for scapegoats when they don't have jobs. And people will be looking for a scapegoat.

And our favorite scapegoat in the United States has always been race. And so I think it's not just incumbent upon him, but upon us as the new coalition and the sense of, you know, coming together, that we, that we as citizens resist that tendency to scapegoat. Because we are at a very important turning point. Is it a progressive moment? I actually think that the architecture is there in place for progressive presidency. But my greater fear about what stands in its way is, again, how we as citizens respond to this. So I think that we need to recategorize some of the old divisive vocabulary. For example, progressive movement is often associated with class or with a labor movement. And it's often found in our own race. And exactly. And our vocabulary has reflected that foundering so that underclass is really a racial term. It's no longer a class term. It's exclusively about black poor people. So when people say white poor people are working poor or the working class, there is no imagination when you say working class of a black working class.

The term middle class is almost exclusively white and certain. But the new black working class is literally any black person who has a job all the way up through Oprah Winfrey. And then upperclass is almost invisible. We deny that there is an upperclass. And that's why I think people like John McCain and George Bush can say that they are sort of Joe Sixpack rather than the true elites, in terms of income. And so all of that has very invisible weight to it. So that's why I think that, for example, Joe the plumber becomes an icon of somebody who wants to buy a $250,000 business at least. But at the same time, really seems to have resented and denied the fact that he's earning $40,000 in his lean on his house. So he's both the product of a kind of fantasy of what he ought to be and a deep resentment of where he actually is in the economic stratum. And that resentment, the distinction between where he wants to be and where he actually is, is the emotional foundation

of what I think we really have to work with to get people to come together. I think in terms of a progressive era, it's not, I don't want to say he has the specific policy, but I think it's more an ethos of public life, a more communal one, a more one that looks out to the common good, not just individual self-interest, as we've been ruled by for the last 20, 30 years, that doesn't see competitiveness as the sole measure of a society. I think a turn toward the notion of a common citizenship. Of course, Obama has talked about this a great deal and the common good and economic security for people, not just saying the market will take care of everything. If those are the governing principles, and I think you then move to specific policies on health care or the economy or race relations or immigration or other things, but if you have those governing principles, the society will move in a progressive direction. And a reinvestment in public education, because I do think that part of the no-nothingism

and the resentment of elitism is the fact that many people know how poorly this educational system has served them, whites and African-Americans. And the resentment of elitists, I think, is also, I mean, my own personal opinion is that there's a kind of envy, there's a kind of yearning, not to be disparaged because of a lack of education, but not really knowing how to get it. And in the last 50 years, we've really disinvested in public education, and we had a very good public education system prior to the second. It's part of this privatization of everything, you know? And that, I think, does need to be reversed. The public realm is a realm that needs to be strengthened in this country, whether it's the infrastructure of our transportation and buildings and bridges, which have fallen apart, or the public school system, as you said, or health care, which really is a public concern, not just an individual concern. And I think this combination of engaged citizens and presidential leadership, that's what really can move us in that direction.

We have had eight years of a complete failure to govern, a complete failure to regulate, a complete failure to oversee. So this isn't just that the markets went awry, or people took out more money than they could pay back. This was also refusal by the Bush administration to oversee everything from the FCC, to the FDA, to the infrastructure. That's, you know, up and down the Mississippi. It wasn't just levees in Mississippi and New Orleans. It was levees in Missouri and Iowa. It was bridges collapsing in. And this was because there was no oversight. It was packed with industry insiders, or people like Heck of a Job Brownie, who were completely incompetent. We've seen drug scandals, we've seen, you know, failure to check the quality of imports. It is not just about the financial collapse and lack of regulation. It's across the board. And so I think that one thing that will go a long way toward an initial movement is the reanimation of the agencies.

The people who were put in charge did not believe in what they were being asked to do. The regulators did not believe in regulation. And they just completely abdicated their responsibility. So we need to be, we need to have, and I'm sure Obama will put into place people who actually believe that the government has a responsibility to look out for the public good in this way, rather than just stepping aside and letting private interests run amuck. Where do you place Obama in the black struggle? You know, he's both a departure and a continuation. And that's why I keep pointing to his rhetoric. And he's part of a tradition of political orders, of great skill. And so he's clearly somebody who comes within the tradition of the power of persuasion that Martin Luther King brought to bear. I think he's also a speaker who draws upon the rhetorical traditions of everyone from, you know, the Puritan Jeremiah, it's John Winthrop, the first Puritans who came. And he employs a kind of speech that is like a sermon.

But it is something which is very classical and familiar to the political ears. So I think he also draws upon the language of the Kennedys, of all the Kennedy brothers. And that part of Obama's persuasive power is to break through the category of just being a black candidate by making people listen to the contradictions of race. And I think, you know, last night I was debating somebody who was a great McCain supporter and was describing Barack Obama as somebody who just simply came out of nowhere. And then the next minute described Sarah Palin as somebody who was a fresh breath of fresh air and who was a whole new phenomenon. Right. And I think that Barack Obama and the tradition from which he comes from and the kinds of ambivalent figures around race like Lincoln or even, you know, people at various moments in the deep south, you know, who could break through, could hear the contradictions of this, who could hear the racism that's unconscious in our vocabulary. And Barack Obama's ability to do that speaks to our better selves.

He recognizes the complication of his grandmother, of a reverend right. But also of working class people who say things like, you know, I'm not really a racist, but I don't want to vote for a black man. But at the same time, I'm going to vote for him. And I think that that is a product of his breaking through this divisive, unconscious vocabulary and speaking to our better selves. Will he pay a price for not putting race on the front burner? No. I don't think he will. I think he did put race on the front burner. Well, he did in a sense. Did everybody... I think he put... Some of the people seem post-racial, you know. I never heard him say that. No. And that's why I think that I think he spoke about it in a new way that people don't recognize. That's why I think that, you know, he was very clever at, you know, saying the immigrant myth is a black story for him. Well, he redefines what race is. He redefines what race is. But I think so. Well, as Pat said, you know, in other words, he's reminding people something which doesn't... shouldn't need reminding that black people are part of America.

You know, they're not just a separate group. That black people have shared in so many of the struggles and the gains and the aspirations of American society. His father was an immigrant. So he's part of the immigrant tradition in this country. It's not just people coming through Ellis Island who are the immigrant story. And his family, you know, of course, you know, all the images that we hear about the black family. His family is a pretty mainstream American family. Can I ever mix family, too? And I think he's really challenged the notion of there being a one-black civil rights community. Right. There is a multiple... You know, we have a new diasporic demographic in the United States. And it includes blacks from Africa. It includes Latino blacks. It includes people of color who consider themselves black from South Asia. It consists of Hispanics who don't speak Spanish in New Mexico, who've been there for generations, but still identify with the linguistic grouping or the... And I think that he was very, very... You know, he represents...

You know, I wrote one throughout saying that I think, you know, we really should call him our first Hawaiian American president. Because he represents so much of the fragmentation of this solid block of white versus black. Right, but I think he also identifies... You read his speeches with, you know, movements which are not racial, the abolitionist movement, which was not a racial movement. It was black people. It was the first integrated movement in American history. People like Frederick Douglass, who himself was by racial. He was born a slave. But, you know, Frederick Douglass didn't just talk about race. He talked about American society. He talked about making this a better place for everybody. In fact, you once wrote that almost every good thing that's come out of America. In American politics came from the anti-slave movement. Well, they were the ones who really put the question of human rights, of individual rights, of what is justice, what is equality beyond race onto our national agenda. They really invented the dialogue of equality not bounded by race. And, you know, I really think the abolitionist movement,

their tradition is still alive in our society today. And Obama has talked about that. And it's not, you know, I think about the people like Douglass, but also like Wendell Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens. You know, they're the ones I'd like to see alive today, so I'm how to see this. All great artists, by the way. I mean, great artists. Great artists. They could command the English language. They could send it marching as you said. They're the ones who really put into our national tradition this possibility of a nation not tyrannized by race. After we reached out to you, Pat, to join us today, I went back to your little book based upon your BBC lectures. Some years ago, seeing a colorblind future. Does Obama mean a colorblind future? No. And the subtitle of that book is the paradox of race. And it is the paradox of seeing yet being blind. And I am not somebody who thinks that, you know, we really don't see race. And it's very interesting how people say, ah, we've reached the post-racial moment because we have a black, a black president elect.

So we've both marked it even as we're denying it. I mean, this is quite a conundrum, isn't it? I mean, that again, he is black. And therefore, we are no longer seeing black. And I think that this is, you know, this constructs one of the problems he's going to have to face, which is really dealing with the fact that we are still a very racially divided nation, that while it represents a success what has been accomplished in his election, we also have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world with two million people winning. Fifty-five percent of the more of color. Yes, yes. And even more, I think we knew that in Latinos. What can Obama do for American blacks? Well, I do think that, you know, everything we've talked about, the economy, the education, these are American problems, they are American problems. I don't want to understate the substantive job he has. But I also think that this is a very important symbolic moment that he represents a new kind of cosmopolitanism

around the question of race. What do you mean? He is somebody who has traveled, who connects to people around the world, who represents the hopes and aspirations of the American ideal. But that American ideal is now a very, it's a prism of color. It's a prism of color in his embodiment. He's not the white American. I'll tell you what he can do. And that's why you had such dancing in the street in Harlem because people were dancing in Harlem. They were dancing in South Africa. And they were dancing in Indonesia. And it was just... And yet, just a few blocks... I mean, a few blocks downtown from Harlem, you had those great scenes at Times Square. I mean, it was an ecumenical collapse in the West. I'll tell you one thing he should do, which will address many of these questions, and which will run into a lot of opposition, is to really take action to make it easier to form labor unions in this country. What? Unions have been the most integrated institutions in this society. Unions are places where people of all backgrounds come together to work for common goals, regardless of race or religion.

Obviously, there's been racism in unions. There's been prejudice. But the whole premise of a union is that people have common interests which are not defined by their personal racial or gender or other characteristics. And it's the experience, apart from the fact that unions will help black people and others. I mean, most blacks are working class people, as you said. And they need the kind of support that unions have provided in the past. But it's more than that. It's an educational function. When people work together for common goals, their views expand. They become more cosmopolitan. They become more tolerant. And, you know, I think that the decline of the labor movement has been a tragedy for American democracy, as well as whatever particular economic impact it has had. I'm told that the theme of Obama's inauguration will be a new birth of freedom. Now, I didn't hear much about freedom in this campaign. What do you think he means by that? We'll have to see.

You know, neither it's a good point that neither candidate talked about freedom in this campaign. I think President Bush, in an odd sort of way, has devalued the concept of freedom by the cynical and militaristic way he has employed it, freedom men invading in other place and giving them freedom, whether they wanted our freedom or not. But I think Obama has a great opportunity to rekindle or other ideas of freedom, which have existed in our history, freedom as economic security, freedom as a sort of sense of dignity and empowerment for people who maybe have lacked that in the past. Freedom as a collective sense of the society becoming free or not just individual. So, you know, I hope he does reclaim the idea of freedom. Since the Reagan Revolution, freedom has been sort of dominated that idea by the right wing. It means owning a gun, not paying taxes, demonizing government. But there are many other themes of freedom in our history, which I hope Obama can pick up and utilize. Now, I think freedom has been really collapsed or restrained

to a kind of arch-libertarianism, which is deeply economic. So, freedom is really a free market. I mean, it's sort of been conflated with the free market, which is not to say that it doesn't have something to do with the free market. But the other larger constitutional definition of freedom is dependent upon things like due process. It is dependent upon the amendments to the Constitution. And those have been given very short shrift in recent years. And so, the reacquaintance with our bill of rights as a foundation of freedom without a price tag of freedom as a notion of the beloved community is something that I think hopefully we'll see more of. Pat Williams and Eric Foner, thank you very much for joining us on the Journal. I truly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. You're welcome. Because of what we did on this day,

change has come to America. I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy. Where we are met with cynicism and doubts, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes, we can. For almost 40 years now, after every election, I've gone back to gauge the results against this book, the Emerging Republican Majority. It was written in 1968 by a young political analyst named Kevin Phillips. While pouring over voting patterns for Richard Nixon's campaign, he spotted some trends that would prove to be political dynamite. People were moving in droves from the old northern industrial states into what Phillips called the Sun Belt.

Just as Democrats were losing southern white support by pushing civil rights for African Americans. He believed the so-called southern strategy would bring working class Democrats into the Republican fold. He told The New York Times, in 1970, the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negro foe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republican. Sure enough, it worked. Southern whites would help the GOP win seven of the last ten presidential elections by ensuring that no Democratic presidential candidate would get a majority of white votes from 1968 to 2004. The Emerging Republican Majority became a bestseller and a seminal reference for modern politics, establishing Phillips as a leading thinker of the conservative movement. But over time, he grew disaffected with the GOP's takeover by the religious right and with its economic policies favoring the rich. With his 1990 book on the Politics of Rich and Poor, Phillips' break with his old comrades was complete.

Kevin Phillips became a political independent and the author of a series of best-selling books on politics and history. You saw him on the journal a few weeks ago discussing his latest, this one, Bad Money, reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism. Now, he's back to talk about what else, the election and the economy. Welcome. How do you explain the catharsis of Tuesday night, the dancing in the streets, the tears in the eyes, the jubilation? Americans always have a sense that the election of a president somewhat like the new king coming in a country that has monarchy. We'll change everything. We'll open up new pages. We'll get rid of the things we didn't like. We tend to overstate it. And that's part of what's going on here. I would say that the answer to that question is because the country has changed. When you and I were young men in Washington in the 1960s, America was almost 89 percent white. Today it's 66 percent white.

And someone said to me last night, minorities voted as if it's finally their country, too. Well, actually one of the interesting things was, according to the exit polls, among people who thought that race was a reason to vote one way or the other, of the majority voted pro-Bama. And my guess is that's because you had a proud black turnout. The same way that in 1960, the Catholic vote in northern suburbia, which had been Republican, was pretty heavily for John Kennedy because of the religion. He won among blacks nine to one. He carried Hispanics by 66 percent. He won the under 30 vote by two to one. There's your new emerging majority, right? I think demographically it may be. I think you get confused about what happens in the political institutional sense. I think the Democrats are going to have enormous problems in the next four years, taking a coalition in which they represent these new emerging demographic groups, but they also, based on contributions and political geography,

represent the financial community now, the upper income groups. And how they straddle this, which is something they've never had to straddle before, especially in difficult times, I think will strain the demographics. So he's got a tension there that is incoherent, a seesaw that's going to be hard to balance. How does he improve the lives of those ordinary people who voted for it? I think if we have a serious economic recovery in which the conservative trickle-down economics is not part of it. And as a result, you have spending that moves money in the direction of a middle income and poor people, that'll make a big difference. But I think it's going to be an enormously difficult balancing act. And forget just the fact of the financial people and the role in the Democratic Party. You're going to have Obama torn between people who want him to help his electorate, the ordinary people.

And those who say, can't do it because of financial constraints, fiscal constraints. The famous thing that was said to Bill Clinton about, you know, he can't do anything, the bond traders don't like it. He had his great response and described what he wanted, the bond traders, but he did it their way. So you look at this new economic team that Obama has appointed. This advisory group that was announced yesterday, you know, names like Warren Buffett, Robert Rubin, Paul Voker, CEOs from Chase, Xerox, Time Warner, Citigroup. I mean, people who've served their time on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms and are big supporters of this bailout. Do you see anyone in that list who represents working people? Well, oddly enough, the richest man on the list at least represents skepticism of Wall Street. Warren Buffett is told more jokes about that crowd. It's really funny, as well as prophetic, but I think it's also fair to say that Paul Voker doesn't automatically represent the financial community.

I think he's transcended that. He has much more of a sense of, he'll do what's best for the country. And I'm not sure a lot of the others quite think of it that way yet. Then there's Robert Rice, who was Clinton's Secretary of the Labor. Bob Rice, generally speaking, is there for balance as opposed to having a whole lot of impact? I didn't really see that there were representatives of the labor movement there except Bob. And he really isn't. I mean, he's not somebody who came up through the union movement. That's the weak link in the Democratic coalition. What are they going to do for labor? And the people who were just falling behind in the movement of the United States away from manufacturing to finance? You know, I still look often at your book, 1990 book, The Politics of Rich and Poor. And we've now had this long run of corporate and right wing free market economics that has produced the most massive distribution of income in our history, which you anticipated, by the way, in that book. The top 1% of households in this country saw their real income more than triple

while the majority of labor, of the labor force, got virtually no increase at all in real wages over the last 35 years. How does the new administration turn that around? I don't think they've even confronted it as a particular problem yet. I think they're aware of what's happened to the distribution of wealth and of income. But I don't think they've come to grips with the fact that that has been a corollary of the rise of finance because whereas manufacturing had a huge labor force and moved a lot of blue collar people up into the middle class, the impact of finance is basically to turn the whole country whether it's overpaid CEOs or even consultants in the economics sphere into people who sort of follow the markets, follow finance. And the rewards there go to a very, very narrow group comparatively. If you look at the employment of the financial sector relative to the home labor force, it's total peanuts compared with what manufacturing did when it was elevating people

in the manufacturing era. There's an argument, apparently, going on within Obama's inner circle, even as we speak. Some of his advisors say it would be politically an economic disastrous if those billions of taxpayer dollars in the bailout were just to sit in the vaults of the bank. On the other hand, the Wall Street and the corporate types, according to the press, this morning are pushing back. They say leaving the money in the banks would help stabilize them and prevent a further crisis in the credit market. What do you think? Well, I think basically that's the most screaming set of self-interested analyses that I can remember. When this thing was passed, they basically had people on television saying that if this bailout doesn't go through, you're not going to be able to get money out of your ATMs, all sorts of dire things were going to happen. And now it turns out that maybe they weren't expected to spend that money after all. Maybe that was all a great camouflage outfit, because what they want to do with the money, and seemingly it's okay by a lot of the people involved, is use it for bonuses,

for dividends, for sitting around so they feel comfortable, for mergers. It's mind-boggling. They created a panic psychology, which has taken a lot of people's 401Ks and savings accounts and pension opportunities, and pointed them right toward the toilet, and now they got their bailout, scaring everybody to death, and what do they want to do with nothing? How do you think the bailout played out in the election results? I mean, I've seen that Putnam, the Republican from Florida, who supported the bailout, and even blunt the Republican leader in the House who supported the bailout, are stepping down from their party positions. Do you think there's a connection there? There's a very strong connection. If there's one spot of the election returns that were relatively bright for the Republicans, it was in the House of Representatives. The Republicans didn't lose nearly as many as people thought in the last week or two, and I think it was because of the bailout.

I think, finally, they stood up to Wall Street, which is like the Democrats in an earlier day standing up to the unions or standing up to the teachers union. The Republicans stood up to Wall Street. This isn't all good. And people who took that view survived. And I think the administration would really ought to take a look at that because between the populist Republicans, the progressive Democrats, and the blue dogs who are going to be worried about the budget, they may not be able to get a majority out of the House of Representatives for all the bailouts, which I think they want. If Obama proves unable or unwilling to tackle some fundamental injustice in this country, if he just nibbles at the edges or strokes the symbolism, which is so powerful, I mean, might there be a racist backlash against a black president that will have white voters saying never again? Well, I think there could be a backlash. And I think the Republicans could make gains in the midterm elections and maybe win the next presidential election.

I say maybe there because I think it's going to take a lot to make them look good, too. But what I would say could happen is I think black voters would be disillusioned and instead of flocking to the polls, they might actually turn fairly lukewarm. And I think a lot of the whites in the middle, the lower middle class, the blue collar people, the sort that he made some ill-chosen remarks about, not, you know, sort of not responding to much and sitting out there and sulking. I think if he doesn't get anything done, they won't sit out there and sulking. That's a danger to them, too. There is this argument going on among commentators in the punditocracy. I mean, the right winger saying this is still a country that is sitter right. And John Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, Toe Charlie Rose, the other night. This is a sitter-right country and progressives had better understand it. On the other hand, on the other side, you've got Nancy Pelosi saying the sitter of the country today is progressive.

Where do you think the sitter lies in public opinion? Well, I think the demographics of the change that we started out discussing, which is the great rise of non-whites. It's not a center-right country anymore, in my opinion. But I think it's a centrist country with tendencies towards frustration. And back in the 1970s, I remember Pat Cadill, who was Jimmy Carter's poster, was pulling on some of this stuff. And we sort of semi-collaborated a bit because we thought that affected both parties because the radical center, so to speak, was angry in a way that neither side could count on. I think that'll develop again. I don't want to say radical center, but I think it's going to be a frustrated centristism that can lurch either left or right outdated terms, but it's probably going to be very unhappy if anybody says, we can reform and privatize social security. And the vote of that says, yeah, but you bailed out the rich end of debate.

As you looked at the map on Tuesday night, the red, blue, and now purple map, the red runs from South Carolina below the Mason-Dixon line all the way over to Arkansas and my home in East Texas. What does that map say to you today? Well, the first thing it says to me is I think what we've seen develop in the Eastern United States is a megalopolis. That word doesn't get used too much anymore. It was big 40 years ago, but it's still very relevant. It doesn't just run from Boston down to Washington. You now have a rapidly modernizing suburban and research belt that runs all the way down through Virginia to the research triangle in North Carolina. And you can start to make some argument for Charlotte, North Carolina being pulled into that. And I think that is a major inroad on what could be thought of as the South. And of course, the other version of that is in Florida where the northern part of Florida starts in the South

and then Peter's energy comes North culturally. And I think this is a major caveat. I don't advise a Republican party and wouldn't dream of it, but in terms of looking at what's there of the South they can count on, it just got narrowed. So if you were riding the emerging new majority today, where is the emerging majority today? I would say it's the emerging non-majority. In other words, you can't count on more than a plurality because party attachment isn't going to run deep enough, which means you can't possibly build a generational supremacy. I mean, after 1968, Republicans held the White House for 20 of the next 24 years. And I believe if Bill Clinton hadn't had a zipper problem, the Democrats would have had it for three terms. But at this point, I think what you've got is a troubled enough set of circumstances for the United States economically and globally. That people in the White House are not going to be able to make enough of a stalwart rallying impression to set up another supremacy like you've got out of 1860 with the Civil War or 1896 or 1932.

I think they're gone. I think the roots of political parties are more tenuous now and nobody will have that sort of supremacy. So what do you think the implication of that might be over the next four years? Well, I think the Democrats have to figure on trouble, the Republicans have to figure on some opportunity for a rebound. But I think mostly they both have to think about that. In a lot of ways, there are duopoly, a double monopoly that no longer has meaningful ideas but has entrenched interests. And if that's true again, and I think it could be, then Americans are really going to start to say, how do we get something new in this country? Pat Buchanan said this week, the conservative era is over. What do you think about that? Well, I think it's over in the sense that supply side and trickle-down economics is gone for a while. I think that's fair to say. It's also clear that we have socialism coming in in a big way.

But it's socialism for the rich. You know, the profits go to finance, but the liability of something goes wrong. Well, that's the taxpayers, you know, that's it. So what you've seen as conservatism in the old sense of free markets was totally trashed by Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson. You know, not sure every day, Garden Variety Riverside Drive leftist. So we now have socialism on right center. And I don't see that we come back to the free market stuff for quite a long time. But I would say, is the bailout liberal, is the bailout conservative, or is it some hybrid, or do those words not mean anything? State capitalism. Well, the bailout is state capitalism, but opposition to it. Some of it's quote-unquote conservative, some of it's quote-unquote progressive. And maybe these people in the end will have more income than they realize and will start to vote together on some things. That could be an unexpected breakthrough.

Quickly connect the dots of this recent era for us. Malooning debt, sliding home prices, recurrent money supply expansion, growing inflation, peak oil, crumbling dollar, stagnant wages. What do they have in common? Well, I think they're all part of something I'm starting to think of. Obviously, the mega bubble, 25 years of just pumping up the money supply and deregulating and not worrying about the ordinary person, but sort of faking him or her out with friendly statistics and feel good stuff. We are in an age of disappointment. And I don't think that's going to be eradicated easily. I'm not sure it will be at all. And I think all of these things, you mentioned, point in that direction. The book is bad money, rectus finance, fail politics, and the global crisis of American capitalism. Kevin Phillips, thanks for being again on the journal. Always good to be with you. This morning we woke up to more sobering news about the state of our economy. The 240,000 jobs lost in October marks the 10th consecutive month that our economy has shed jobs.

Tens of millions of families are struggling to figure out how to pay the bills and stay in their homes. We are facing the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime. In just the last week, our country has lost two of its most original progressive voices, and I've lost two friends. So much has been said about studs circle. There's no need to embroider any further, a remarkable lie spent listening to America. But I'd like to share with you a scene or two from a documentary that studs and I did back in 1984 for CBS News. We travel by train from Chicago to San Francisco, on the Amtrak Empire Builder. The train that crosses the northern great plains of the Pacific Northwest, then down the west coast from Seattle. Along the way we'd buttoned hold anyone who was willing to talk and studs and I, well, we just listened. What's your big worry on the world today? What worries you?

Benjamin Franklin said something defective with all the technological progress they had had at that time, and we've had much more sense. It was such a pity he expressed it much better than this, that we had not had moral progress. Here's a moment I remember when studs started talking with a young mother to be. All right, that baby. Pretty soon? Three months. Three months. Okay, what sort of world you want that baby? Boy or girl? What sort of America? I want this to still be available. I want this to be accessible, and I want the baby to have the same opportunities that I have. You know, you ask a lot of people on this trip, what are you worried about? Let me ask you, studs turquoise. 72 years old. Yes, sir. Seeing a lot of this world, a lot of this country. What are you worried about?

I'm worried about what Einstein was worried about, and if he's scared, I'm scared. He said, we've taken such a leap in weaponry and technology and science. Unless we take that same leap, as far as understanding one another in the society and in the world, we're in for catastrophe. And wouldn't it be good if we had more passage of traveling all the road beds were fixed that had been on the bumpy side? And I'm always thinking, one less miss on them. So many road beds and so many passage trains traveling, wouldn't that be something? Oh yes, studs. That would have been something. A few weeks ago, studs turquoise sent me two of his many marvelous books, hard times and oral history of the Great Depression, and his own memoir, PS, for the thoughts from a lifetime of listening. He taught us all how to listen, and in the best progressive tradition made noteworthy the lives of the folks he called the non-celebrated, the people who keep the wheels going round. The other friend who just left us was John Leonard, one of our most prolific commentators, critics and essayists, a frequent contributor to the CBS Sunday morning.

John was possessed of an insight that saw the early promise of such riders as Tony Morrison, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Like studs, he had a knack for perceiving what was at the heart of American society and our culture. Even though he was at the end of a long fight with lung cancer, one of the last things John did before dying was to get to his polling place Tuesday, so he could cast his vote for Barack Obama. So long, John, and studs, it was good to know you. That's it for this week. I'm Bill Moyers. What now? Viewers lay out their priorities for the new administration. Log on at PBS.org.

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