Welcome to Working the Commons
Restoring the concept of The Commons
Welcome to Working the Commons. Here’s what inspired me to start this blog.
October 29th, a Tuesday 93 years ago, saw the colossal failure of laissez faire capitalism. Entrusting the future of the world’s most promising democracy to a tiny elite of trust fund babies, oil tycoons and financial buccaneers (what we call the One Percenters today) was a spectacular failure.
It cost millions of immigrants and first-generation Americans their shot at the American Dream. Contrary to the myth the privileged propagate, the “masses” haven’t aspired to join that brassy upper crust that filled the opera houses and art galleries of New York at the end of the 19th century. No, they sought only to provide a safe home in a safe community and bequeath economic security to their children, so they could build a better future for their children.
When the U.S. stock market collapsed, it took the Gilded Age with it. The wiser members of America’s economic aristocracy retreated to their private estates in Long Island and Penobscot and other coastal retreats and laid low in luxury. It was no longer safe for them to parade their wealth and privilege in front of unemployed men and women who could no longer feed their children.
Concentration of wealth and opportunity in a tiny economic elite of trust fund royalty and financial privateers, the inevitable result of unconstrained capitalism, while ignoring the needs and aspirations of millions of American workers led inevitably to the complete collapse of the casino economy the robber barons created for themselves.
After Herbert Hoover’s fumbling, vapid attempts to blame the victims of their runaway greed, the One Percenters of that age for whom he spoke, the ones ruined the economy, finally gave way to the desperate voices of the American people, the voters.
As a result, Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved from the New York governor’s mansion in Albany to the White House in Washington, D.C. with a mind to change things for a faltering working class.
I mark that moment in history as the beginning of America’s attempt to restore a British notion that provided the template for the Magna Carta and for our own Constitution — the idea of the Commons, a shared public space where free exchange of goods and services, and social interactions between diverse economic classes, and the advance of the liberal ideal of self-governance could all thrive. For nearly 100 years, the legacy of FDR has been the expansion and opening of The Commons to all.
I mark that moment as the moment when America committed to becoming the shining city on a hill, a beacon to the world, symbolized so well in the torch held high by Lady Liberty in New York Harbor.
The shared vision of what we as American citizens want to accomplish for ourselves and our progeny is all played out on The Commons. Whether or not the great American experiment in democratic governance, in the form of today’s republic, succeeds depends on what happens in The Commons.
But the robber barons, the fabulously wealthy who exploited America’s impulse to unrestrained acquisition of individual gain that we call the “miracle of capitalism” have always viewed this expansion of The Commons as an existential threat to their elite positions in American society. They have not sat idly by, while the march of progressivism and liberalism, expanded and elaborated The Commons.
They organized at exclusive gatherings of the wealthiest among them and formed tax sheltered foundations, funded educational institutes, and political candidates, hired hundreds of lobbyists and more recently, used social media platforms to create hundreds of astroturf gras-root organizations, all specifically formed to attack and constrain the growth of The Commons. Today, this cabal of the wealthiest is referred to as “dark money.”
Evidence of their successes is no more loudly proclaimed than the evening of the day that Donald Trump and the GOP succeeding in passing a trillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthiest one percent of Americans.
“I just made you all a lot richer,” Donald Trump boasted as he entered a gold-filigreed ballroom at Mar a Lago, packed with One Percenters celebrating their re-emergence as dominators of the political system.
Four challenging and often discouraging years later, the American voters sought to correct the country’s course and restore The Commons as the home for patriotic, hard-working Americans. They elected a believer in The Commons and it’s promise for all of us.
President Joe Biden spoke to our shared interest in the success of The Commons frequently during the 2020 presidential campaign. He remains a firm believer in the access of every American to The Commons and in every American voter’s ability to shape The Commons. He believes this is our birthright as citizens, despite the relentless attacks on voting rights and on objective truth by Donald Trump and the GOP in the wake of Trump’s trouncing in the 2020 election.
Let’s hope our President is right. More importantly, let’s hope we the people are up to the challenge of protecting the Commons from the powerful people who seek to destroy it in their relentless pursuit of concentrated wealth and absolute political power. In the end, it is up to us.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood something about The Commons that today’s Republicans do not seem to grasp.
“We Americans expect our government to protect all of us regardless of our economic status, to serve our interests as we articulate them through elections, and to solve the really big problems that stand between us and a secure and better future for us and our children regardless of the price tag. We Americans don’t want smaller government. We want better government. That means a government big enough to defeat our biggest problems, competent enough to govern wisely and efficiently, and responsive enough that we always know ultimately we are in charge through the regular exercise of our right to vote.”
This is what The Commons is all about and why so many political battles are waged there every day, opposing parties are constantly trying to control or free up access to The Commons, to protect it or attack it.
It’s my intent to use Working the Commons to explore the issues facing The Commons and profiling the people who work there every day, dedicated to keeping it open to all of us for the very same reasons that FDR explained so eloquently in
If you work The Commons, from maintenance worker to executive leader of a large agency, I encourage you to share your stories with me. You can reach out to me here: editor@workingthecommons.com.
Best wishes,
Jim Wavada, your editor and moderator at Working the Commons.
