Can you identify the musician who wrote these lyrics?.
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
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That was easy, right? Forty years ago, John Lennon released his landmark song and album by the same name Imagine. For Americans that year, it seemed as if politics, music and new intellectual currents were converging to remake society along more egalitarian lines. After Martin Luther King's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the urban riots of 1967, the 'Gestapo tactics' used by police on protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the tragic assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 - along with the Tet Offensive (Vietnam) and the first moon landing in 1969, America ought to have been mentally and socially exhausted. Not so. A new, indefatigable generation of young people, known as 'Baby Boomers,' were tenacious and refused to give up their ideals of economic and social justice. Two members of the World War II generation figured into their continued campaign in 1971 - one of which was the unlikeliest of allies.
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Richard Nixon: The Last Liberal President
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Say the name 'Richard Nixon' and several things come to mind: Watergate, his resignation from the presidency (1974), his 'Checkers' speech (1952) and his uniquely off-putting demeanor. Of course, Nixon was no friend to the 60s movement. He was an ardent anti-communist and suspicious (if not paranoid) of hippies and protesters. During his time in office, the FBI spied on John Lennon and considered him something akin to an enemy of the state. Yet at the same time, Nixon was a pragmatic politician and certainly no libertarian.
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Similar to most Democrats, Nixon, as a political centrist, believed it was necessary for government to act as a broker between private interests and the public welfare. As such, Nixon not only created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 but also instituted wage and price controls a year later to curb inflation and prevent working class Americans from sliding into the economic abyss. Undoubtedly, his decision stemmed from the efficacy and popularity of price controls set by the Office of Price Administration during the Second World War. Upon its abolition in 1947, prices skyrocketed, business profits soared and Americans (especially women) took to the streets to protest for its re-institution. That did not happen - not until twenty-four years later.
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To be sure, Nixon was dead set against the idea at first, but pressure from citizens and the media to rein in inflation forced him to rethink the idea. After he announced his plan to institute wage and price controls for a ninety-day period, most citizens applauded the move (in fact, a majority of Americans approved of wage-price controls until 1979) and the Dow Jones posted the largest single-day gain in its history the day after. Imagine - a measure to ensure economic security drove investors into the market.
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For all of his mistakes, Nixon placed the welfare of the people ahead of corporate profits with respect to the environment and the economy from 1970-1971. Meanwhile, a scholarly treatise with the banal title A Theory of Justice was being published by an unknown academic. It would create intellectual waves for the next twenty years.
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John Rawls: Liberty and Justice for All
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Born into a modest household in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921, John Rawls (1921-2002) was the shy, quiet and studious type. While he served in the Pacific in World War II, earned a PhD from Princeton in 1950 and would go on to become one of the pre-eminent philosophers of his time at Harvard University, Rawls wanted neither the accolades nor the spotlight. He was a true gentleman - humble and gracious.
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In his masterpiece A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls began with a highly creative premise. What kind of societal values would men and women stress if they were to enter a world without any knowledge as to how their skills and knowledge would translate (if at all) into economic and social status within that society? In short, one could be poor, rich or somewhere in between. According to Rawls, most people in this scenario would opt for a base of security and construct a society whereby wealth was redistributed to ensure disadvantaged people did not starve and had every opportunity to rise toward the middle class. This ethical society would be created out of one of finest emotional-spiritual ideas humanity possesses - empathy, or the ability of a person to imagine himself or herself in the shoes of someone struggling with hardship - and helping them as needed. For Rawls, this was essentially the heart of ethics and seemingly - common sense.
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The End of American Imagination...and The Beginning
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Only two years later in 1973, the American economic juggernaut came to a halt. Since then, real wages as measured against prices have been largely stagnant. Union membership has decreased, and unemployment/underemployment have increased. The neoliberal economists from the Reagan-Thatcher era have ruled the day since 1980. Their drive toward deregulation, smaller government and blind faith in big business to create jobs has led to the highest income inequality (the top 10% of society earns 49.7% of total wages) and largest wealth inequality (the richest 1% of Americans possesses 34.6% of all wealth) since 1917 and the Great Depression respectively. The much touted 'market solutions' by business leaders and their politicians in tow have created disruption and needless suffering for tens of millions of people. Good jobs, ones that offer remunerative wages and health care benefits, are now out of reach for a staggering number of citizens in the current Great Recession.
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Meanwhile, the prophecy of New Deal economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his once widely-read book The Affluent Society (1958) has come true. In predicting that a consumer-based society devoid of any mechanism for redistribution would produce "A self-perpetuating margin of poverty at the very base of the income pyramid (that) goes largely unnoticed, because it is the fate of a voiceless minority," Galbraith was entirely correct. The United States, still the richest country in the world, contains 45 million people below the poverty line - 1 out of every 7 Americans .
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Although the 'Occupy' protesters have raised consciousness of income/wealth inequality in America and around the world, the current political climate is still hostile toward redistribution or of taking any interventionist measures on par or greater than Nixon's wage and price controls in 1971.
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To reclaim America, Americans need to reclaim their imaginations. When Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to an audience at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, That all men are created equal,'" he was not speaking only of racial equality - he was also speaking of equal economic opportunity and security - as the campaign was entitled the 'March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.' Jobs and Freedom - they are inextricable in modern society. If a person is poor or even underemployed, that person is not truly free. King dared to imagine a more just world. As a result, millions of Americans followed his dream, and today, a black man sits in the White House not as a guest - but as the head of state.
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In order to halt the decline of wages, the erosion of affordable health care and the leveling of the middle class, Americans must re-imagine their society along more egalitarian lines with government acting as a check and regulator of corporate power - a power that increasingly measures the 'bottom line' in terms high profits and large dividend checks for shareholders instead of good wages for workers and a high quality of life for all citizens.
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To turn America into a more just society, Americans must first change the national conversation. All Americans must read, write and think about the hardships of their fellow citizens in a society where the content of one's character has become less valuable than the size of one's bank account. This must change.
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If Scandinavian countries can post annual increases in their GDPs with national health insurance systems, programs of free education through university and laws allowing for paid maternity leave for an extended period of time, then America can do the same.
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Americans need to be as economically flexible in their thinking as Nixon, as ethically-minded as Rawls and as empathic and hopeful as Lennon.
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In 1971, the year Imagine was released, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York City - the heart of the American dream. And they imagined.
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You may say I'm a dreamer
but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you will join us
and the world will live as one
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(Image: A watercolor portrait of John Rawls)
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(To listen to the song Imagine - celebrating its fortieth anniversary in 2011 - please click onto the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7qaSxuZUg)
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Key Sources
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Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post war America (New York: Random house, 2003)
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Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011)
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The author is an American
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J Roquen