Moral Revolution

America has defeated decadence and corruption before. This is the story of how to do it again.

The uncensored BBC Reith Lectures, from the New York Times bestselling author of Humankind and Utopia for Realists

Votes bought with cash. Billionaires who pay no income tax. A handful of oligarchs who own the media and bend it to protect their fortunes. America has been here before—and the last time, its Gilded Age produced its most idealistic generation. In twenty-five years they broke up the trusts, taxed the rich, and won women the vote.

In these four lectures, historian Rutger Bregman shows how moral revolutions begin. And how to start ours.

His account of the present spares no one. The right has produced shameless corruption; the liberal establishment has answered with paralyzing cowardice. And our most capable young people are being funneled into consulting, finance, and corporate law—a “Bermuda Triangle of Talent” that swallows a staggering share of the Ivy League. We have taught our best and brightest how to climb, but not what ladder is worth climbing.

It doesn't have to be this way. Throughout history, moral revolutions have made nations great again. In the late eighteenth century, twelve men met in a London print shop and set out to end the slave trade. A few decades later a handful of Victorian eccentrics called the Fabian Society brought the modern welfare state into existence. Bregman tells the stories of the small groups who bent history, and shows what they had in common. They didn’t do good because they were good people. They became good people by doing good.

“Ask an American today what the American Dream is, and you will hear something about a house, a yard and a two-car garage. But that’s not what the term used to mean when it was coined in 1931. The real American Dream was never about what you owned, but about what you contributed. It measured life by what it meant for others.”

In the past, eras of total corruption and decadence have given way to moral renewal.

It can happen again. It will happen again.