The State of the Union

The State of the Union by Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn delivered this talk in Waltham, Massachusetts, on November 18, 2008, days after Barack Obama's election as the nation's first African American president. Zinn expresses genuine happiness at the historic result, noting that enough white voters supported a Black candidate to show real progress, but he focuses his talk on a phrase Obama used during the campaign: the desire not just to end the war but to end "the mindset that got us into war in the first place." Zinn sets out to identify that mindset and question whether Obama has actually escaped it. He argues the mindset rests on the false premise that government and people share common interests. Tracing this back to the Constitution's framing by fifty-five rich white men in Philadelphia, Zinn contends the document was designed to benefit bondholders, slaveowners, merchants, and land expansionists rather than the majority. He recalls pre-Revolutionary food riots, slave rebellions, and tenant uprisings, arguing the Revolution itself was not the unified colonial effort taught in schools: Black people gained nothing from it since the British, not the Americans, offered them freedom; Indians lost their protective boundary against colonial expansion; and soldiers mutinied against Washington's officers. He links Shays' Rebellion of 1786 directly to the framers' motivation for a strong central government in the 1787 Constitution. Zinn identifies a second element of the mindset: "American exceptionalism," the belief that the United States uniquely brings democracy and liberty abroad. He disputes this by pointing to what has been done to the Cubans, the people of Latin America, Hawaii, the Philippines, and lately the people of the Middle East, and distinguishes real patriotism, as defined by Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, and the Declaration of Independence, from mere obedience to government. A third element is unquestioning faith in free-market capitalism as the only alternative to Stalinism, which Zinn says leaves people unprepared for recurring economic crises and enduring poverty. A fourth element is the belief that military force is a necessary and legitimate response to threats, which he says paved the way for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zinn criticizes Obama directly for planning to withdraw from Iraq while increasing troops in Afghanistan, comparing this to destroying an entire neighborhood to catch one hidden criminal. He cites the official 9/11 Commission report and one of its investigators to argue that American occupation and foreign policy in the Middle East, not insufficient military strength, caused the attack, noting that the United States already had bases in a hundred countries and thousands of nuclear weapons when 9/11 occurred. He compares Obama's position to FDR's, arguing FDR only acted boldly on the Depression because of strikes and grassroots agitation, and suggests Obama's enthusiastic young supporters must organize into a genuine social movement rather than passively waiting for change. He connects domestic and foreign policy through the $600 billion military budget, arguing that a bold domestic program going beyond the New Deal, including single-payer health care, requires redirecting military spending and adopting a more progressive tax structure, including a wealth tax. Zinn discusses his own history as a World War II bombardier, describing how he came to see even that "good war" as morally complicated: motives like saving the Jews or the Chinese were not what drove the imperial powers—France, England, the United States—or Stalin's Russia, and the conduct of the war, including the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and cities throughout Germany and Japan, involved its own atrocities. He recalls receiving a letter from General Marshall promising a "new world" after the war that never materialized, since fascism gave way to continued racism, militarism, and further wars. He recounts contacts with figures from the civil rights movement, including Marian Wright Edelman, Bob Moses, Alice Walker, and Vincent Harding, who share his complicated feelings about Obama, agreeing that he will only achieve meaningful change if pushed by an organized movement, with Harding suggesting Obama act as a "community-organizer-in-chief" rather than commander-in-chief. Zinn traces the early twentieth-century socialist movement of Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Jack London, Emma Goldman, and Clarence Darrow, arguing the Soviet Union unfairly discredited socialism's good name, which he believes can now be restored given capitalism's failures, including child poverty and mass incarceration. He closes by reviewing how past grassroots movements produced real, if limited, gains, including the eight-hour workday, labor and social security legislation, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments driven by the antislavery movement, and civil rights victories driven by mass movements rather than by Kennedy, Johnson, or Congress. Zinn warns against treating any single leader as a savior, insisting that lasting change requires sustained grassroots organizing built up over time, sometimes decades, through small actions and small groups.

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Political Commentary, Historical Critique, Social Commentary · 5,536 words

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Waltham, Massachusetts, November 18, 2008.

Zinn gave this talk at Back Pages Books a little more than a week after the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first African American president. Though it was a time of euphoria, with many hoping that the new president would put an end to the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, Zinn raised questions that would soon prove prescient.

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American politics · social criticism · government critique · historical analysis · economic inequality · labor movements · civil rights · activism · social justice · war and militarism · imperialism · capitalism critique

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