FIGHTING FOR A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

(from the Intro to the book, The Strange Death of Liberal America)

In researching his family history in a prairie township with the poetic name of Big Meadow, a close friend found something extraordinary that speaks of these people’s values. Eighty-year-old minutes of the township board refer to cases in which the board considered payments to local citizens asking for help. A decade before the New Deal, this local government believed it had a responsibility to use taxpayer dollars for what today some derisively call “welfare.” The people of Big Meadow articulated a fundamental principle that represents the heart of what I term Liberal America: the duty of government is to insure a level playing field.

Keeping the playing field level means government serves to assure votes are counted fairly, to maintain a free “marketplace of ideas,” and to provide an equal education for every American. Its values lie behind the ringing inaugural addresses of FDR and JFK as well as what is the single greatest American speech of the last century, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" masterpiece.

The fingerprints of liberalism lie everywhere on this nation, from public buildings built by the Works Progress Administration, to schools, roads, homes and utilities paid for by government subsidies. You cannot pass through any city, drive on any road, visit any national park, or enter any school, hospital, or government building without passing over ground built by Liberal America. Liberalism pervades every American household, where someone has benefited from government programs, ranging from college loans to unemployment, from the minimum wage and collective bargaining to regulations assuring the safety of the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We do not live in fear of someone arbitrarily knocking down our doors in the middle of the night or of not being able to speak our minds, because the people who fought for those rights believed in the level playing field.

Now the level playing field is under fire from a Republican Counterrevolution determined to take us back to 1900. This site will focus on those who are defending the level playing field and identifying trends and actions that would increase its already-dangerous tilt.