OK, so here's what your friend Bill O'Reilly and the other guys at Fox News will say if they read this interview: Moyers just came out and admitted that the al-Qaida terrorists and the anti-globalization activists and the antiwar protesters are all on the same team. They all hate capitalism and hate America.

There are centrifugal forces at work here. There are counterforces at work here. There is clearly and ostensibly a reaction to dissent in this country in the most conspicuous way. Clear Channel organizes to arouse patriots to oppose antiwar demonstrators. Magid Associates advises radio and television stations around the country to play the national anthem, show the flag. Fox News taunts the demonstrators on Fifth Avenue during the protests and its ratings rise.

The right has been doing this for some time. The effectiveness of the right's echo chamber has been that every time the Democrats dissent, or people protest, they had this megaphone that was able to drown them out, make them seem "liberal," taint them with that word. There's an inevitable wartime pulling of the strings, to paint anyone as unpatriotic who disagrees with the war.

But if you go to the Web, there are so many new fronts of dissent opening up all the time. You can close the windows, you can pull down the shade, you can leave your car in the garage, but you can't keep pollution from auto emissions from coming into your house. That's the way dissent is. I mean, it's a huge phenomenon around the world.

Obviously George W. Bush has particular problems with the rest of the world, but is there a way for any U.S. president in this era of American dominance to be healer or bridge-builder?

This is the most disturbing consequence of the hegemony that has been achieved over our political institutions by (right-wing) ideology and money right now. I lived through one of the most fortuitous and dangerous periods in American history -- World War II and the postwar era, when the Soviet Union became a Goliath and we lived under the umbrella of the nuclear threat -- and our political leadership responded splendidly in that period. Whether it was Truman or Eisenhower, they understood. Eisenhower in particular understood -- he was a conservative, but he was moderate in the use of power.

The Republicans I remember from my days in Washington -- the moderate Republicans -- along with the moderate Democrats, were able to forge a bipartisan foreign policy that worked. It had its problems, but it worked. If I had been George W. Bush, I would have asked Al Gore to become head of homeland security. I would have asked Bill Bradley to become the planner for the reconstruction of Iraq.

It is a real problem for someone who by nature is a lone ranger. I think that George W. Bush is like that, he sees America as the Lone Ranger in the world, so he pulls out of this treaty and that treaty, one treaty after another. He isolates himself in the world at a time when we need the world. I do not understand this.

This period certainly does test political leadership. If Al Gore had been in the White House on 9/11, it would have tested him. Who knows how he would have reacted? But I would hope Gore would have seen, as I hoped Bush would see, that this transcends all politics. We need to create a leadership that represents the fullness of American life to confront a world that is in great disorder.

Doesn't that phrase, "the fullness of American life," remind us that Americans come from all over the world, and that perhaps more than any other country we are tied to the world? Of course it was the United States that was attacked on 9/11, but people from 40 or so different countries died in those towers. That seems to have been forgotten.

I'm still not sure it was an attack on America as much as it was an attack on the power of money and the power of commerce to change and challenge theology and ideology. Yeah, sure, they saw America as the Great Satan. But nobody stopped until much later to realize that they hit the United Nations down there, just not a building.

It was the United Nations of capitalism.

Exactly. It was the good side of globalization. I wish we could get rid of that word. I'd like to say that the protesters and the activists are not opposed to globalization as much as they're for global justice. And the United States is in a great position to take leadership in presenting the best side of our character, which is that we are drawn from the world, and now we can give back to the world.

I just did a six-hour series, five years in the making, on the Chinese in America. I thought the timing would be unfortunate, but it turned out to be fortuitous. This is the first series I've ever done, in 30 years, in which I actually found the answer to the question that provoked me to do it. I wanted to find out what the Chinese had to say about becoming American, about the American dream.

One woman I interviewed, out of the dozens of people I spoke with while making that series, explained it all to me. She began to talk to me about eating chicken feet. You've seen chicken feet in Chinese restaurants, right?

Yeah. They're terrifying.

Well, yes, they're ugly, they don't look particularly nutritious, people are squeamish about them. She said to me, "As an American, I can eat chicken feet. But I don't have to eat chicken feet. I can turn around and eat at McDonald's and nobody questions me." I said to her, "What the hell does that have to do with the American dream?" She says, "That is the American dream! That I can compose my own life. That I can invent who I want to be."

We are creating a new American identity, and to take our identity as being opposed to the world, instead of being of the world, is the greatest mistake that George W. Bush has made.

Obviously the country has been over and over this, and maybe it's a moot point now. But what do you make of the case the president made for going to war in Iraq?

I thought he did a good thing in going to the U.N. and getting Resolution 1441. I believe in international law, and I've been troubled that U.N. resolutions are not enforced. I thought it was working. It was slow and costly, but it was working. Saddam Hussein was isolated. The inspectors were back, and we had the world more or less with us. You know, I think if we had tried diplomacy in Vietnam, and let politics play out more, we would have come to a better end there.

I think Bush did the right thing in identifying Saddam Hussein. Not in relation to al-Qaida -- I don't think they've proven that connection and I don't think it exists, I think that's a different kind of society. But American liberal democracy should never stand by idle when someone like Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin or Milosevic is wreaking such havoc on his own people. I thought he was doing it the right way and I think it would have worked.

So I think Bush did the right thing in going to the U.N. and did the wrong thing by not playing it out patiently.

What's your assessment of George W. Bush's character?

I never pay much attention to the character of a president. I learned this from Lyndon Johnson, who was 13 of the most difficult people I've ever known. He was the best dancer in the White House since George Washington, but he could also be the most uncouth man the next morning. He could be generous and tolerant, he could be scathing and unforgiving. None of those mattered to me, compared to what the policies were. A president is there to make the best decisions for all of us that he can, and we should judge him by his decisions.

I've read the transcripts of Nixon's tapes and I can see that he was brought down by his paranoia, by his obsession with his enemies. If that's character, it's revealing. But I really look at a president's public persona and at the consequences of a president's choices. This president, whatever his character, is making choices whose winners are primarily the people who can win, the people who are ahead, at the expense of the people who are not. His character is not the issue to me. His policies are.

One of the striking things about your show is that you've consistently been covering the troubling economic consequences of major policy decisions made by the Bush administration -- and actually the Clinton administration too. You've exposed the fundamentally undemocratic character of much of the neoliberal free-trade agenda -- GATT, Chapter 11 of NAFTA, Bush's fast-track trade agreements -- well before the mainstream media noticed widespread corruption in the business world. Is there a danger that we're just going to forget about economic justice in the context of war and terrorism?

Yes. As has been said, this is both a war to seek weapons of mass destruction and a war of mass distraction. There are fundamental political changes taking place that are not being reported and not being debated under the cloak of war. Forty-four million people are uninsured; our healthcare situation is in terrible shape. There's growing inequality in our country. Then there's what's happening to the environment. We can make a lot of mistakes in public policy -- we can make a mistake in tax policy and change it. We can make a mistake in labor policy and change it. We can make a mistake on housing and change it. But when you make mistakes on the environment, you can't change that. That's irreparable damage.

I did a two-hour broadcast two years ago called "Earth on the Edge," in which I looked at what nonpartisan research scientists were saying about us reaching the tipping point. They say that if we don't reverse certain trends by 2004, 2006, it's too late. When you lose that open space, it's gone. When you lose that wetland, it's gone. There's a lot of these -- they're not mistakes, they're deliberate policies of the Bush administration -- from which we will not be able to recover. Those are deeply troubling to me. These things are being done without debate from the Democratic Party, coverage by the press or awareness on the part of citizens.

You're saying that George W. Bush is a dangerous president.

This is a presidency that is fundamentally changing the nature and character of American government. It's the most anti-government administration of my lifetime. I believe in our collective responsibility. I grew up in an America where that made a difference to my parents, made a difference to my community, made a difference to my culture. You have to go back to Warren G. Harding to find an administration that so opened the doors to its cronies to come in and exploit the public resources. That's very troubling.

I don't have any personal feelings about George W. Bush, any more than I did about Bill Clinton. I looked at Bill Clinton from the standpoint of his policies, and I had a lot of trouble with them.

I think my life, and certainly my career in journalism, have been informed by two things. One was being a Southerner. Whenever you learned about Southern life, you realize that when we drove the truth-tellers out of the pulpits, out of the editorial rooms and out of the classrooms -- people who were telling the truth about slavery -- that politics failed and we wound up in the Civil War, from which we still haven't recovered. We were still dealing with the aftermath of the Civil War in the 1960s, when I was in government.

We're still dealing with it now.

Oh, yeah. This is another subject that's off the table -- race! But being a Southerner informed me about what happens when a society closes the wagons around itself, when it doesn't tolerate good journalism or prophecy in the pulpit or truth-telling in the classroom.

The other thing was being a part of the Johnson administration, where we pulled the wagons around us on Vietnam, and we -- the government, the administration and the country -- paid a terrible price for that. So my journalism has grown steadily to be very skeptical, in the public interest, of any hegemony of thought or uniformity of ideology that's in charge. I'm deeply troubled by the lack of debate in the country, by the suppression of dissent, by the secrecy.

I fought hard for the Freedom of Information Act when I was in the White House. Johnson signed it; he hated it, but he signed it because Congressman [John] Moss just insisted. It was a great victory for openness in government. Every journalist will tell you that, every author will tell you that, every scientist will tell you that. And now, this is becoming the most secretive administration in American history, much more so even than during the Civil War.

Cheney last week was given full power by Bush to classify everything he wants. This is very troubling; this is a man who's indifferent to democracy, if not hostile to it. He's certainly hostile to transparency. He allows the energy industry to come in and write his energy bill, he talks to them about the oil fields in Iraq, yet all the records are closed. The main reason behind what they're doing with secrecy is to make it very difficult to follow their footprints on the policies that the first Bush and second Bush administrations are making.

It's a troubling time. They will regret it, just as we (in the Johnson administration) regretted it. And the country will pay for it, just as the country paid for our transgressions.

Why aren't we hearing more from the Democratic Party about this whole range of issues?

I think the primary reason is that the Democratic Party has bought into the same thing. It is as obligated to corporate fundraising, to money, as the Republicans. They have to raise as much money as the Republicans do, and they go to essentially the same sources for it: wealthy, privileged people, the 1 percent of this country that contributes most of the money to political campaigns. So the interests of the donor class come to dominate both parties. The people who get your attention once you're in office are not the people who voted for you but the people who paid for your price of admission.

Now, the Democrats have an old tradition, going back to the middle of the last century: labor and environmentalists and others. This country's history has been a seesaw between the power of organized money and the power of organized people. And there's been a balance. Now there is no real balance. It's money, private money, that is the dominant influence over public policy. And the Democrats go to the same trough as the Republicans do. That diminishes their ability to challenge the corporate conservative coalition that is now running the country.

That's one thing. The other thing is, just look at Lyndon Johnson and his reluctant decision to go to war. He, more than anybody else, as the tapes now show, had his doubts. But he remembered what happened in 1950 to '52, when McCarthy and the Republicans accused the Democrats of treason. Johnson was determined that would never happen to him. Kennedy, in '61 and '62, was just as determined that he, as a Democrat, would never be accused of being soft on our enemies. Today the Democrats are worried that if they do the wrong thing and oppose the war, they will pay the price in 2004. That's why, before the election last year, Tom Daschle led the effort to give almost unanimous approval to the resolution on Iraq. Let's pass it, he said, and move on to more important things. What did he mean by that? He meant the election, which they lost anyway.

Speaking of elections, let's touch on a subject where there's still a lot of bitterness among Democrats: Ralph Nader. People like me who voted for Nader in 2000 are still hearing about it from Democrats, how those 2.8 million votes cost Al Gore the White House. What's your perspective on that, especially since you think the Bush presidency has been so disastrous for the country?

I've always thought third parties played a valuable role in American political life. They release tension, for one thing. They release stress. They bring ideas in.

I thought Ross Perot running was a good thing. The Democrats were never going to deal with the deficit. I'm not a Democrat, I'm an independent, and I had gotten so disgusted with the Democrats when they had hegemony in Congress and refused to deal with the deficit. We would never have dealt with the deficits in the early '90s if Perot hadn't gotten his little chalkboard out and bought the TV time and went out there and educated enough American people that suddenly we began to see what was happening with this endless spending.

It took Perot to do that, and I thought Nader running would force the two parties to confront some issues. One thing his candidacy did was expose the hegemony of the two parties over the political rules in this country. It's a calamity the way they have become a racket to protect their own interests. But I wrote to him and urged him to run as a Democrat. I thought that inside the debates in New Hampshire and Iowa, he would get his ideas out in a way that would be politically realistic.

I can't condemn him for running. I believe in the pluralism of ideas and the competition of democracy. Having said all that, however, while I agree with Nader that Gore lost the election, I still think it's a reality that Nader's race probably did cost Gore the electoral votes he needed for a clean victory. That isn't to say it judgmentally, just to say there are consequences.

When you interviewed Nader last August, you actually got him to admit that there are differences between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Well, there are differences. I said that earlier. Both parties are largely beholden to the same privileged and elite class, but there are traditional differences that make an impact on the margins. Clinton and Gore, for all their talk, didn't significantly advance environmental issues in eight years -- not until the end, when Clinton started signing all these executive orders to embarrass the next Republican president. But you have to gauge a president on the ultimate consequences of his policy on American life. Clinton did face the deficit, he did do the right thing on the economy, he did raise taxes on the wealthy to deal with deficits, he did finally go into Bosnia.

Looking ahead at the political calendar, it strikes me that the presidential primary process, which has always been pretty weird, gets worse every four years. Once upon a time, the primary season went from February well into May or June of an election year, and you got that sense of campaign-trail drama, where the candidates were tested in the public eye. Now they spend a year or more raising money, and the primary season has been packed into a ridiculous blitzkrieg of six or eight weeks. By the end of March next year, if not earlier, we'll know who the Democratic nominee is. And it's probably going to be the guy with the most money. Doesn't that sound like a democracy in danger?

I think democracy is in danger. I think democracy is gasping at the moment. The money people primarily determine who runs and wins in both parties. George W. Bush simply outspent John McCain in 2000; when Bush was in trouble in South Carolina, he was able to pour money in. Increasingly a small number of people determine who runs and therefore who wins. The participatory process is in paralysis. The mainstream press is largely owned by a handful of major corporations, so the debate is only on the periphery. It's on the Internet or out in the streets.

I do believe that the oxygen is going out of democracy. Slowly, but at an accelerating pace, the democratic institutions of this country are being bought off or traded off or allowed to atrophy. Political participation is one of them. There simply isn't any way for political candidates to engage in a true debate that people can watch and respond to. We don't hear many ideas anymore, just sound bites. Democracy is in great difficulty right now, and this troubles me about our country.

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