Reclaim the Land of Opportunity

The following is an excerpt from a speech delivered at the Take Back America conference on June 2, 2004. The full transcript of this speech and other speeches is available at the Campaign for America's Future.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked a beginning of the dependence of the Republican Party on the politics of racial division to win elections and to gain power. By playing the race card in election after election they've appealed to that dark underside of American culture, to that minority of Americans who reject democracy and equality.

They preach racial neutrality and they practice racial division. They celebrate Dr. King and they misuse his message. Their idea of reparations is to give war criminal Jefferson Davis a pardon. Their idea of a pristine environment is a parking lot before the lines are painted in. Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the confederate swastika flying side by side. Their idea of compassion is to ask the guest at the millionaire's banquet if they want an extra helping or a second dessert. They've tried to patch the leaky economy and every other domestic problem with duct tape and plastic sheets. They've written a new constitution for Iraq and ignored the Constitution here at home. They draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban-wing of American politics.

And now they want to write bigotry back into the Constitution. They want to make one group of Americans outsiders to our common heritage. They want to do what has never been done before, to amend the Constitution to create a group of second-class citizens. Our Constitution is the last hope of freedom, it cannot become a carrier of prejudice and ignorance.

And what about the opposition party? Too often they're not in opposition; they're an amen corner. With some notable exceptions, they've been absent without leave in this battle for America's soul. When one party is shameless, the other can't afford to be spineless. These economic imbalances not only mean difficult times for many, they also undermine democratic values. The danger is that plutocracy will prevail over democracy, that the free market will rule over the free citizen.

The reason for the current deficit and the vanished surplus can be placed squarely on the tax giveaways to the rich. To make up for just the initial tax cuts, we'd have to cut spending by $5 billion five days a week for over a year. That, after all, was the whole point. To further enrich the already wealthy. To starve the government, to make it unable to meet human needs, signing a death warrant for social programs for decades and decades yet to come.

We have a president who talks like a populist and governs for the privileged. We were promised compassionate conservatism; instead we got crony capitalism. We have an attorney general who's a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Falwell. And we have a Senate majority leader who has voted consistently against labor rights, against civil rights, against women's rights, and he's the one who replaced the bad guy. Now, we know that war and fear often cause hasty mistakes, costly both in economic and in human terms. We need to remind ourselves what America is fighting for.

Lessons From World War II

In the summer of 1918 on the eve of America's entry into World War I, one of the NAACP's founders, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, urged black people to forget our special grievances, close ranks shoulder to shoulder with our fellow citizens and the allied nations that were fighting for democracy. The criticism he faced was immediate and loud. He quickly reversed his position and he realized then, as we must realize now, that calls for a retreat from our rights are always wrong.