david levering lewis delivers keynote

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS:

It is a gorgeous day, isn't it? Rather close weather forecast I would say. President Marshall, trustees, distinguished honorees, students and parents, alumni, friends of Wheaton, my old friend Roger Wilkins, I stand before you on this Saturday morning both humbled and exhilarated. Ten years ago next October I came to Wheaton to deliver the inaugural Jane Ruby Humanities Lecture. Today I return to receive a most singular honor and to meet the challenge of addressing the graduating class of 2003.

Now, the husband of your Board of Trustees president (so sadly and regrettably absent) has just introduced me in adjectives befitting the David Levering Lewis I shall now aspire to become. However, it would be a serious mistake on my part were I not to adduce the most compelling of all reasons behind my presence today--for the real measure of my intelligence and the fullest source of my achievements is the Wheaton alumna and trustee emerita whose spouse I became nine years ago, Ruth Ann Stewart. She, like my companion honoree Esther Newberg, and your board President, Patricia King, is of that triumphant class of '63, select members of which have asked me not to be boring today.

You may find the comparison far-fetched, but as I reached for ideas and language appropriate to this occasion, the words of Napoleon to his army before the pyramids echoed in my thoughts: "Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you." The gaze from the 40th reunion class is almost as unnerving.

The thing to be remembered about the best commencement speeches is brevity. Their least common characteristic is memorable content. I hope to be remembered for both brevity and content. Mine is the advantage as a biographer and a historian of being able to call attention to some historical moments of especial saliency for this graduating class.

The class of 2003 goes out into an America whose profound racial reconstruction will be marked next year by celebration and contemplation of the 50th anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education. You are going to work and play, bond, vote and parent in a multicultural nation of accelerating ethnic, demographic, gendered and politico-economic complexity. It's a nation that has come about in major measure because of a contagious civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, whose momentum has empowered women, ethnics, gays and other challenged categories that continue to emerge and lay claim to a fair share of the vaunted American dream. For nothing could be more obvious to us now than that the black civil rights struggle commenced the fight for the optimal expansion of everybody's rights.

A half century of human rights programs, such as it has been, is a milestone of which all Americans should be proud; but the considerable social gains of the last 50 years are only as authentic and as enduring as your vigilant guardianship makes them.

I hardly need tell you that you have your work cut out for you. Your generation is facing not only concerted assaults through the federal courts upon minority advancement in secondary and higher education and women's reproductive rights, you and we confront the most formidable, and related, assault upon the very possibility of economic democracy in this country since the late 1890s.

To many this massive assault seems to come out of nowhere. Yesterday, we had a republic; today we have the Homeland Security State. How has this happened? As William Greider warned in his disturbing exploration of free market globalism, One World, Ready or Not, "the right has seized the revolutionary banner of the left"--a strange triumph it seems to some of us in which money trumps root interest and corporate royalists have captured Joe Six-Pack's loyalties. The beginnings of the neoconservative or radical right political triumph antedate the Reagan revolution by some three decades, back to the beginnings of the Cold War and the origins of a group of intellectuals cultivated and promoted by the CIA. A British observer has tracked its history in a book whose title is its argument: The World Turned Right Side Up.

But what precisely is this radical right revolution and what has it achieved? After years of false starts around the National Review and the American Spectator, after years spent brooding in a handful of conservative, second-tier think tanks and foundations and in the monied purlieus of Orange County, after much grassroots organizing among fundamentalist Christians in the American heartland and the states of the Old Confederacy, after nullifying the political leverage of the eastern WASP establishment over the Republican party in order to promote the new money men from the southwest and west, and after lobbying always and everywhere for personal tax relief for the rich and the corporations while stigmatizing advocates of economic equity and civil rights as Communists or just plain liberals, after two decades of electronics and print media saturated with anecdotal evidence of "reverse discrimination" in industry and a national decline in public morals and educational standards largely blamed on the alleged perversion of the original goals of the civil rights movement--and not least, after devising an emotive political language (coded for race and gender) aimed at working class whites and their struggling suburban cousins--the radical right has emerged as a powerful vote-getting synthesis of antithesis: populism bonded to plutocracy. (Applause.)

The movement was organic in its appeal to hierarchy, tradition and wealth, yet it swore by a Jeffersonian wariness of government and a Jacksonian resentment of old money and elite culture. It made possible for the employees of industry that were being downsized or completely disappearing to vote for the politicians owned by the very people who were forcing these employees to work for less wages and no benefits and, indeed, increasingly not to be able to work at all.

The radical right tapped into those ancient underground veins of nativism, fundamentalism, and anti-intellectualism, paranoia, violence and gender consternation, in order to produce an alloy combining, as seldom before, the politics of resentment with that of economic royalism.

This squaring of political and cultural circles amounts to an epic achievement tracking back to that electric moment in 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater, the GOP standard bearer, solemnly announced that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.... Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," thereby issuing the radical right its first marching orders.

When Ronald Reagan took the South with the exception of Georgia in 1980 and then in the landslide in 1984, with George Bush the first following in 1988, the polsters and pundits proclaimed an historical fundamental realignment in national politics--a realignment decisively driven by the solid Republican South.

A drumbeat of prophecies held that "as the united South goes, so goes the nation," which is to say that in a sense more real than John C. Calhoun could have imagined, the South has now and for many years to come the power to reshape the social and economic life of a nation. Rather than the South losing its identity, the rest of America may now be said to be in the process of becoming religiously and socially conservative, anti-government and economically maldistributed.

Still, it has taken much more than the winning of the South by the GOP to win the hearts and minds of much of the rest of America. A nonblatant racism--seductive because of its sophistication and inoffensive to consciences because it can even seem highly principled--was indispensable as a corollary and revision of that crude political iconography that utilized welfare queens and Willy Hortons and the transparent rhetoric of a David Duke.

The Bush White House number two reproaches Senator Lott in tones worthy of Abraham Lincoln in one week only to deplore race as an element of access in higher education as divisive and un-American but a few weeks later.

The radical right has excelled in the manipulation of the cultural and intellectual debate, positioning itself as defenders of civilization as we know it--of standards, values and family, of citizens' rights, character and virtue. What is increasingly wrong with America, they harmonize, is that too many influential Americans have been too ready to abandon the solid solutions of the past for soft-headed, costly responses to the problematic future. Too much government, too much welfare, not enough warfare, too much affirmative action, too much multi-culturalism, gay rights and freedom of choice over women's bodies, too much pornography and too little prayer.

Who among us here doesn't know that since the 1980s the maldistribution of income in the United States has become greater in favor of the rich than in any other modern democracy and is rapidly growing worse? More to the point, there are no jobs in an economy where money chases after money and business mergers produce watered stock and a contracting labor market in which real goods are produced mostly anywhere but here.

In 2003 the political ethos in which taxes for social democratic initiatives can be meaningfully debated no longer exists. Instead, the incumbent administration prescribes more tax relief for the richest and deficit finances billions for regime changing. While it was a mock news story in a satirical weekly that quoted President-Elect Bush II as saying, "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over," the present Bush reality has come precisely to that.

Your class was the last one to enter college as the stock market was still climbing. "Graduates lower sights in stagnant job market," the New York Times of May 14 announces, in the face of the worst hiring slump in 20 years. Now, this may be good news for medical and law schools, even for graduate history departments, but it's rather bad news for your parents and for many of you who will carry crushing debt out of these temporary professional-school detours from unemployment.

Asha Rangaraj, a Chapel Hill senior quoted in that same Times article, expresses an optimism characteristic of your subspecies: "I think it's definitely temporary. Two or three years, and everything will be back to normal." Maybe so, but it is not unlikely Miss Rangaraj won't find a job she really wants or one with a decent pension and affordable health benefits.

The formula for these occasions invariably stipulates that the future belongs to the graduating class. Today, however, it very much looks like your future might be a very close call, for the options confronting you in the era of September 11, 2001, are truly consequential. Like Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, 9/11 is one of the mega-intervals in our national experience that will set the agenda for much of the 21st century.

You will remember that in the immediate wake of September 11th, we Americans catechized ourselves against the deadly temptation of inflating the savagery committed by a syndicate of religious fanatics into a clash of civilizations--a global war of "us, the modern" versus "them, the outmoded." Indeed, when President Bush famously asked, "Why do they hate us?" many were encouraged to believe that there might be an earnest and informed search for answers to that pressing question. Regrettably, I think it must be conceded that such a commendable mindset has been overwhelmed by a simplistic, puerile war on terrorism whose objectives are now grotesquely ecumenical and of indefinite duration.

In a forthcoming book by a Princeton economist Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, the author makes a bitter allegation that the republic has been high-jacked by a movement "whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system." Now one hopes that Krugman's charge is an exaggeration. Even so, despite the pledge to be on our guard against self-fulfilling prophecies, it seems that the government and a significant portion of the public see themselves as living in a black-and-white world of clashing civilizations in which the rules of contact are cynically devised.

All this is rather depressing, and I take no satisfaction being the bearer of bad news on this potentially warm, sunny morning; but the good news is that where we go from this moment in history will depend decisively upon the direction women and men such as you chart for the nation.

One solemn commitment that is imperative you keep is--as they used to say in my political-analyst wife's Chicago hometown--to vote early and vote often. I wish I could feel more sanguine about your voting-box choices, but the last words on that subject pronounced by the man I spent so much time with, W.E.B. Du Bois, remain especially apt. He said, "Today," said he 40 years ago, "The rich and powerful rulers of America divide themselves into Republicans and Democrats in order to raise [millions of] dollars to buy the next election and prevent you from having a third party to vote for, or stop war, theft, and murder by your votes."

But the good news is still about you, regardless of the fears and the challenges. The future of this country and of this global century will be written by this splendid graduating class.

If I've learned anything from my profession, it is that the future is never certain until it becomes history. As beneficiaries of a superb Wheaton education, you are expected to play a significant part in the writing of the American future and help determine, thereby, whether you will be citizens of an American empire that mimics imperial Rome or of a republic dedicated to the planetary spread of knowledge, science and technology through democracy. As I close in saluting you, Class of 2003, I envy your options because they really are breathtakingly historic. And now it's up to you to make history come out the right way. Thank you.

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