Truthout has an absolutely brilliant lecture by Bill Moyers delivered on June 4, 2003 at the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality, ‘one nation, indivisible’ 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.  

That’s one incredibly pithy analysis, IMHO. And Moyers’s answer isn’t easy to swallow, but there isn’t any other. And Moyers knows how to make his pitch.

Ideas have power as long as they are not frozen in doctrine. But ideas need legs. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources and the protection of our air, water, and land, women’s rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security and a civil service based on merit — all these were launched as citizen’s movements and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and in the face of bitter opposition and sneering attacks. It’s just a fact: Democracy doesn’t work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn’t work much better than trickle down economics. It’s also a fact that civilization happens because we don’t leave things to other people. What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit — to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.

So go for it. Never mind the odds. Remember what the progressives faced. Karl Rove isn’t tougher than Mark Hanna was in his time and a hundred years from now some historian will be wondering how it was that Norquist and Company got away with it as long as they did — how they waged war almost unopposed on the infrastructure of social justice, on the arrangements that make life fair, on the mutual rights and responsibilities that offer opportunity, civil liberties, and a decent standard of living to the least among us.

But in the post-Iraq era, when lies are heaped on lies, when one man controls the destiny of the world and can decide, arbitrarily, to waste a huge amount of tax dollars to put a man on Mars (why? isn’t desecrating one planet enough?), I wonder if Moyers’s final sigh of hope isn’t, after all, just a little bit melancholy.