富豪统治vs大众民主

1987年我见到了最高法院大法官威廉•布伦南（William Brennan）。当时，为了纪念宪法奠定200周年，我正在做一档宪法研究的十二集电视节目。那时候，他在法院的时间比任何同事都长，并且写了将近500份多数意见，其中许多都涉及关于平等、投票权、种族隔离、新闻自由——特别是在纽约时报诉沙利文案中——等根本问题。

这些判决引来了全国范围的抗议。他说他从不把这些针对他的仇视和愤恨放在心上。不过，他后来透露，他的母亲说，一直都喜欢他在新泽西法院的那些判决，但很疑惑为什么他现在去了最高法院就“不能一样行事了呢？”他回答道：“我们必须履行义务。不管大众如何反应，我们要保障少数人的权利。”

尽管是一个自由派，布伦南大法官也担心政府规模过大。当他说现代科学可能在造一个“弗兰肯斯坦”（Frankenstein）的时候，我问：“怎么会这样？”他环顾了一下房间回答道，“我们现在讲的就可能被人偷听了。就我所知，科学已经能做成这种事情了，透过这些窗帘、窗户把什么东西放置进来，记下我们的谈话。”

那是个还没有网络的年代，也没有大规模的监听搅乱每个政府部门的工作。我多么希望他还在——还在最高法院！

我对布伦南的采访是那个十二集节目中的一集。另一集涉及他听说的1967年的一个案子。一个名叫哈里•凯伊西安（Harry Keyishian）的教师因不愿签署纽约州的效忠誓言被开除。布伦南当时裁定，效忠誓言和其它反颠覆罪的州成文法违反了第一修正案中对学术自由的保护。

我找到凯恩西安并采访了他。布伦南大法官看了那期节目，很着迷地看着他裁决的名字背后的真人。记者纳特•亨托福（Nat Hentoff）一直负责跟踪报道布伦南的工作，写道：“在此之前，他可能没有见过任何诉讼当事人。但当一个案子上来，他会设法去将心比心。”看着凯恩西安的采访，他说，“这是我第一次见他。直到现在，我才知道如果做出另一种裁定，他和其他教师会失去一切。”

直到任期的最后，当他在伦奎斯特法院（保守主义法官上台——观察者网译注）写异议书时，布伦南被问及是否气馁。他笑着说，“我们都知道——国父们也知道——自由是个脆弱的东西。你不能放弃。”他也没有放弃。

威廉·布伦南

金主阶级和黑钱

历史学家普鲁塔克很久以前就警告过我们，如果对会破坏选举的巨大财富的力量不加限制，会发生什么。“买卖选票泛滥”，他写的是罗马，“金钱开始决定选举。之后，腐败在法院和军队蔓延；最后连利剑都被金钱奴役时，共和国就臣服于皇帝的统治了。”

我们还没有皇帝，不过我们却有罗伯茨法院，不断地给金主阶级特权。

我们还没有皇帝，不过我们有这样一个参议院，就像政治学者拉里•巴特尔斯（Larry Bartels）的研究所揭示的那样，“比起对中产阶级选民的意见，参议员们很明显对富裕阶层选民反应更积极，而收入分配最底层三分之一选民的意见则对唱票表决结果没有显著的数据影响。”

我们还没有皇帝，不过我们有一个极右派统治的众议院，他们由源源不断流入的黑钱滋养着，这都要感谢最高法院在联合公民诉联邦选举委员会案中送给富人的大礼。

我们还没有皇帝，不过两党中的一个现在被激进分子掌控着，他们参与了一场压制老人、年轻人、少数族裔和穷人投票的运动；而另一个曾是普通劳工的支持者，如今却被自己与金主阶级的联合弄得虚弱不堪，只能象征性地抵抗那些让美国日益败坏下去的力量。

社会批评家乔治•蒙比尔特（George Monbiot）最近在《卫报》上评道：

我不会责备人们抛弃了政治……当政府-公司的联盟绕过了民主还愚弄了投票程序，当一个未改革的政治体系确保了党可以买卖，当（主要党派的）政治家干看着公共服务被肮脏的阴谋私掠，这个体制还剩什么值得我们参与？

为什么领取食品券的人数创了记录？因为美国的穷人数量创了记录。为什么美国人民跌入深渊？因为深渊就在那里！在这个富裕的国家里，仍有2100万美国人在找寻全职工作，其中许多人正在失去失业保险。而金融行业人士赚到了前所未有的利润，大笔大笔地花在竞选上，以保证一个符合他们自己利益的政治规则，并要求政府进一步缩紧开销。同时，大约4600万美国人生活在贫困线之下，除了罗马尼亚，没有一个发达国家孩童的贫困比例比我们更高。而西北大学和范德堡大学的研究发现，最富有的美国人几乎没有支持政治改革来减少收入不公的。

阶级特权

听着！你听到的是社会契约被撕碎的声音。

十年前《经济学人》杂志——他们可不是马克思主义者——警告：“美国正在固化为欧洲一样的阶级社会。”《哥伦比亚新闻评论》最近的头条写道：“民主和黑暗的社会秩序之间的分界比你想象的小。”

我们真的快要把自己的民主输给唯利是图的阶级了。就像我们靠在科罗拉多大峡谷的边缘等着人抡起一脚。

20年前，当我采访布伦南大法官前在他屋子里私下聊天时，我问他怎么会持自由派观点的。“是因为我邻居，”他说。1906年，他出身于爱尔兰移民家庭，镀金年代的严苛带给他亲人和邻居的艰难困苦，他目睹了“各种苦难，人们不得不挣扎地活着”。他从未忘记那些人和他们的挣扎，他相信这是我们共同的责任，来创造一个国家，能让他们都获得平等的机会去过上体面生活。“如果你对此有所怀疑”，他说，“就读读宪法的序言。”

他接着问我如何形成自己对政府的理解（他知道我在肯尼迪和约翰逊政府里待过）。我不太记得确切的回答了，但我提醒他我出生在大萧条时期，我父母一个四年级辍学，一个八年级辍学，因为他们都要去摘棉花养家。

我记得，在我生命头11年里，富兰克林•罗斯福是总统。我父亲爱听广播“炉边闲谈”，好像听福音一样；我哥哥因《退伍军人权利法案》（G.I. Bill）上了大学；我是公立学校、公共图书馆、公园、公路和两所公立大学的受益者。我当然认为对我好的，也会对别人都好。

那是我告诉布伦南大法官的大致内容。如今，我希望自己能够再和他进行一次对话，因为那时我忘了提，也许是我所知的关于民主的最重要的教训。

1950年我16岁生日那天，我去得州东部小镇的日报工作，我在那里长大。这是一个根据种族划分的小镇——2万人口，一半白人，一半黑人——你可以得到关爱，收到良好教育，接受宗教熏陶，却完全不知道仅仅一街之隔的其他人的生活。不过，对初出茅庐的记者来说，这是个好地方：小到你可以驾驭，大到让你每天够忙还能学到新东西。很快我就时来运转。一些编辑室的老员工有的去度假有的请了病假，我于是被派去报道现在被称为“家庭主妇的抗议”（Housewives’ Rebellion）。15个小镇的妇女（都是白人）决定不支付她们的家佣（都是黑人）社会保障预扣税。

她们争论说社会保障是违背宪法的，强行征收是无代表税收，并且——这是我最喜欢的部分——“要求我们收这税与要求我们收垃圾无异。”她们雇了一个律师——正是前国会议员戴斯（Martin Dies, Jr.），因其在上世纪三四十年代政治迫害期间任非美调查委员会主席时的所为而闻名，或者说臭名昭著。他们上了法庭，然后败诉。毕竟，社会保障不违宪。他们不情愿地缴了税。

我的报道被美联社转了，并在全国范围内传开。一天，执行总编斯宾塞•琼斯（Spencer Jones）把我叫了过去，指着美联社滚动新闻。屏幕上正是我们报纸报道的“抗议”活动。我看到了我的名字，就这样定住了。不管怎样，从学校到政坛和政府，我一直都在报道阶级战争。

那些得州马歇尔市的女人是先锋。她们不是坏人，她们常去教堂，她们的孩子是我的同学，她们中许多人热衷于社区事务，她们的丈夫是镇上的经济支柱和职业阶层。她们都很值得尊敬，是积极向上的公民，所以我花了很久思考，是什么让她们做出这种反抗。很久以后，有一天我明白了，她们只是不能超越她们自己的（阶级）特权来看问题。

她们对其家庭、俱乐部、慈善组织和教会格外忠诚，换句话说，她们忠于自己的同类——她们将民主仅限于和她们一样的人。那些黑人妇女洗衣服，给家里做饭，打扫卫生间，给孩子擦屁股，整理丈夫的床。可她们也会逐渐老去，失去丈夫，独自面对岁月的摧残。那么多年的劳动只留下额头上的皱纹和关节上的疤痕。若没有协同保障体系来保证她们辛勤劳作换来的微薄报酬，她们无以为生。

美国未完成的事业

无论如何，这是美国最古老的故事：这是一场斗争，意在决定“我们人民”（所代表的）这种精神，究竟是一份政治契约里所深植之物，或仅仅是伪装成神圣的一出荒唐表演，被有权有势者利用来以他人的牺牲来维持他们自己的特权生活。

我要声明，我没有关于政治和民主的理想化概念。记住，我为林登•约翰逊（Lyndon Johnson）工作过。我也没有浪漫化“人民”。你应该读一读我在右翼网站上的信件和帖子。我理解得州的那些政治家，他们谈到立法机关时会说：“如果你认为这些家伙是坏人，那你应该看看他们的选民。”

一个为所有公民服务（某种意义上的社会正义）的社会，和一个将其制度变成了巨大骗局的社会，两者之间的区别与理想或是浪漫毫无关系。这是民主和金主统治的区别。

布伦南大法官在最高院任期的最后时刻，做了一次切中要害的演讲，他说：

“对于穷人，少数族裔，被刑事指控的人，那些在技术革命中被边缘化的人们，误入歧途的青少年，还有城市里的多数人……我们还没有正义，平等的、切实的正义。丑陋的不公继续在抹黑我们的国家。我们显然在斗争的开始阶段而不是在其结束阶段。”

就是这样。150年前，亚伯拉罕•林肯站在葛底斯堡鲜血浸染的战场上，呼吁美国人继续“未完成的伟大任务”。林肯所说的“未完成的事业”，和美国建国一代时的一样。迄今仍然如此：为《独立宣言》的允诺注入新的生命，并且保证这个共同体仍然是那个值得那么多人为之牺牲的共同体。

（本文原载于《赫芬顿邮报》网站2013年12月12日，原标题：The Great American Class War；观察者网林凌、张苗凤/译）

翻页请看英文原文

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.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars -- The Untold Story.