A Politics of Love by Marianne Williamson

Author:Marianne Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

History Is on Our Side

Our history is one in which overreach by moneyed forces, more often than not, has ultimately been met by righteous protest. Pushing back against what Thomas Jefferson called “the general tendency of the rich to prey upon the poor” is more in line with the “American way” than our current acquiescence to legalized economic tyranny. America has historically prided itself on expanding economic justice, not weakening it.

The narrative of our past is not one in which Americans consistently folded in the face of economic injustice; it is one in which, more typically, the American people railed against such injustice and ultimately prevailed.

The question of whether capitalism has a moral responsibility to people and the planet is not new. American brilliance applied to business has always been one of our greatest strengths, but we are also a people for whom ethics matters.

Our history has been marked by an ongoing struggle between the engines of economic prosperity, on the one hand, and the ethical considerations that make life meaningful and righteous, on the other. The sacrifice of our moral core to the false god of short-term economic gain is as morally dangerous for our society as it is for an individual. A morality that applies to everything except the things that affect real people’s daily lives is not morality at all. It is our moral responsibility to insist on just enough regulation of American business and to give enough pushback to an otherwise unfettered, amoral capitalism.

We should neither romanticize the history of capitalism nor fall prey to an intellectually lazy, knee-jerk condemnation of it. We should support it when it supports us and push back against its overreach when it becomes untethered from ethical considerations.

That is what Americans have done before, and that is what we should be doing now.

The industrial revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought forth a burst of productivity never before seen, with the industrial prowess of railroads and factories putting America on the path to becoming a major world power. Yet that burst of industrial power induced a financial drunkenness in its main beneficiaries that eventually was met with appropriate, often heroic resistance on the part of both citizens and government. Yes, Henry Ford built the Model T, but he also used a private security force to shoot demonstrators at his factory. Yes, American manufacturing flourished, but it took the passage of child labor laws to make it illegal for six-year-olds to be put to work in factories. Yes, the “robber barons” built great cultural institutions, but they also amassed their enormous wealth by exploiting workers and the environment.

It took the advent of the labor movement, nonprofit organizations, and legislation such as the passage of antitrust legislation and union protections to guarantee a more just economy for all Americans. With the founding of this country, we had already repudiated an economic royalism; we did not, and do not, want to go back to it. Workers should receive fair compensation for the

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