Introducing
This Land Is Your Land
How the Greatest Sociological Shift in United States History is Changing Everything. And What that Change Requires of Us. (Or, How Each of Us Shapes the Fate of All of Us.)
RD Moore, MMI Press
This Land Is Your Land (TLIYL) is the groundbreaking book written by MMI founder Rod Moore, and that serves as the theoretical foundation for the work we do at MMI -- helping us transform ourselves into a "For All" society.
Spanning the course of US history, TLIYL explores the unimaginably powerful sociological forces forever changing our nation, the path that led us here, to this moment of consequence, and how what we do in the face of these changes will determine our fate.
|
By 2045, the United States will be a non-majority nation. But the society we've built, one based on majority rule, is incompatible with the people we'll soon be.
|
What People are saying:
“If you’re looking for Twitter wisdom or the level of insight you can get from a TikTok video, this isn’t the book for you. But if you’re looking to really understand what’s happening to our nation and what each of us can do about it, then This Land Is Your Land is a must read.”
"Reminding us of the immense power of our nation's founding statements and how, all along, our diversity has been our strength has helped me remember that I love my country at a time I can barely bear it."
"I wish we could make [This Land Is Your Land] required reading for Congress..."
Read Preview Online
Download Free Ebook Version
Download Audiobook Version on Google Books
Download Free Companion Materials for Audiobook
Purchase Print Version
Download Free Ebook Version
Download Audiobook Version on Google Books
Download Free Companion Materials for Audiobook
Purchase Print Version
Now Available in print format!
In addition to being available for free download in ebook and audiobook formats, This Land Is Your Land can now be purchased via Great British Bookshop.
Link to Preview Online
Download Free Ebook Version
Download Audiobook Version on Google Books
Download Free Companion Materials for Audiobook
Link to Purchase Print Version at Great British Bookshop
Reflections from Rod Moore, MMI founder, and author of This Land Is Your Land
In Fork in the Road, one of my recently posted Letters from a Birmingham Boy, I described how, back in the late ‘90s, I had three experiences that radically altered my sense of where we, the American people were headed and the kind of nation we were becoming.
The first was seeing, in real-time, the radicalization of Christian ideology as it became increasingly militant; the new code-speak for segregation, which, in the years after the Civil War, arose as the new code-speak for dehumanization. Churches that were, a couple of years prior, deeply committed to making amends for racism were suddenly insisting racism didn’t exist, denying that James Byrd’s and Matthew Shepard’s murders were hate crimes, and picketing the funerals of people who’d died of AIDS.
The second was discovering how both our demography and our psychographics were shifting, and what those shifts meant for both social alliances and political power. This redrawing of the lines was at work when white-identifying Charlie, my mailman, during our first conversation, asked me if I’d noticed how many immigrants were moving into the neighborhood, before going on to say, “I mean, the white man and the black man, we built this country up together, and now here they come trying to take it away from us…”
And, the third was the dawning realization I had while watching the film Gattaca with my friend Bob Jackson, and how their world’s system of grouping people into “Valids” and ”Invalids” helped me make sense of how we’ve done the same thing, and that we’d been doing it, in one way or another, since the dawn of the Revolution. I started to get how the most important thing we could deprive people of was an ownership stake in their society, and how those kinds of tactics were on a collision course with the people we were becoming.
Grasping these truths both altered the course of my life and, years later, would form the premise of This Land Is Your Land – my attempt to make sense of what was happening to us – how our unprecedented diversification is both what’s forced us to reckon with what it really means to be a true democracy, and is the driver behind the increasingly desperate attempts by a faction to reassert their reign.
That’s because right now, we’re witnessing nothing less than the outright obliteration of every power majority ever created – from chattel slavery and wage slavery to denials of citizenship and the restricting of the vote to property owners, to segregation and discrimination, racial supremacy, gender supremacy, straight supremacy, wealth supremacy and religious supremacy.
Each and every one of them is shrinking and disappearing. This means that any subset reliant on them to stay in power simply can’t remain in power. Not as long as we aspire to be a society where authority is shared both universally and equally – a democracy.
250 years ago, the whole of the human race took a previously unimaginable socio-evolutionary leap forward, when the ideas underpinning democracy spread around the world, upending tiered social systems that had existed throughout human history almost instantly. All of a sudden, humankind was dreaming of what could be, instead of settling for what had always been.
It reminds me of that RFK quote: There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask, why? I dream of things that never were, and ask, why not? We started dreaming of a new kind of society, one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal, of a land free of social hierarchy, religious tyranny and imperial ideology. Where everyone has enough, where justice is just and freedom is real.
But democracy was still just a theoretical. No one had ever seen it in practice. It was like the mountaintop Martin spoke of during his final sermon. On the other side is the Promised Land, but there was a long hard climb from here to there. Turning the idea of democracy into something real would take two-plus centuries. It’s the work we’ve been about since the end of the Revolutionary War; working out what a “for all” society even means, and how we go about building one.
Yet, right from the beginning, there was another segment of us that was content to not contest the ideals democracy extolled – as long as there was means to game it – to allow the “truly deserving” to rule. So, they built in protocols that shifted power in their favor, starting with the three-fifths compromise they strong-armed into the Constitution itself. This one point – whether the United States would become a society for just some, or for all – is essentially what all the struggle that has occurred since has been about.
In This Land Is Your Land, I describe this period we're in, spanning from 2012 (the first year non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births, aka, the birth year of Generation Alpha) to 2032 (the first presidential election that will be dominated by this non-majority generation) as our nation’s Time of Turmoil. That's what makes this reckoning we’ve long been postponing so significant: We're in a moment where every facet of what it means to be an American is shifting.
For the first time in US history, the people used to ruling via majority power can do so, no longer. And that puts them in a tough spot -- either accept that the days of supremacy are over and embrace democracy, or seek to impair the democratic process, to not just keep the social pyramid intact but to do whatever is deemed necessary to maintain their place at the top of it. But the latter is a failing enterprise. What's easy to miss is that this great sociological shift isn't still forthcoming. It's not something our efforts can prevent.
Our unprecedented diversification is a tsunami, one that’s already made landfall. As a result, every construct that once enabled certain factions to rule is failing, being washed out to sea. And in this new landscape, the only thing that truly matters is the kind of society we'll become – one that works for only some of us or all of us. “Some” or “all”. That’s really what’s at stake. And perhaps it always has been.
Over the years, we’ve framed it many ways – us or them, black or white, red state or blue, left or right, straights or queers, the faithful or the godless, patriots or commies, natives or immigrants – thinking that if we can just tweak the formula, draw the right lines and incite the right levels of enmity and outrage, we can make a “For Some” society still work. We can’t.
That’s because of two fundamental shifts, one triggering the other. The first is the post-majority nation we’ve already become. The second is how our diversification has exposed a massive design flaw. We built the crux of American society on majoritarianism – catering to the majority at the minority’s expense. But now that system itself is crumbling, and its processes, are increasingly incompatible with the diverse people we’ve become. Because, in a democracy, it's not the majority that rules. The people do.
Which finally gets us to the root problem -- despite our founding aspiration of being a new kind of nation, one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, we’ve found that calling difficult to live up to. Sure, our Pledge still ends with “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. But, instead of “for all”, what we really mean is “for some”. And, “for some”, no matter how it’s defined, ultimately comes to mean one thing – none.
Societies are living entities. And if there’s one thing history teaches us about them, it’s this: they start to die the moment we decide that only some of us matter. But that also doesn’t have to be our future. If we so choose, we can emerge from this crucible better than before, and in doing so, move ever closer to becoming the nation so many who have come before us have dreamed of.
I think often of We Shall Overcome, which Martin, MLK, described as "our theme song". And it was. It gave voice to the hope and longing of a nation. "Oh, deep in my heart," the lyrics say, "I do believe -- that we shall overcome someday." That "we", like "We, the People of the United States of America," is collective and all-inclusive. It represents the lived reality of a "For All" society.
My hope is that a better understanding of the changes we're undergoing and what they mean, paired with the amazing work so many of you are doing, and strengthened by the powerful legacy upon which we stand, can help make this our reality.
In Fork in the Road, one of my recently posted Letters from a Birmingham Boy, I described how, back in the late ‘90s, I had three experiences that radically altered my sense of where we, the American people were headed and the kind of nation we were becoming.
The first was seeing, in real-time, the radicalization of Christian ideology as it became increasingly militant; the new code-speak for segregation, which, in the years after the Civil War, arose as the new code-speak for dehumanization. Churches that were, a couple of years prior, deeply committed to making amends for racism were suddenly insisting racism didn’t exist, denying that James Byrd’s and Matthew Shepard’s murders were hate crimes, and picketing the funerals of people who’d died of AIDS.
The second was discovering how both our demography and our psychographics were shifting, and what those shifts meant for both social alliances and political power. This redrawing of the lines was at work when white-identifying Charlie, my mailman, during our first conversation, asked me if I’d noticed how many immigrants were moving into the neighborhood, before going on to say, “I mean, the white man and the black man, we built this country up together, and now here they come trying to take it away from us…”
And, the third was the dawning realization I had while watching the film Gattaca with my friend Bob Jackson, and how their world’s system of grouping people into “Valids” and ”Invalids” helped me make sense of how we’ve done the same thing, and that we’d been doing it, in one way or another, since the dawn of the Revolution. I started to get how the most important thing we could deprive people of was an ownership stake in their society, and how those kinds of tactics were on a collision course with the people we were becoming.
Grasping these truths both altered the course of my life and, years later, would form the premise of This Land Is Your Land – my attempt to make sense of what was happening to us – how our unprecedented diversification is both what’s forced us to reckon with what it really means to be a true democracy, and is the driver behind the increasingly desperate attempts by a faction to reassert their reign.
That’s because right now, we’re witnessing nothing less than the outright obliteration of every power majority ever created – from chattel slavery and wage slavery to denials of citizenship and the restricting of the vote to property owners, to segregation and discrimination, racial supremacy, gender supremacy, straight supremacy, wealth supremacy and religious supremacy.
Each and every one of them is shrinking and disappearing. This means that any subset reliant on them to stay in power simply can’t remain in power. Not as long as we aspire to be a society where authority is shared both universally and equally – a democracy.
250 years ago, the whole of the human race took a previously unimaginable socio-evolutionary leap forward, when the ideas underpinning democracy spread around the world, upending tiered social systems that had existed throughout human history almost instantly. All of a sudden, humankind was dreaming of what could be, instead of settling for what had always been.
It reminds me of that RFK quote: There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask, why? I dream of things that never were, and ask, why not? We started dreaming of a new kind of society, one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal, of a land free of social hierarchy, religious tyranny and imperial ideology. Where everyone has enough, where justice is just and freedom is real.
But democracy was still just a theoretical. No one had ever seen it in practice. It was like the mountaintop Martin spoke of during his final sermon. On the other side is the Promised Land, but there was a long hard climb from here to there. Turning the idea of democracy into something real would take two-plus centuries. It’s the work we’ve been about since the end of the Revolutionary War; working out what a “for all” society even means, and how we go about building one.
Yet, right from the beginning, there was another segment of us that was content to not contest the ideals democracy extolled – as long as there was means to game it – to allow the “truly deserving” to rule. So, they built in protocols that shifted power in their favor, starting with the three-fifths compromise they strong-armed into the Constitution itself. This one point – whether the United States would become a society for just some, or for all – is essentially what all the struggle that has occurred since has been about.
In This Land Is Your Land, I describe this period we're in, spanning from 2012 (the first year non-Anglo births surpassed Anglo births, aka, the birth year of Generation Alpha) to 2032 (the first presidential election that will be dominated by this non-majority generation) as our nation’s Time of Turmoil. That's what makes this reckoning we’ve long been postponing so significant: We're in a moment where every facet of what it means to be an American is shifting.
For the first time in US history, the people used to ruling via majority power can do so, no longer. And that puts them in a tough spot -- either accept that the days of supremacy are over and embrace democracy, or seek to impair the democratic process, to not just keep the social pyramid intact but to do whatever is deemed necessary to maintain their place at the top of it. But the latter is a failing enterprise. What's easy to miss is that this great sociological shift isn't still forthcoming. It's not something our efforts can prevent.
Our unprecedented diversification is a tsunami, one that’s already made landfall. As a result, every construct that once enabled certain factions to rule is failing, being washed out to sea. And in this new landscape, the only thing that truly matters is the kind of society we'll become – one that works for only some of us or all of us. “Some” or “all”. That’s really what’s at stake. And perhaps it always has been.
Over the years, we’ve framed it many ways – us or them, black or white, red state or blue, left or right, straights or queers, the faithful or the godless, patriots or commies, natives or immigrants – thinking that if we can just tweak the formula, draw the right lines and incite the right levels of enmity and outrage, we can make a “For Some” society still work. We can’t.
That’s because of two fundamental shifts, one triggering the other. The first is the post-majority nation we’ve already become. The second is how our diversification has exposed a massive design flaw. We built the crux of American society on majoritarianism – catering to the majority at the minority’s expense. But now that system itself is crumbling, and its processes, are increasingly incompatible with the diverse people we’ve become. Because, in a democracy, it's not the majority that rules. The people do.
Which finally gets us to the root problem -- despite our founding aspiration of being a new kind of nation, one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal, we’ve found that calling difficult to live up to. Sure, our Pledge still ends with “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. But, instead of “for all”, what we really mean is “for some”. And, “for some”, no matter how it’s defined, ultimately comes to mean one thing – none.
Societies are living entities. And if there’s one thing history teaches us about them, it’s this: they start to die the moment we decide that only some of us matter. But that also doesn’t have to be our future. If we so choose, we can emerge from this crucible better than before, and in doing so, move ever closer to becoming the nation so many who have come before us have dreamed of.
I think often of We Shall Overcome, which Martin, MLK, described as "our theme song". And it was. It gave voice to the hope and longing of a nation. "Oh, deep in my heart," the lyrics say, "I do believe -- that we shall overcome someday." That "we", like "We, the People of the United States of America," is collective and all-inclusive. It represents the lived reality of a "For All" society.
My hope is that a better understanding of the changes we're undergoing and what they mean, paired with the amazing work so many of you are doing, and strengthened by the powerful legacy upon which we stand, can help make this our reality.