Third World America - Arianna Huffington [89]
The perfect example of this came in March 1965.179 In an effort to push for voting rights legislation, Martin Luther King met with President Lyndon Johnson. But LBJ was convinced he didn’t have the votes needed for passage. King left the meeting certain that the votes would never be found in Washington until he turned up the heat in the rest of the country. And that’s what he set out to do: produce the votes in Washington by getting the people to demand it. Two days later, the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation in Selma—in which marchers were met with tear gas and truncheons—captured the conscience of the nation. Five months after that, on August 6, LBJ signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, with King and Rosa Parks by his side.180
At that March meeting, LBJ didn’t think the conditions for change were there. So King went out and changed the conditions.
Similarly, before the start of WWII, legendary labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, lobbied FDR to promote equal employment opportunities in the defense industry. Roosevelt was sympathetic but made no promises.181 Randolph responded by taking his cause to the American people, organizing a massive march on Washington. Concerned about the impact the march would have on the country’s wartime morale, Roosevelt got Randolph to call it off by issuing an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to watch over hiring practices.
In recent decades the system has gotten only more rigged and the powers that be more entrenched. The ability of special interests to thwart meaningful change has never been stronger. And the reason we are given—time after time after time—for why we can’t have fundamental reform? What else: The votes just aren’t there!
That’s where Hope 2.0 comes in. If the votes aren’t there, the people need to create them. If politicians put their finger in the wind to see which way it’s blowing before deciding what to do, well, let’s change the direction of the wind.
In the early days of the financial crisis, as I looked at the tone-deaf response of Wall Street, including former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and his now infamous $1.2 million office redecoration in the midst of the economic collapse, I thought of Thain and his Big Banking brethren as the Marie Antoinettes of the meltdown.182 They just didn’t get it.
Little did I realize just how small-scale Thain’s outrages would seem and how much worse things would get in the ensuing months. Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd “Doing God’s Work” Blankfein, BP’s Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward, and their fellow too-big-to-fail CEOs—with their utter cluelessness about the public’s anger over what they’ve done and continue to do—take “not getting it” to a whole other level.183, 184
Luckily for them, society has evolved, and we express our anger differently than we did in Marie Antoinette’s day. “Off with their bonuses” is a lot less painful than “off with their heads.” But the question is, can the American people’s righteous—and entirely justifiable—rage be productively channeled to produce a real movement for reform, or will it be hijacked by dangerous demagogues, with whatever is left over co-opted by agents of the status quo in Washington?
In 2004, hope was ignited by an unknown state senator standing up and proclaiming that we are not blue states and red states, but one people who can only solve our problems together.
In 2008, hope was about crossing our fingers and electing leaders who we thought would enact the change we so desperately need.
Hope 2.0 is about creating the conditions that give them no other choice.
THE CHOICE IS OURS
Clearly, we all have a lot