Howard Zinn
Author
of A People's History of the United States shares his thoughts
on revisionist historians, the upcoming election and more with Robert
Birnbaum
It is unlikely that 20 years ago,
when Howard Zinn's magnum opus A People’s History of the
United States: 1492 to the Present was published, that anyone
thought it would sell close to two million copies and spawn an entirely
new historiography. Today, though not quite a household name, spry
octogenarian Zinn is a much in-demand lecturer, criss-crossing the
country, speaking to crowded halls and auditoriums and continuing
his life-long commitment to social justice activism.
Zinn’s radically revisionist analysis of history
from the grassroots up is of a piece with his support for various
progressive movements and causes—from labor to civil rights,
to Vietnam, to the women’s liberation movement. He unflinchingly
protested the American imperial adventures that have taken place
around the planet, from Cuba to Chile to Haiti to Grenada to Panama
to Nicaragua, and, of course, Iraq. And his refusal to sequester
himself in the proverbial ivory tower of the academy is a story
delightfully related in his autobiography You Can’t Be
Neutral on a Moving Train.
In this, my fourth
or fifth
public conversation with him, Zinn talks about whether he has changed
his views and shares his thoughts on the upcoming election and the
newly published graphic/comic A People’s History of American
Empire with historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki.
A shorter version of this conversation appeared in Vice Magazine
as “Zinn and the Art of History Maintenance.”
Robert Birnbaum: What ever happened
to the HBO project?
Howard Zinn: [chuckles]
The famous HBO project. Well, before the HBO project here was the
Fox project, you see. And this must have been about ten years ago.
And what happened is that a vice president of Fox had read A
People’s History in college and then her bosses at Fox
Television on the West Coast asked her to find a good series for
Fox, a documentary series. She immediately thought of A People's
History. And then she was having dinner with an agent and told
him about it. He immediately called me. So I get a call from somebody
I didn’t know. He says, “Fox Television is interested
in doing a documentary series based on A People’s History
and I’d like to be your agent.” I said, “OK.”
And Fox doodled with it for two years. One of the reasons they were
interested was that his agent cleverly brought Matt Damon and Ben
Affleck into the picture and Chris Moore with me, the four of us
as executive producers. Of course, [Fox was] attracted by the names.
Aside from this vice president, probably none of them knew the book.
Anyway, Fox fooled around with it for a couple of years. Then dropped
it. My theory is that finally Rupert Murdoch read the book [both
laugh] and they dropped the project. I doubt it. He probably
hasn’t read a book for years. Whereupon Chris Moore, Ben Affleck,
Matt Damon and I—they flew me out to LA. The four of us visited
three television networks: ABC, TNT, HBO. Affleck pitched the story
of a documentary to all three and they all wanted it. We had a choice,
we chose HBO. HBO diddled with it for two years. Actually hired
three script writers—which we chose—John Sayles, to
write something on the Lowell mill girls, Howard Fast to write something
on the American Revolution and Paul Laverty (who works with Ken
Loach) to write something about Bartolomé de Las Cases. They
wrote scripts. HBO turned them down. And that was the end of the
project.
RB: Wow.
HZ: Now—for the first time
it has a real chance of being done. More than a chance. It will
probably be done. Chris Moore, who is an experienced Hollywood producer,
decided that he is going to do it. And so he is raising the money—it
is a two-and-a-half-million-dollar budget. And he has already spent
a good part of it organizing these performances which took place
in Boston in early January where we have quite well-known actors
reading the voices of historical figures like Frederick Douglas,
[Henry David] Thoreau and [Eugene Victor] Debs and Helen Keller
and Emma Goldman and mutinous soldiers of the American Revolution
and so we had coming to Boston for a few days to do these performance
at the Emerson Majestic Theater: Josh Brolin, Vigo Mortenson, and
Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Kerry Washington, others, David Strathan,
and they read these pieces from history to audiences of a thousand
people at each performance. And Chris Moore had twelve cameras in
the theater, and the result is we have fifteen hours or so of film,
which will be edited down into four hours of television.
RB: This is different than when it
was first proposed. This is no longer a docudrama—
HZ: That’s right, this is nonfiction.
This is real. What was envisioned before by Fox and HBO were feature
films based on incident—which, when you think about it, is
a very difficult thing to do. I am happier with the present situation
because, one, when you start to fictionalize history, you are in
great danger for moving away from what the historian intended to
do. You are caught up in the story, the drama, you sensationalize
it, distort it. And so, here, where I have final say over the script,
I feel very confident that what will come out will reflect my views
on American History. Which means what will come will be an in-your-face
[both laugh] radical history in which we feature dissenters
and troublemakers and visionaries and socialists and anarchists,
and if television is put off by that, well that’s too bad.
It’ll be a DVD. But right now they are editing the material
and preparing to show it at the Berlin Film Festival. They’ll
be showing it at Cannes in May and it's—to put it in Hollywoodese
terms—“It’s a go.”
RB: Interestingly enough, in the
coming months there will be yet another iteration of the People’s
History: the People’s History of the American Empire,
a graphic novel.
HZ: Yes.
RB: And I had to laugh...it reminds
me of a Mel Brooks line in one of his later films, about how they
were marketing something and, in exploiting the brand, he suggested
forthcoming bed sheets and towels—how many iterations of the
People’s History can there be?
HZ: Well, you are reflecting the
exasperation of my wife. Every time someone comes up with one of
these things, she says, “Please, enough, enough of the People’s
History.” Someone wants to do an animation. Some animation
group in Canada wants to do an animated People’s History,
like The Simpsons. And sure, as you pointed out, there
is this graphic history. They used to call them comic books. Do
you remember Classic comic books? They were good. I remember reading
A Tale of Two Cities as a comic book. So this graphic history
will come out in April.
RB: It's entitled A People’s
History of the American Empire, a bolder statement than the
original—and it effectively weaves your biography into the
presentation.
HZ: When I first looked at his [Mike
Konopacki’s] portrait of me, I said, “Hey!” [both
laugh]
RB: Real photos are included—there
is one of you and your parents.
HZ: Yes, actual photographs.
RB: Like Ken Burns.
HZ: He’s very good—Mike Konapacki.
Before this, he did labor cartoons for labor newspapers—
RB: Plural? There are still labor newspapers?
HZ: Yes.
RB: Anyway, there is a volume called Voices
of A People’s History and a CD of recordings.
HZ: Which Anthony Arnove and I put together. It’s
a spinoff—we started with little nuggets of quotations. The
People’s History is really full of little juicy paragraphs
of quotes and we decided to expand on that and have a book of the
words of these historical figures. So Voices is a substantial
book including about 200 documents. Instead of having a few sentences
from Las Casas, we’ll have two pages of him. We have a whole
speech by Emma Goldman on patriotism. And it goes from Christopher
Columbus right up to the Bush Administration and the so-called War
on Terror and the Iraq War. One of the last documents in it is an
Iraq [war] veteran, returning from Iraq, and he turns against the
war. That has been used as the basis for readings that have taken
place in various parts of the country in LA and New York for five
years now. We started in 2003 at the 92nd Street Y with readings
by James Earl Jones.
RB: Was that an anniversary of the book's publication?
HZ: What it was, was a celebration by Harper Collins
of the one-millionth copy sold of the People’s History.
We had a wonderful lineup of readers. We had Kurt Vonnegut and Alice
Walker. It was a lot of fun.
RB: And I saw A People’s History of
Sports coming out.
HZ: That’s right. It turns out I am the
general editor—something I never wanted to be—a general
editor. A general editor being someone who really doesn’t
do anything.
RB: Like an executive producer.
HZ: That’s right. The New Press, they do
a lot of good books, and they decided—another example of people
deciding—they look at the People’s History,
“My God it sold a million copies, what can we do with this?”
[laughs] Some editor at The New Press, probably André
Schiffrin, decided, let’s do a bunch of People’s History
of this and that—People’s History of Molasses.
So they said, will you be general editor of this series? I said,
I don’t want to be a general editor of anything. But then
they showed me the first volume, which had come to them—A
People’s History of the American Revolution.
RB: By Ray Raphael.
HZ: Have you ever talked to him?
RB: No.
HZ: He’d be an interesting guy to interview.
RB: He lives on the West Coast, I think.
HZ: He lives up on the very northern part of California, a little
town. He is not a professional historian. He is not an academic.
But he is a wonderful researcher. And it's interesting how he can
live in this little town with this little library and, through the
interlibrary loan and the Internet, he has all this material pouring
into his house, and he does wonderful research. So when I read the
People’s History of the American Revolution, I said,
“Wow, this is good. Okay.” We have that. We have A
People’s History of the Civil War out. There will be
A People’s History of Sports [in the United States],
which you mentioned. A People’s History of Art in The
United States. [laughs] They have already done A
People’s History of the Roman Empire.
RB: Who is doing revisionist history today? Eric Foner?
HZ: Yes.
RB: Gordon Wood?
HZ: I wouldn’t call Gordon Wood a revisionist historian.
Wood does write about the American Revolution but takes a very different
point of view than Ray Rapahel. Alfred Young, who is the dean of
historians of the American Revolution and who wrote a very critical
essay about Gordon Wood—he sees Wood writing about the Revolution
from the standpoint of the Great Man. There are a number of people
who write about that period who love to write about John Adams and
Jefferson and so on, but there are people who write about it for
A People’s History point of view. And Alfred Young
has done several volumes. Let me broach an interesting thing about
the American Revolution, if you don’t mind. You don’t
mind if your interviewee broaches interesting things?
RB: Not at all.
HZ: As opposed to the boring things that the interviewee has been
talking about. [both laugh]
RB: Knock yourself out.
HZ: I am waiting for somebody to write a book about the American
Revolution questioning the justice of the American Revolution. In
another words, asking, "Was this really a justified war?"
There are there holy wars in American History—the Revolutionary,
the Civil War and World War II. People are willing to say that the
Mexican War was imperialist—
RB: Now they are.
HZ: That's right. And the Spanish American War and Vietnam. But
there are holy wars. Untouchable, you know. Ken Burns does the Civil
War and then he does the WWII.
RB: Called it The War.
HZ: And there is nothing revisionist about that. I think it is
worth questioning the justice of those wars. It’s a complicated
moral issue. You might say Vietnam is easy. Iraq is easy. And the
Mexican War is easy. And there are no wars which are more morally
complicated. But the fact that there are morally complicated wars
shouldn’t stop us from examining them. And the American Revolution,
in terms of casualties, the bloodiest of wars. A lot of people don’t
recognize that. There were only three million people in the colonies
at that time. I’ll put it another way. It ranks with the Civil
War as—
RB: Percentage of casualties against the total population.
HZ: Yes, and the question is as questions in all of these holy
wars: Could the same objective have been accomplished, independence
from England, ending slavery, defeating Fascism—could those
have been accomplished at less than the bloody toll that was taken
and without corrupting the moral values of the victors in the war?
And with better outcomes? Those are questions worth asking. The
American Revolution won independence from England at the expense
of the Indians, at the expense of the Native Americans. What it
did, the English had set a line, the Proclamation of 1763, you couldn’t
go beyond it, into Indian territory. They didn’t want trouble
with the Indians. Independence from England takes place, the Proclamation
of 1763 is wiped out. The settlers are free to move into Indian
territory. Black People—most of them joined the British side
rather than the American side. It was not a revolution for them.
And the question I haven’t seen asked... Canada won its independence
from England without a bloody war... Conceivable? It’s like
asking the question about the nature of the Civil War. Slavery was
abolished in all of the countries of Latin America by 1833. Without
a bloody civil war. Now, of course, all those situations are different.
And complicated. All that I am saying is that I think there are
questions about history that so far have been untouched and untouchable
and should at least be opened up.
RB: I thought you were going to address who were the beneficiaries
of the American Revolution.
HZ: That’s another issue. Another aspect of it. Because the
constitution that came out of the American Revolution was a constitution
that benefited the slaveholders, the merchants, the bondholders.
It's interesting that the Constitution is looked upon in romantic
terms—as it always has been in the United States. What people
think of when they think of the Constitution is the Bill of the
Rights. That’s the nicest thing about the Constitution. The
Bill of Rights was not in the original Constitution, The Founding
Fathers did not want a Bill of Rights. They only put a Bill of Rights
in when there was protest and reaction. And what a lot of people
don’t understand, and this goes to your point about who benefited
from the Revolution—the soldiers who fought in the Revolution
did not benefit from the Revolution.
RB: Ergo the famous Shay’s rebellion.
HZ: Exactly.
RB: Actually, not so famous.
HZ: What is Shay’s Rebellion? It’s a question on a
multiple-choice test. [laughs] You ask people about Shay’s
Rebellion—“Oh yeah, Shay’s Rebellion.” What
do you know about it? “Nothing.” There is a connection
between Shay’s Rebellion and the Constitution, which the traditional
history books never talk about. They will mention Shay’s Rebellion
and of course they will talk about the Constitution and the Founding
Fathers. They will not say that the Constitutional Convention was
animated by the rebellions in Massachusetts and other places, and
those rebellions caused the Founding Fathers to decide to get together
in Philadelphia and draw up a document that would create a national
government strong enough to deal with rebellions like this. And
you have General Knox writing to Washington before the Constitutional
Convention, saying, “These soldiers of the revolution come
back and they think because they fought in the revolution they deserve
an equal share of the wealth of this country.”
RB: The nerve. [both laugh]
HZ: I remember learning in school—Oh the Constitution was
a great thing. The Articles of Confederation—that was weak.
The Constitution gave us a strong country. It gave strength to a
country, which would now be strong enough to put down troubles.
RB: Are the writers like McCullough and Joseph Ellis and Brookhiser,
are they historians?
HZ: [laughs] Are they historians? Ellis is a historian.
RB: Are they writing history?
HZ: They are writing history. From my point of
view they are writing superficial history, but, sure, they are writing
history. I do believe—McCullough is a very colorful writer
and some of his work has been really good—the history of the
Panama Canal. But I think it is important for historians not to
draw a line about their profession and to say we are historians,
and somebody like McCullough is a popularizer. I am all for popularizing—it
depends on how you do it.
RB: That’s why I didn’t want to talk about him as a
historian but whether he was doing legitimate history or hagiography.
HZ: When McCullough writes about Truman, a biography of Truman,
it passes very lightly over Hiroshima and Nagasaki--worse than passes
over lightly it. He seems to justify it by repeating Truman’s
defense of the bombing and not doing any critical examination of
it. And no critical examination of Truman’s prosecution of
the Rosenbergs and refusal to do anything about the Rosenberg case.
And even in his book on John Adams, he [McCullough] passes very
lightly over the Alien and Sedition Acts. So it’s not the
fact of popularizing, which is fine. Hoard Fast popularized history
in his novels but he did it in a meaningful and important way. But,
sure, I welcome non-professional historians. I remember Barbara
Tuchman, who wrote the book 1914, about World War I. Not
a professional historian but a very good historian, a colorful and
very fine writer. People like her and Ray Raphael should be welcomed
for what they do.
RB: I asked you because there seems to be a continuation of the
mythology of the godly heavenly mandate that seems to accrue to
the Founding Fathers. They seem to have a halo around them—
HZ: Exactly. The unfortunate thing about it is
not just that it is a misreading of history and a distortion of
the actual role these slave holders and wealthy people played in
putting down the poor and so on. Not just a misreading. What it
does—and to me this is most important—how you deal with
the past, what effect it has on the present. When you have hagiography
about figures of the past, what you are doing is creating in the
public an inclination to trust your leaders of the present and to
look upon them as important and not questoning them. I remember
during the Vietnam War, people saying, “Well, he’s the
president of the United States—"
RB: He knows what he is doing.
HZ: Even in the recent war, Dan Rather, a presumably intelligent
news commentator, saying, “Well, he’s my commander-in-chief
and what he says goes.”
RB: What is your sense of how history is being taught today?
HZ: Well, it's better than it used to be. And
still not adequate. Lets’s put it this way: a critical and
a people’s history—paying more attention to native Americans
and women and working people and so on—that has made inroads
in the teaching of history which didn't exist before.
RB: Have any public school systems adopted your book as a text?
HZ: Yes, yes, whole departments, whole schools. Actually, as I
think of it, more private than public schools. I guess simply because
private schools have more freedom than public schools. They are
not subject to state legislatures and politicians and so on. But
even in public schools, my book has been used more and more. This
is a relatively new development. When the book first came out, it—is
there such a thing as a libro non grata?
RB: Sure, usually they are burned. [both laugh]
HZ: Yes, but now I am a little worried about the book's respectability.
RB: Have you changed your mind about anything or things in the
last decade?
HZ: [chuckles]
RB: Do you see things differently at all?
HZ: [long pause] That’s a good
question. I suppose we all should be examining ourselves all the
time to see if we still hold the same views. Maybe all I can say
is I think my views have become intensified. I am even more persuaded
than I was ten years ago that governments are essentially rotten
and not to be trusted. To put it another way, the anarchist distrust
for government—as more history parades itself before us, the
more events come into our view—the anarchist distrust of government
seems to me more and more legitimate. After Jean Paul Sartre died,
and there were a lot of recollections of Sartre and so on, and someone
who interviewed him just before...I was thinking about Sartre being
interviewed just before he died and I became worried that you are
interviewing people just before they die. [both laugh]
Which is a very common thing in oral history. Its triage—you
think, "Who am I going to interview first?" and decide
to interview the oldest first. No, you don’t think that.
RB: I did have Kurt Vonnegut on my list of future conversations.
HZ: You missed out. One of my great fortunes was to become friends
with Kurt Vonnegut in the last ten years. By the way, they are making
a film--a documentary group in Chile is making a film--about Kurt
Vonnegut.
RB: Makes you wonder why an American group wouldn’t hop on
that idea immediately?
HZ: That’s right.
RB: There is a new Vonnegut anthology forthcoming and his son has
written the introduction.
HZ: You know his son wrote a memoir about his own mental illness?
RB: No.
HZ: He might be interesting to talk to. He lives in Milton, I think.
He’s a physician. He’s a schizophrenic and wrote a book
about it, and he came out of and went to Harvard Medical School.
RB: Amazing—we were talking about Sartre.
HZ: I’m sorry. I was saying, we started out with you asking
me if I had changed my views and somebody asked Sartre, in retrospect
on his life, “Do you have any regrets about the positions
that you took?” Sartre replied, “I wasn’t radical
enough.” [both laugh]
RB: He was an admirer of the Soviets, called a Stalinist apologist.
HZ: He was. That’s one of the things that caused a break
between him and Camus. When he said, "I wasn’t radical
enough," I don’t think he meant, "I wasn’t
Communist enough." I think he meant, on the other hand, that
it was more radical to recognize the limits of Communism--to be
a true Communist, a true radical.
RB: Because the people’s history unfolds the stories of the
marginalized and oppressed, the backlash of resentment against so-called
political correctness—when you have a litany of stories about
women and ethnicities and all manner of sexual identities, that
is dismissed as politically correct—has that subsided?
HZ: There will always be a clash, a continuing clash, between the
defenders of traditional history and those who are writing a more
radical and critical people’s history. I still keep getting
criticism—the work is not objective, you are biased. You saw
the [negative] review of A Young People’s History—talking
about offshoots—soon there will be A Baby’s History.
[laughs]
RB: This book, A People’s History of the American Empire,
ends with you pronouncing your great optimism, despite much evidence
to the contrary, about humanity triumphing. One wonders, [is it
a skeptical view or a cynical view, who would offer it’s the
grandeur of the American system to allow us our illusions? [Herbert]
Marcuse called it “repressive tolerance,” I think. Was
it [Emile] Zola or Anatole France who commented, “It’s
the grandeur of Prussian law that the nobleman as well as the vagrant
will be arrested for sleeping under the bridge”?
HZ: This whole issue of optimism and pessimism, cynicism and utopianism—these
issues will always be with us. Always you can draw up this double
list. Always. You can draw up this double list you started to draw
up, which is a terrifying list which shows we are still going to
stupid wars and still violating people’s liberties and all
of that is true. You can’t deny it. On the other hand, you
can also draw up a list which says there is a greater consciousness
today in this country about the rights of women than there was twenty
years ago. There is a greater consciousness of people to sexual
privacy. A greater consciousness about that. And the problem is—and
there is a greater consciousness of the futility of war–it’s
a consciousness which can be set aside when [there’s] a fusillade
of propaganda from the government and it’s echoed by the press,
and that’s what happened in the Iraq war. But when people
begin to learn facts and the information somehow makes its way even
through the major media, then people’s minds change. As they
have changed. And the problem is, of course, that the changing of
minds and the growing of consciousness does not immediately change
policy. We have the same policy going on, but under the surface,
consciousness changes. My optimism, if that’s what you want
to call it, which is not an optimism for the short term but for
the long term, it's based on the thought that when consciousness
develops at a certain point, it will break through that ceiling
and something will change. In the way that we have seen change take
place in other parts of the world. Where, apparently, all-powerful
governments have been toppled by popular protest. Not that these
popular uprisings have therefore lead to wonderful societies. They
show the possibility that power can be dislodged when enough people
become indignant and angry. As they did in the Soviet Union. What
happened in the Soviet Union was that under the sheet of total control
that the Communist Party exercised, there was a consciousness that
grew—samizdat and cultural change, murmurs of rebellion
and more and more contact with the outside world--and at a certain
point it broke through. Now, of course, what has happened in [the
former] Soviet Russia is not something admirable and yet we have
at least a suggestion that things can change and that power is not
always apparent—that the normal requisites of power, the military
power, money, secret police and so on—are not sufficient to
hold back change when enough people become aroused. South Africa
is a case in point. Where a remarkable change took place with the
ending of apartheid there. Now the change that has taken place is
not the best possible solution for the people of South Africa.
RB: We can make the same claim about Iran and the overthrow of
the Shah.
HZ: There was revolution in Iran […]—whoever holds
power in Iran there is a different consciousness than there was
with the Shah. Their revolution set ideas in motion, which are still
operative in Iran, below the surface of who is holding power. This
comes back to a question that you asked earlier, that is, Have I
changed my mind about anything? If I have changed my mind about
anything, it is about the timetable of progress. That is, that those
of us who have some hope for the future--maybe I’ll use the
word 'hope' instead of 'optimism' (hope is not as confident a statement
as optimism)--we have to create a longer time frame. We have to
assume that it will take a lot longer for things to change than
at one time we assumed. We can’t expect that big changes will
happen in our lifetime.
RB: But in some cases we face a deadline—as with global warming.
HZ: That’s true.
RB: And at one point we faced strong possibilities of nuclear war,
and the issue of proliferation even now haunts the moment.
HZ: Nuclear warfare is still a threat. And you are right about
global warming, which doesn’t allow the luxury of waiting.
And it’s a race and, I suppose, maybe the best justification
for hope and optimism is a pragmatic one—it is more useful
to be hopeful. At least it gives us some energy, give us a better
chance in this race. Because it is a race.
 RB:
Speaking of races, it is an election year. We will have a regime
change of sorts. What do you see at play in the presidential campaign
of 2008?
HZ: One of the things that has happened in 2008 that did not happen
in 2004 is that in 2004, although we had already been at war for
a year and a half, the Democratic candidate, Kerry, did not take
a clear antiwar stance. The Democratic candidates, even though the
details are murky, they have said, we are going to get us out of
the war. Hillary Clinton says, “I’m going to take us
out of Iraq.” They may not say exactly when but all have said
they were going to end the war. So we have made some progress since
the last election. There has been some recognition of the change
in public opinion about the war. More recognition about the stupidity
and futility and failure of the war. And that’s a good thing.
I don’t recall in the 2004 election that anybody came forward
very strongly with the idea of universal health care. It was not
a major issue. In fact in the election of 2004 it was very hard
to find a major issue that was presented in a clear way. Which is
one of the reasons that the Democrats lost. Now, all the Democrats
came forward with plans for what they call universal health care,
which are better than anything proposed previously, even though
they are not the best kind of plans. So I see some progress made,
I am hopeful that whoever the Democratic candidate is, the Republican
administration will be ousted in the next election. I say this not
on the basis of enormous enthusiasm for the Democratic candidates
but on the basis of an enormous distaste in the country for what
has been going on so far—the war and everything connected
with this administration. So I am hopeful for this election, although
even assuming that a Democrat is elected, whether Clinton or Obama,
I don’t expect there will be a radical change. I don’t
expect them to immediately get out of Iraq, I don’t expect
them to immediately institute what we need as a health plan—we
really need a single-payer system health plan. But I do expect that
they will be more open and sensitive to the popular currents swirling
around in the country. The Republican administration has been totally
deaf to whatever the people have been saying in the country. They
have been going their own way. They have felt very confident that
they can do whatever they want and not listen to anything that the
public is saying. I think that the Democratic candidates will at
least [have] the advantage of being more sensitive to public opinion.
RB: 2004 was about so called moral issues--which any number of
people, Thomas Frank in What’s Wrong with Kansas,
for example--explained why working people voted against their own
real interests.
HZ: The moral issues came to the fore because there was a vacuum
in other areas. And because what you are calling people’s
own interests were not really appealed to. And their interests were
not really identified and described by the candidates in such a
way as to make people aware that their interests were being jettisoned.
But, as always, I don’t think we are going to see the kind
of changes we need coming from the White House unless there is a
rising popular movement. My hope is that there is such a movement
growing. That more and more people are becoming aware of the environment.
And more and more people are fed up with wars and that the new president
will be open to this.
RB: Thank you— always a pleasure.
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