Bill Becker worked for two decades in the U.S. Department of Energy. Bill is the executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project. I had the good fortune to meet him at a conference at Oberlin College a year or so ago. I have been on the mailing list for his blog ever since.
Wanted: A Vision for America
By William S. Becker
Joe Biden has just released an updated clean-energy platform, inspired in part by his desire to attract Sanders’ voters with stronger plans for leading a “clean energy revolution”. His new plan contains nine elements that range from holding polluters accountable to helping fossil energy workers displaced by the energy transition.”
It’s a predictable list and unlikely to satisfy climate hawks. But what its missing most is a vision for the nation. That has been the case for all of the policy platforms we saw from the Democrats who sought the presidency. Vice President Biden needs to communicate a unifying vision that is uplifting, principled, and aligned with the nation’s highest ideals. It needs to invoke the better angels who have been on sabbatical in America for too long. It needs to remind us what we all (or nearly all) have in common, rather than where we disagree.
Donald Trump dominates the presidential accessories market with “Make America Great Again”. It’s punchy enough to fit on a baseball cap, and everybody wants America to be great. Unfortunately, there is little agreement on what “great” is, and the devil is in the details.
Earlier this year, one of the pollsters posed Ronald Reagan’s famous debate question: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago.” The response was a predictable and resounding yes. That was before CVID-19 changed everything.
But even when the stock market was setting record highs and joblessness was low, those are superficial and temporary metrics that don’t tell us much about “great”. Are we morally and ethically great right now? Are we united around a shared aspiration for our country? Is our Congress functional? Does the rest of the world respect us? Are we at peace?
Do we respect and trust the most powerful guy on the planet?
When Dr. Martin Luther King stood at the Lincoln Memorial to tell us his dream, he didn’t recite a list of policy proposals. He let the better angels speak. His dream lifted us (or most of us) up.
This not to dismiss or belittle policy promises. Federal policies have been my bread and butter for the last 20 years. They form the roadmap to the future we want. Goals such as net-zero by 2050 are the mile markers. But we need something more. Trump has had the bully pulpit and the Twitter megaphone to dominate every daily news cycle for three years, so we have a pretty good idea of what his vision is. Joe Biden needs to give us an alternative. Here are some examples he can consider:
a) We want America to be an inspiration to the world rather than a disappointment. Let’s Make America Proud Again.
b) We want a country that guarantees equal opportunity for all its people, but not necessarily equal results. We should not expect success to be given to us. We should earn it.
c) We want a nation that values and cares for its natural resources, whether it’s wilderness and biodiversity or clean air, water, and skies.
d) We want a nation that cares about future generations.
e) We want a country that has grown past the propaganda that we can’t have environmental protection and lots of jobs at the same time. We can, and we must. The solar, wind energy, energy efficiency, and environmental restorations sectors are proving it.
f) We want to be finally and truly energy independent. Trump says we already are because we produce more oil than anyone else. He’s wrong. By one count, the oil disruption we are experiencing now is the 20th over the last 40 years. Shouldn’t we switch to energy that is inexhaustible, ubiquitous, harvested harmlessly, and free? You know, resources like sunlight, wind, geothermal energy, hydroelectricity, and bioenergy that the Saudis and Russians can’t manipulate?
g) We want America to be an active and constructive part in the community of nations. Let’s stop pretending that we can stand alone when all nations are inexorably bound together in the modern world. It’s probably unavoidable that an egomaniacal president will have an egomaniacal foreign policy. Let’s fix it..
h) We want an inclusive nation that respects the rights and the contributions of all races, religions, and nationalities who contribute to America’s success.
i) We need to stop using GDP as the only indicator of America’s health. It doesn’t measure happiness. And we should redefine growth to prioritize quality over quantity.
j) We want to be a country that pays it forward, we give back to our communities with volunteerism and civic engagement, and give back to our country with national service.
k) We want a country that lives up to the expectations of our greatest leaders, where we will “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” in the words of President Kennedy; where we judge each other by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin, in the words of Dr. King; where our greatest concern is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God’s side, in the words of Abraham Lincoln; where “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much (but) whether we provide enough for those who have little” in the words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; where we see wars as a “plague of mankind” and work to banish them from the Earth, as George Washington hoped; where we truly are that shining city on hill that President Reagan invoked; and where in the words of President Barack Obama, we “recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideas and those who died in their defense.”
That is the country we should be, Joe Biden might say, and that is the country we will be again.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s worth recalling the sermon by John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” from which Reagan’s speechwriter (Peggy Noonan, I believe it was) took this phrase about the “city on a hill.” Winthrop wrote it aboard the ship Arabella in 1630, on the way to the New World to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His point was that the people with him and whom he would govern for twelve years were bound by a commission from God to care for one another, to make certain that the needs of all were met, and not to take in an excessive or unseemly way for themselves. Here’s what Winthrop said. I’ve added a couple notes, in brackets, to help clarify the text by placing it in context.
Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke [God turning his wrath upon the colonists], and to provide for our posterity, is to followe the counsell of Micah, to doe justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his oune people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes. Soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome, power, goodness and truthe, than formerly wee haue been acquainted with. Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it likely that of New England.” For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of God, and all professors for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither wee are a goeing.
“Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities.”
“Wee must . . . make other’s conditions our oune.”
This is how one becomes a “shining city on a hill” and not “a story and a by-word throughout the world.” (This phrase strikes home, doesn’t it, in a time when Trump has made us a laughingstock and object of pity throughout the world?) Reagan didn’t have a clue what this line about the “city on a hill” meant when he mouthed it, for in context we can see that it means precisely the opposite of the notions calcified into Reaganite Libertarian philosophy: We have a responsibility not to engorge ourselves at others’ expense, to take to ourselves “superfluities,” but to ensure that the needs of all our citizens, “other’s necessities,” are met—needs for safety, food, shelter, education, healthcare, recreation. That’s how we become a shining city on a hill.
LikeLike
Thanks, Bob. Long time since I read that piece, and I recalled none of it. Such is the memory. That Winthrop must have been uneducated. He sure had trouble with spelling.
LikeLike
LOL. I know you are joking, Roy, but others here might not.
LikeLike
Sheesh. What crappy grammar.
LikeLiked by 1 person
John always says the nicest things about your writing, Greg.
LikeLike
So what Winthrop meant by the “city on a hill” bit is that the colony would be seen, by God and by the entire world, and would be judged according to whether its members conducted themselves in a godly fashion by loving one another and taking care of one another rather than by pursuing their private engorgement and aggrandizement.
LikeLike
Well said. I must remember some of these.
LikeLike
Bob, many thanks for this excerpt. Am I right in recalling that Winthrop also wrote about settling on lands cleared previously by local natives, and eating foodstuff from their abandoned gravesites? I have some memory of Winthrop seeking to pay the natives for what the English took, considering their good fortune to settle in an already settled place a gift to them from God, but I may mistake it as Winthrop.
.
LikeLike
You probably know as much of this as I, Ira, if not more.
Winthrop noted that the natives did not claim property but moved camp as they saw fit and used this as an excuse for the Puritans’ claiming and using what was common to all and so claimed by none. However, he did draw the line at taking land that the native people had already tilled for their own use. But like other Puritans (with rare exceptions like Roger Williams), Winthrop believed that the people of God had a divinely inspired destiny to claim for God’s people lands formerly used by folks whom he deemed “savages” (though he had higher opinions of them than did some of his fellows). Perhaps others who know more than I can answer your superb questions more fully, Ira. But all this soon became moot because disease and, later, war pretty much wiped the natives out. The most egregious of the leaders among these folks, to my mind, were William Bradford (leader of the separatist Pilgrim colony at Plimoth (Plymouth) and, later, Cotton Mather, the magistrate and preacher. On the very day that Bradford’s pilgrims landed in the New World, stupidly, in mid-winter, Bradford’s men went into an Indian village (the natives had scattered at their approach) and STOLE THEIR ENTIRE STORE OF FOOD FOR THE WINTER!!!! Then Bradford penned in his diary thanks to the Lord for so providing, without a second’s thought about having condemned the folks of that village to starvation. What a presaging of what was to come all across the continent!!!! Both Bradford and Mather wrote of the New World being the Devil’s territory, inhabited by savages who served him, and of their duty to cleanse it. Sickening. Here’s Bradford (from his Of Plimoth Plantation):
The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast & unpeopled countries of America, which are frutfull & fitt for habitation, being devoyd of all civill inhabitants, wher ther are only salvage & brutish men, which range up and downe, litle otherwise then ye wild beasts of the same.
“Unpeopled” because Bradford didn’t consider Indians to be people.
Here’s Mather (from Wonders of the Invisible World):
The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession. There was not a greater Uproar among the Ephesians, when the Gospel was first brought among them, than there was among, The Powers of the Air (after whom those Ephesians walked) when first the Silver Trumpets of the Gospel here made the Joyful Sound. The Devil thus Irritated, immediately try’d all sorts of Methods to overturn this poor Plantation
The Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted as its seal a drawing of a native with a kind of thought bubble pendant next to the native’s mouth saying, “Come over and help us.” They certainly did. On a slight pretext, they burned down an Indian village at Mystic with 700 men, women, and children in it, while these people were sleeping, killing them all, and they spread disease that killed almost all the Indians of New England.
As you doubtless know, Roger Williams, who was expelled from Salem and founded Rhode Island, was a great exception. He argued that land couldn’t be taken from natives except by purchase from them and created the first bilingual dictionary of native/English speech.
LikeLike
The only thing I disagree with is that the “better angels” have NOT been on sabbatical. The “better angels” have been marginalized, side lined and pushed aside because their truth does not match that of “the establishment” (Political Parties) who love markets, money and profit. We have an entire political class that prioritizes profits over humanity and only allows those who are willing to tow the political line to take part in the political process. Sure, there are a few politicians who have broken into the rank and file, but they too, are marginalized and pushed aside.
LikeLike
Exactly right; many, many folks have been wide awake to the deprivations of the past 40 years.
LikeLike
“We need to stop using GDP as the only indicator of America’s health. It doesn’t measure happiness.”
Strange word in the American Experience, happiness. When Jefferson used it in the context of the Declaration of Independence, he was referring to the word that came from Greek and suggested the opportunity to participate fully in a democratic society as a full member of that society. It implied that true happiness came from this participation I society.
Whether Trumpist or some other philosophy, I fear that the modern paradigm is to sort of drop out of political society, becoming either dependent on a government that organizes everything or an unwitting parasite on that government. Or both.
Has society become too complex? We all must trust the science advisors for the information we base our political decisions on. The Covid has highlighted this more than ever, but it has been true for over a century. We must, in a modern world, have a robust governmental science for assuring us of the purity of our supply of food and medicines. This depends on the monetary support of a scientific bureaucracy that is apolitical. Can such a thing be maintained in the face of corruption? We likewise need a professional body of economists independent of monetary entities that stand to benefit from the governmental decisions. Can it be done?
No amount of Happiness, the Greek thing about democratic participation, will solve the increasingly complex world we live in. Covid has underlined that fact.
LikeLike
How about green caps w/the slogan: “Make America Clean Again?”
(I’m afraid if the word “green” were on the cap rather than “clean,” the venture capitalists/corporations/hedge fund vultures would interpret the green as $$$$$$$.)
LikeLike
“Make America Clean Again.” We can start by dumping Trump.
LikeLike
yes. Rid the country of the Moronavirus trumpinski orangii
LikeLike