One Angry Priest

A thousand years are like a day.

--II Peter 3:8

(The Rev.) Bill Moyers is an angry man. He is preparing a television series that compares current America to the “Guilded Age,” the post-Civil War years when “Robber Barons” owned the U.S. Senate, got paid in land to build railroads, manipulated the stock market, built mansions in Newport, and rode out recessions that drove ordinary people into joblessness and debt. He told the United Church of Christ’s general synod June 23 that while he believes in democracy, the current concentration of wealth in a few hands, and the wealthy’s consequent manipulation of our political system, threatens the very foundation of democracy.

Moyers proclaimed the heart of democracy lies in the Declaration of Independence’s key phrase that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Liberty is the old word for freedom. Conservatives stress this freedom to pursue happiness in our own, individual ways. Moyers is fixed on equality, most especially inequality of income. So later in his speech, he just rewrites Jefferson to say we are after “life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice[!]”

Whoa! So much for happiness. And so much for Jefferson’s leaving “justice” out of the Declaration’s key phrase. Moyers rams home his passion for justice by quoting the story of Jesus’ driving moneychangers from the temple. In the name of justice, Moyers wants to drive the wealthy from the temple of Washington D.C.

My disappointment is with the stale nature of Moyers’—and Democrats’—divisive, anti-business appeal. It’s a throwback to FDR, to HST, and to LBJ’s Great Society. Don’t Democrats have anything new to offer? Moyers who was, in effect, Johnson’s chief of staff at age 30 [picture], seems unable to live past the collapse of the Great Society, Johnson’s (and Moyers’) failed big government effort to complete the New Deal. Vietnam was part of that collapse, in Moyers’ eyes draining needed money and attention away from domestic programs. But it’s also true big government just didn’t work to solve poverty or fix education. America moved on with Reagan’s election in 1980, Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, and the decentralized effort to raise education standards that 2001’s No Child Left Behind represents.

So Moyers still fights the anti-capitalist war, as if the old ways are right for America today. Democratic New Priests such as Moyers won’t leave the New Deal behind. They want high taxes, humbled capitalists, and bureaucrats back in charge. Vilifying business worked—politically, especially—for the America they ruled 1933-69. Like Confucians, they revere a past that brought their religion mythic success.

The New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society made major contributions to America--especially social security, labor laws, the GI bill/student loans, FHA mortgages, Medicare, and civil rights legislation. And we cannot allow capitalism to run roughshod over the landscape. But we now know that big government has severe limitations (look at Iraq!). In the broad sweep of history that treats years as minutes, capitalism has brought prosperity to billions, and big government socialism has collapsed. Dour New Priests like Moyers may find prosperity problematic, yet to the masses prosperity exactly defines "the pursuit of happiness."