比爾·莫耶斯：美國的階級鬥爭
富豪統治vs大眾民主
1987年我見到了最高法院大法官威廉•布倫南（William Brennan）。當時，為了紀念憲法奠定200週年，我正在做一檔憲法研究的十二集電視節目。那時候，他在法院的時間比任何同事都長，並且寫了將近500份多數意見，其中許多都涉及關於平等、投票權、種族隔離、新聞自由——特別是在紐約時報訴沙利文案中——等根本問題。
這些判決引來了全國範圍的抗議。他説他從不把這些針對他的仇視和憤恨放在心上。不過，他後來透露，他的母親説，一直都喜歡他在新澤西法院的那些判決，但很疑惑為什麼他現在去了最高法院就“不能一樣行事了呢？”他回答道：“我們必須履行義務。不管大眾如何反應，我們要保障少數人的權利。”
儘管是一個自由派，布倫南大法官也擔心政府規模過大。當他説現代科學可能在造一個“弗蘭肯斯坦”（Frankenstein）的時候，我問：“怎麼會這樣？”他環顧了一下房間回答道，“我們現在講的就可能被人偷聽了。就我所知，科學已經能做成這種事情了，透過這些窗簾、窗户把什麼東西放置進來，記下我們的談話。”
那是個還沒有網絡的年代，也沒有大規模的監聽攪亂每個政府部門的工作。我多麼希望他還在——還在最高法院！
我對布倫南的採訪是那個十二集節目中的一集。另一集涉及他聽説的1967年的一個案子。一個名叫哈里•凱伊西安（Harry Keyishian）的教師因不願簽署紐約州的效忠誓言被開除。布倫南當時裁定，效忠誓言和其它反顛覆罪的州成文法違反了第一修正案中對學術自由的保護。
我找到凱恩西安並採訪了他。布倫南大法官看了那期節目，很着迷地看着他裁決的名字背後的真人。記者納特•亨託福（Nat Hentoff）一直負責跟蹤報道布倫南的工作，寫道：“在此之前，他可能沒有見過任何訴訟當事人。但當一個案子上來，他會設法去將心比心。”看着凱恩西安的採訪，他説，“這是我第一次見他。直到現在，我才知道如果做出另一種裁定，他和其他教師會失去一切。”
直到任期的最後，當他在倫奎斯特法院（保守主義法官上台——觀察者網譯註）寫異議書時，布倫南被問及是否氣餒。他笑着説，“我們都知道——國父們也知道——自由是個脆弱的東西。你不能放棄。”他也沒有放棄。
威廉·布倫南
金主階級和黑錢
歷史學家普魯塔克很久以前就警告過我們，如果對會破壞選舉的巨大財富的力量不加限制，會發生什麼。“買賣選票氾濫”，他寫的是羅馬，“金錢開始決定選舉。之後，腐敗在法院和軍隊蔓延；最後連利劍都被金錢奴役時，共和國就臣服於皇帝的統治了。”
我們還沒有皇帝，不過我們卻有羅伯茨法院，不斷地給金主階級特權。
我們還沒有皇帝，不過我們有這樣一個參議院，就像政治學者拉里•巴特爾斯（Larry Bartels）的研究所揭示的那樣，“比起對中產階級選民的意見，參議員們很明顯對富裕階層選民反應更積極，而收入分配最底層三分之一選民的意見則對唱票表決結果沒有顯著的數據影響。”
我們還沒有皇帝，不過我們有一個極右派統治的眾議院，他們由源源不斷流入的黑錢滋養着，這都要感謝最高法院在聯合公民訴聯邦選舉委員會案中送給富人的大禮。
我們還沒有皇帝，不過兩黨中的一個現在被激進分子掌控着，他們參與了一場壓制老人、年輕人、少數族裔和窮人投票的運動；而另一個曾是普通勞工的支持者，如今卻被自己與金主階級的聯合弄得虛弱不堪，只能象徵性地抵抗那些讓美國日益敗壞下去的力量。
社會批評家喬治•蒙比爾特（George Monbiot）最近在《衞報》上評道：
我不會責備人們拋棄了政治……當政府-公司的聯盟繞過了民主還愚弄了投票程序，當一個未改革的政治體系確保了黨可以買賣，當（主要黨派的）政治家幹看着公共服務被骯髒的陰謀私掠，這個體制還剩什麼值得我們參與？
為什麼領取食品券的人數創了記錄？因為美國的窮人數量創了記錄。為什麼美國人民跌入深淵？因為深淵就在那裏！在這個富裕的國家裏，仍有2100萬美國人在找尋全職工作，其中許多人正在失去失業保險。而金融行業人士賺到了前所未有的利潤，大筆大筆地花在競選上，以保證一個符合他們自己利益的政治規則，並要求政府進一步縮緊開銷。同時，大約4600萬美國人生活在貧困線之下，除了羅馬尼亞，沒有一個發達國家孩童的貧困比例比我們更高。而西北大學和範德堡大學的研究發現，最富有的美國人幾乎沒有支持政治改革來減少收入不公的。
階級特權
聽着！你聽到的是社會契約被撕碎的聲音。
十年前《經濟學人》雜誌——他們可不是馬克思主義者——警告：“美國正在固化為歐洲一樣的階級社會。”《哥倫比亞新聞評論》最近的頭條寫道：“民主和黑暗的社會秩序之間的分界比你想象的小。”
我們真的快要把自己的民主輸給唯利是圖的階級了。就像我們靠在科羅拉多大峽谷的邊緣等着人掄起一腳。
20年前，當我採訪布倫南大法官前在他屋子裏私下聊天時，我問他怎麼會持自由派觀點的。“是因為我鄰居，”他説。1906年，他出身於愛爾蘭移民家庭，鍍金年代的嚴苛帶給他親人和鄰居的艱難困苦，他目睹了“各種苦難，人們不得不掙扎地活着”。他從未忘記那些人和他們的掙扎，他相信這是我們共同的責任，來創造一個國家，能讓他們都獲得平等的機會去過上體面生活。“如果你對此有所懷疑”，他説，“就讀讀憲法的序言。”
他接着問我如何形成自己對政府的理解（他知道我在肯尼迪和約翰遜政府裏待過）。我不太記得確切的回答了，但我提醒他我出生在大蕭條時期，我父母一個四年級輟學，一個八年級輟學，因為他們都要去摘棉花養家。
我記得，在我生命頭11年裏，富蘭克林•羅斯福是總統。我父親愛聽廣播“爐邊閒談”，好像聽福音一樣；我哥哥因《退伍軍人權利法案》（G.I. Bill）上了大學；我是公立學校、公共圖書館、公園、公路和兩所公立大學的受益者。我當然認為對我好的，也會對別人都好。
那是我告訴布倫南大法官的大致內容。如今，我希望自己能夠再和他進行一次對話，因為那時我忘了提，也許是我所知的關於民主的最重要的教訓。
1950年我16歲生日那天，我去得州東部小鎮的日報工作，我在那裏長大。這是一個根據種族劃分的小鎮——2萬人口，一半白人，一半黑人——你可以得到關愛，收到良好教育，接受宗教薰陶，卻完全不知道僅僅一街之隔的其他人的生活。不過，對初出茅廬的記者來説，這是個好地方：小到你可以駕馭，大到讓你每天夠忙還能學到新東西。很快我就時來運轉。一些編輯室的老員工有的去度假有的請了病假，我於是被派去報道現在被稱為“家庭主婦的抗議”（Housewives’ Rebellion）。15個小鎮的婦女（都是白人）決定不支付她們的家傭（都是黑人）社會保障預扣税。
她們爭論説社會保障是違背憲法的，強行徵收是無代表税收，並且——這是我最喜歡的部分——“要求我們收這税與要求我們收垃圾無異。”她們僱了一個律師——正是前國會議員戴斯（Martin Dies, Jr.），因其在上世紀三四十年代政治迫害期間任非美調查委員會主席時的所為而聞名，或者説臭名昭著。他們上了法庭，然後敗訴。畢竟，社會保障不違憲。他們不情願地繳了税。
我的報道被美聯社轉了，並在全國範圍內傳開。一天，執行總編斯賓塞•瓊斯（Spencer Jones）把我叫了過去，指着美聯社滾動新聞。屏幕上正是我們報紙報道的“抗議”活動。我看到了我的名字，就這樣定住了。不管怎樣，從學校到政壇和政府，我一直都在報道階級戰爭。
那些得州馬歇爾市的女人是先鋒。她們不是壞人，她們常去教堂，她們的孩子是我的同學，她們中許多人熱衷於社區事務，她們的丈夫是鎮上的經濟支柱和職業階層。她們都很值得尊敬，是積極向上的公民，所以我花了很久思考，是什麼讓她們做出這種反抗。很久以後，有一天我明白了，她們只是不能超越她們自己的（階級）特權來看問題。
她們對其家庭、俱樂部、慈善組織和教會格外忠誠，換句話説，她們忠於自己的同類——她們將民主僅限於和她們一樣的人。那些黑人婦女洗衣服，給家裏做飯，打掃衞生間，給孩子擦屁股，整理丈夫的牀。可她們也會逐漸老去，失去丈夫，獨自面對歲月的摧殘。那麼多年的勞動只留下額頭上的皺紋和關節上的疤痕。若沒有協同保障體系來保證她們辛勤勞作換來的微薄報酬，她們無以為生。
美國未完成的事業
無論如何，這是美國最古老的故事：這是一場鬥爭，意在決定“我們人民”（所代表的）這種精神，究竟是一份政治契約裏所深植之物，或僅僅是偽裝成神聖的一出荒唐表演，被有權有勢者利用來以他人的犧牲來維持他們自己的特權生活。
我要聲明，我沒有關於政治和民主的理想化概念。記住，我為林登•約翰遜（Lyndon Johnson）工作過。我也沒有浪漫化“人民”。你應該讀一讀我在右翼網站上的信件和帖子。我理解得州的那些政治家，他們談到立法機關時會説：“如果你認為這些傢伙是壞人，那你應該看看他們的選民。”
一個為所有公民服務（某種意義上的社會正義）的社會，和一個將其制度變成了巨大騙局的社會，兩者之間的區別與理想或是浪漫毫無關係。這是民主和金主統治的區別。
布倫南大法官在最高院任期的最後時刻，做了一次切中要害的演講，他説：
“對於窮人，少數族裔，被刑事指控的人，那些在技術革命中被邊緣化的人們，誤入歧途的青少年，還有城市裏的多數人……我們還沒有正義，平等的、切實的正義。醜陋的不公繼續在抹黑我們的國家。我們顯然在鬥爭的開始階段而不是在其結束階段。”
就是這樣。150年前，亞伯拉罕•林肯站在葛底斯堡鮮血浸染的戰場上，呼籲美國人繼續“未完成的偉大任務”。林肯所説的“未完成的事業”，和美國建國一代時的一樣。迄今仍然如此：為《獨立宣言》的允諾注入新的生命，並且保證這個共同體仍然是那個值得那麼多人為之犧牲的共同體。
（本文原載於《赫芬頓郵報》網站2013年12月12日，原標題：The Great American Class War；觀察者網林凌、張苗鳳/譯）
翻頁請看英文原文
The Great American Class War
By Bill Moyers
Posted: 12/12/2013 9:38 am
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and -- in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular -- the defense of a free press.
Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”
Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.”
That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration. How I wish he were here now -- and still on the Court!
My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution. Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967. It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath. Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom.
I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him. Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision. The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.” Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him. Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.”
Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known -- the Framers knew -- that liberty is a fragile thing. You can’t give up.” And he didn’t.
The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money
The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.
Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented,
“So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”
Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.
Class Prerogatives
Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.
Ten years ago the Economist magazine -- no friend of Marxism -- warned: “The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.” And as a recent headline in the Columbia Journalism Review put it: “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.”
We are this close -- this close! -- to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.
When Justice Brennan and I talked privately in his chambers before that interview almost 20 years ago, I asked him how he had come to his liberal sentiments. “It was my neighborhood,” he said. Born to Irish immigrants in 1906, as the harsh indignities of the Gilded Age brought hardship and deprivation to his kinfolk and neighbors, he saw “all kinds of suffering -- people had to struggle.” He never forgot those people or their struggles, and he believed it to be our collective responsibility to create a country where they would have a fair chance to a decent life. “If you doubt it,” he said, “read the Preamble [to the Constitution].”
He then asked me how I had come to my philosophy about government (knowing that I had been in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). I don’t remember my exact words, but I reminded him that I had been born in the midst of the Great Depression to parents, one of whom had to drop out of school in the fourth grade, the other in the eighth, because they were needed in the fields to pick cotton to help support their families.
Franklin Roosevelt, I recalled, had been president during the first 11 years of my life. My father had listened to his radio “fireside chats” as if they were gospel; my brother went to college on the G.I. Bill; and I had been the beneficiary of public schools, public libraries, public parks, public roads, and two public universities. How could I not think that what had been so good for me would be good for others, too?
That was the essence of what I told Justice Brennan. Now, I wish that I could talk to him again, because I failed to mention perhaps the most important lesson about democracy I ever learned.
On my 16th birthday in 1950, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a racially divided town -- about 20,000 people, half of them white, half of them black -- a place where you could grow up well-loved, well-taught, and well-churched, and still be unaware of the lives of others merely blocks away. It was nonetheless a good place to be a cub reporter: small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something new every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old-timers in the newsroom were on vacation or out sick, and I got assigned to report on what came to be known as the “Housewives’ Rebellion.” Fifteen women in town (all white) decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers (all black).
They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that -- here’s my favorite part -- “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer -- none other than Martin Dies, Jr., the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the witch-hunting days of the 1930s and 1940s. They went to court -- and lost. Social Security was constitutional, after all. They held their noses and paid the tax.
The stories I helped report were picked up by the Associated Press and circulated nationwide. One day, the managing editor, Spencer Jones, called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing the reporters on our paper for the reporting we had done on the “rebellion.” I spotted my name and was hooked. In one way or another, after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government, I’ve been covering the class war ever since.
Those women in Marshall, Texas, were among its advance guard. Not bad people, they were regulars at church, their children were my classmates, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all, so it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary defiance. It came to me one day, much later: they simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives.
Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations -- fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind -- they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves. The black women who washed and ironed their laundry, cooked their families’ meals, cleaned their bathrooms, wiped their children’s bottoms, and made their husbands’ beds, these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show for their years of labor but the creases on their brows and the knots on their knuckles. There would be nothing for them to live on but the modest return on their toil secured by the collaborative guarantee of a safety net.
The Unfinished Work of America
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize “the people.” You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.
Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said:
“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”
And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.” That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.
Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism. He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism. He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy. This is his first TomDispatch piece.
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