Noblesse N'Oblige Pas.

December 19, 2013 5:56 PM

The Endgame for Democracy: A short essay by Bill Moyers. [SLYT]
posted by phaedon (31 comments total)

Is there a transcript of this, by chance?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:09 PM on December 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

There is, sorry about that. Par for the course for Bill Moyers. Full episode here, with transcript (click "read the transcript" below the video).
posted by phaedon at 6:14 PM on December 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

transcript
posted by get off of my cloud at 6:15 PM on December 19, 2013

Does it end with "Tear it apart with their bare hands?" There seems to be a title mismatch, and I don't want to go through the video to find out. :)
posted by corb at 6:21 PM on December 19, 2013

It reads like a poetic, even-keeled request to burn down Washington in 2014. Like a militant holiday card.
posted by phaedon at 6:28 PM on December 19, 2013

Uploaded August 23, BEFORE the "Government Shutdown" debacle. If we were leaning over the edge then, by now we have gone past the edge, like Wile E. Coyote, blissfully unaware that there is nothing but air under our feet and ignorant of the delayed-but-inevitable payback of the Laws of Cartoon Physics.

But as for Moyers' final prediction of "outraged citizens would descend on this town, and tear it apart with their bare hands," sorry, not in our time, Bill. The town will slowly tear itself apart and sell off the pieces to the highest bidders and usual suspects. If the author of the "Anarchist's Cookbook" is rejecting violence now, how can we expect anybody to rise up or descend or do anything beyond making frustrated web comments (like this one)?
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:30 PM on December 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

There's going to be a bloody uprising somewhere in the west sometime soon. I keep hearing this rhetoric, spontaneously, independently, from all quarters. Friends in private, the guy in the pizza store, some previously moderate person on mefi, Bill Moyers. Revolution is in the air: it reminds me of reading people's recollections and accounts of the political atmosphere before 1848 or 1968. This idea of violent overthrow just keeps bubbling up.

Like any good bourgeois European I fear revolution. I'm very afraid of this too. I just wish our leaders would learn the lessons of our history and bring in forestalling reforms now before it's too late.
posted by Dreadnought at 6:38 PM on December 19, 2013 [9 favorites]

Are you honestly comparing living conditions in the United States, Britain, France and Germany with what people had to endure in 1848?

Even 1968 seems like a stretch, just in terms of pure demographics (and also poverty rate in real terms).
posted by KokuRyu at 6:48 PM on December 19, 2013 [6 favorites]

Ah, hate to disappoint, but no there won't be a revolution. The security and media control is too well established. If things even begin to look like there's a hint of a threat to the established order, potentially identified agitators will be quickly rounded up, their supporters isolated, their ideas dissected and found wanting in every mainstream media outlet.

We have sufficient examples that if the security state is powerful enough and even moderately competent, no internal force will bring it down, no matter how oppressive things get. Don't expect the West to be any different than East Germany or North Korea.

No, things will only change when we hit the complete ecological collapse in a couple decades, and then people will be tool busy during to revolt.
posted by happyroach at 6:51 PM on December 19, 2013 [4 favorites]

I love Bill Moyers. I can heartily recommend every single one of his books, and just about every word he utters. When I think of him and Molly Ivins, I am reminded that Texas doesn't just turn out crackpot conservatives - it has also given us some of the finest, most lucid progressive thinkers out there, too.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 7:01 PM on December 19, 2013 [4 favorites]

We'll have to tear it down with our bare hands, because by the time we do anything that's all we'll have left.
posted by carping demon at 7:01 PM on December 19, 2013 [5 favorites]

Bill Moyers calls for A Prairie Home Insurrection! I'm down, but feeling pessimistic about the prospect on a day when my Facebook feed is infested with calls to arms on behalf of that Duck Dynasty fuckwit.
posted by batfish at 7:04 PM on December 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

People just love predicting the end times.
posted by jpe at 7:08 PM on December 19, 2013 [3 favorites]

Like any good bourgeois European I fear revolution. I'm very afraid of this too. I just wish our leaders would learn the lessons of our history and bring in forestalling reforms now before it's too late.

I have a feeling Moyers feels the same way, not so much because of any actual "revolution in the air" these days (because, frankly, there really isn't), but because that's what his beloved Johnson did when there really was revolution in the air.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:09 PM on December 19, 2013

Bill Moyers calls for A Prairie Home Insurrection!

Found in the street shortly after the rebels passed through, a sign:

EVERY WOMAN STRONG

EVERY MAN GOOD LOOKING

EVERY CHILD ABOVE AVERAGE
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 7:09 PM on December 19, 2013 [6 favorites]

As long people have food in their bellies, there will be no revolution.
posted by tgyg at 7:13 PM on December 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm not comparing the living conditions to the past, rather the political atmosphere. Middle class people keep saying to me, in effect, "I have no future, the deck is stacked against me, the present order is rigged so everything goes to a small elite I can never join".

Historically, that's a very dangerous situation. Poor people always say that sort of stuff, naturally, but poor people are generally so beaten down that they don't have expectations to be dashed. When middle class people start talking that way... well they have the wherewithal and resources and motivation (read 'entitlement') to start causing real damage.

I was just thinking, the other day, how many couples I know who have not had children. Generally speaking these are middle class kids who grew up and got married and found themselves living in poverty with no hope of advancement in society and no chance to create what they considered to be an acceptably stable home environment within their childbearing years. This has happened in the past, usually in the form of people not having the financial means to marry, rather than have children. Messing with peoples' reproductive capacity makes them crazy: it's primal and it causes society-wide aggression.

Let me emphasise that I am not a revolutionary. I would not rejoice in violence and would grieve to see the damage and death that chaos would cause. I don't want a revolution. But I think and outbreak of violence is coming nonetheless.

We've seen big-scale riots and protests repeatedly over the past decade-and-a-bit. As time goes by, they seem to be less focussed toward an articulable goal, less directed toward a coherent target, less adequately 'managed' by media indifference and police action and, frankly, less restrained. Every time, political elites seem to respond by doubling down on adding new restrictions to social mobility for... I honestly don't know what reason. Now, even in the very staid, very deferential city where I live, I keep hearing this sentiment expressed again and again by random people. That makes me really worry.

Please understand that I don't see myself as a chicken little. I am an academic historian (albeit an unsuccessful and pretty impoverished one) and I have neither a stockpile of arms and tinned food nor a bunker in which to store it. I have nothing to gain from violence and have no resources to escape it. Nor do I think that the pervasive resentment and despair I see around me (in my neighbourhood, in my circles of friends and acquaintances) will necessarily break out into violence here and now.

BUT, I've read enough history to know what a social powder keg looks like. This is the situation building in western countries right now, and if it keeps on this way, it's going to get to a really dangerous point where something small can set off a violent chain of events.

That said, I am obliged by what passes for professional ethics among historians to emphasise the particular over the generalised, and to point out that history can't tell us what is definitely going to happen. This is not an Official Opinion, or anything: it's just a sick, hollow feeling growing in the pit of my stomach.
posted by Dreadnought at 7:44 PM on December 19, 2013 [23 favorites]

We need more leaks.
posted by surplus at 8:03 PM on December 19, 2013 [3 favorites]

I saw reposted yesterday an Olbermann commentary (stick with me, please) from May of last year about a Reuters poll that showed that only 16% of Americans consider themselves "well-off or upper-middle-class", while 50% believe they will become "well-off or upper-middle-class" within the next 5-10 years. Unless the last 18 months have forced a large part of those people to suddenly stop being delusional, The People are not going to be rising up in the near future, and if they do, they'll do it to stop "the Government" from getting in the way of their well-earned success. Good night and good luck, indeed.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:25 PM on December 19, 2013

In Mein Kampf a main point was how he didn't have enough food to eat for a long time when he was younger.
posted by bukvich at 9:06 PM on December 19, 2013

Not such a good time to get rid of food stamps, perhaps.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:27 PM on December 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Everything I see about me is sowing the seeds of a revolution that is inevitable, though I shall not have the pleasure of seeing it. The lightning is so close at hand that it will strike at the first chance, and then there will be a pretty uproar. The young are fortunate, for they will see fine things."
posted by 3200 at 10:42 PM on December 19, 2013 [3 favorites]

> "Everything I see about me is sowing the seeds of a revolution that is inevitable, though I shall not have the pleasure of seeing it. The lightning is so close at hand that it will strike at the first chance, and then there will be a pretty uproar. The young are fortunate, for they will see fine things."

Perhaps too obscure a quote to leave unattributed; it's from a letter Voltaire wrote to the marquis de Chauvelin on April 2, 1764:

« Tout ce que je vois jette les semences d'une révolution qui arrivera immanquablement, et dont je n'aurai pas le plaisir d'être témoin. La lumière s'est tellement répandue de proche en proche, qu'on éclatera à la première occasion, et alors ce sera un beau tapage. Les jeunes gens sont bien heureux ; ils verront de belles choses. »

I don't think "lightning" is a good translation of "lumière."
posted by languagehat at 5:29 AM on December 20, 2013 [3 favorites]

Mod note: One comment deleted. Maybe this doesn't need to become a gun control thread?
posted by taz (staff) at 5:53 AM on December 20, 2013

What weird is that a lot conservatives I know seem to be expecting civil unrest, too. As if it were just some sort of natural event that no one can to anything about. I can think of all sorts of reasons for why that makes sense but it still unnerving to listen to.
posted by charred husk at 7:00 AM on December 20, 2013

If you think about it, there has indeed been a lot of civil unrest - just not in the US (if you don't count the Tea Party/OWS movement). The Arab Spring is similar to 1848. In Greece people were rioting in the street. Riots in London and Paris.

I wonder if the US has the same socio-economic conditions as that list of countries and regions...
posted by KokuRyu at 7:11 AM on December 20, 2013

I think about how many stories I've read about the militarization of police forces, just in the last year. I may be misremembering this, but weren't all the Occupy protests all broken up and dispersed at about the same time, by a unified police action that was well-organized and coordinated across multiple cities, multiple states, multiple jurisdictions?

I think the people in charge, the elites in power, they see what's coming. I think they've been getting ready for it, for a while now. I wonder when the revolution, or whatever you want to call it, actually happens, will it actually be big enough to interrupt daily life? Or will it be like the movie 'Brazil', where the bombs go off and people die, but everyone else just goes on with their Christmas shopping?
posted by KHAAAN! at 7:54 AM on December 20, 2013

I was just thinking, the other day, how many couples I know who have not had children. Generally speaking these are middle class kids who grew up and got married and found themselves living in poverty with no hope of advancement in society and no chance to create what they considered to be an acceptably stable home environment within their childbearing years. This has happened in the past, usually in the form of people not having the financial means to marry, rather than have children.

Kids are a trap in our current social context, but it's slightly more complex than us just not having "the chance to create what [we] consider to be an acceptably stable home environment within [our] childbearing years."

My partner and I are now in a sufficiently privileged position that we could put together a "middle-class" child-raisin' income if we wanted to. But if we were to do so, we'd be tied, for the rest of our lives, to working brain-destroying, society-destroying, anti-human jobs servicing the wealthy. And our child would be a hostage — we'd have to keep doing terrible things for a living, or they'd wreck the hostage's life.

If we had a kid:

1. Capital would get us both for as long as it wanted, and,
2. After we're too old and broken for capital to play with us, it'd get a replacement for us in the form of our child.

Why on earth would we want to give three people to capital? Kids are a trap.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:46 AM on December 20, 2013 [6 favorites]

Buick, according to your profile you live in Seattle, one of the most economically diversified regions in the United States (I live just to the north, in Victoria BC; we have the lowest unemployment in Canada, and while BC's unemployment rate rose in the last quarter, ours actually continued to decline to under 5%).

I always wonder where MeFites come from when they say they are hopeless about their current situation and the future.

My assumption is that some labour markets are better than others in the States, and some places are better to be.

I guess if you compare unemployment by state, versus median income by state, versus cost of living, you can triangulate which parts of the States are doing the best.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:04 AM on December 20, 2013

You're talking about the problem of unemployment, which is less dire on the west coast of the United States than it is most other places. I'm talking about the problem of employment. You're saying "hey, you don't have it so bad"¹ in response to me saying "we all have it awful."

1: "I don't have it so bad" is in fact something I said in almost as many words in my comment above, in fact.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:27 AM on December 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

While I can't apologize for saying "you don't have it so bad" (reviewing my comment, I said nothing of the sort) I suppose I should apologize if I made you feel defensive, although it's sometimes really hard to determine what people are going to be defensive about.

I do agree that we probably have different perspectives. From my perspective, "busy hands are happy hands," and that if we have jobs where we can experience some self-actualization and achieve financial goals (hence the economic indicator mumbo jumbo I posted above), then we will tend to be happy.

I do disagree with the idea that each and every one of us is a worker serving some capitalist overlord.

There are plenty of occupations and vocations where helping others, rather than realizing a profit, is the primary purpose of the job: teachers, doctors, civil servants, clergy, charities, non-profits, counsellors...

And if you don't have kids you have to provide for, you really have nothing to lose by exploring these options.

We face many challenges. But once we give up hope in the future, all is lost. Humanity has been through tougher times than this.
posted by KokuRyu at 2:50 PM on December 20, 2013 [1 favorite]