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The Unbearable Lightness of Liberal Politics
Anyone But Bush?
The Unbearable Lightness of Liberal Politics
Rabbi Michael Lerner
from here:
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/inde...le/040311a.html
Will the resounding commitment of liberals and progressives to the notion of "Anyone But Bush" do any more than guarantee the re-election of Bush for another four years?
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The Democrats are in danger of sidelining their most principled voices and once again (as in the Clinton-Gore years) appearing to care more about what's popular than what's principled, with the possible consequence of becoming less popular.
I have no problem with any of their leading contenders, but if, for example, Kerry is perceived to win the nomination not because of what he stands for but rather because he has been judged electable, that itself may become the reason he won't be. It's easy to understand why the "Anyone But Bush" slogan became popular among the Left. After the Nader campaign of 2000 took the two to three percentage points that would have given Al Gore a clear electoral college win (Gore decisively won the popular vote), liberals and progressives are reluctant to vote from their hearts in 2004. This is all the more so because, from a liberal point of view, President Bush has done more damage to America in three years than any president in living memory:
* Resorting to the most aggressive class warfare in America since the 1930s, Bush has enacted budget cuts that have undermined the social safety net that had been carefully constructed over a seventy-year period, and replaced it with tax giveaways to the rich that will ensure even harsher cuts in services to the poor and lower income Americans, while guaranteeing that future generations will have to carry the burden of these cuts without having any way to raise the resources to do so.
* Transforming the tragedy of 9/11 into a blanket excuse for a new wave of expanding American power around the world, President Bush has proclaimed (and then implemented in Iraq) the right of the United States to intervene and overthrow regimes that it considers threatening to American values. Sixty years of effort went into building an international principle that war should be used only as a last resort and only when agreed upon by the community of nations to restrain rogue states, but now Bush has created a precedent which may haunt our planet for generations to come. (It may not always be the United States which has the greatest military power and capacity to make unilateral decisions about when its interests legitimate military interventions.) There is every likelihood, many people worry, that a second Bush administration would expand the War on Terror to Iran, Syria, North Korea, and possibly beyond—to any other country with the temerity to reject dictation from the United States. (Some of his backers are talking about France as the new enemy!) While many of us at Tikkun rejoice in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship (something we've been calling for since 1988, when the United States was turning its head to his crimes against humanity and use of chemical weapons), the way that it was done and the overt lying to the American people (without subsequent sincere apologies for having misled us) are deeply troubling and represent the wrong direction for the use of American power.
* Using the cover of his "anti-terrorism" campaign, President Bush has unilaterally suspended the Constitutional rights to a fair trial, due process, and other protections of law that are the very foundation of American democracy. The Patriot Act gives the President the authority to eliminate many Constitutional safeguards and treat American citizens as prisoners of war—all he has to do is claim that a given American is working on behalf of terrorists.
* Undermining decades of environmental progress, President Bush has begun an offensive to put the environment back into the hands of the most rapacious profit-seeking corporations. The long-term consequences for the planet may be irreversible.
With these kinds of positions, it is no surprise that many on the Left have rallied around the idea of "Anyone But Bush" rather than on a positive agenda for social transformation.
The mission of Tikkun, however, is social transformation. As a project of a nonprofit organization, Tikkun cannot and does not endorse or oppose any candidate running for office, and we are not interested in electability. More than that, we believe we can only heal the world if we speak to what can be rather than what is. "Anyone But Bush" is a slogan based in fear and in the past, rather than a vision for the future.
Yet, instead of speaking to the deep yearning of Americans for a world of kindness and generosity, for moral goodness and spiritual coherence, the Democrats and their supporters have generated (or some might say capitulated to a media-generated) language of technocratic practicality that will dissipate the very support they so desperately seek in the elections of 2004.
The fact is that you cannot win Americans over to an alternative to the radical ideology of the neoconservative Right that has been the foundation of the Bushites' success by providing them with a variety of cautious half-measures lacking any coherent intellectual foundation or vision. The unbearable lightness of the Democrats—their inability to stand for anything at all—has been with us since the 1990s, when Congressional Democrats were unable to construct a liberal or progressive alternative to Gingrich's very effective (though from our standpoint reprehensible) "Contract with America," which boosted Congressional Republicans to majority status in the 1994 elections. Even in 2002 those Democrats managed to take a perfect moment for re-ascendancy and present themselves as the party that had no unifying theme or message.
It was in reaction to that unbearable lightness that many people became excited about the candidacy of Howard Dean. Because he opposed the Iraq war consistently from before it had begun, Dean seemed to be the one candidate who had the antiwar understanding and backbone to challenge the Republicans. Other Democrats pointed out that Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton all had these same characteristics—that they too had opposed the war consistently and that they had a considerably deeper understanding of the problems facing the country. Yet, when the media told us that Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, and Carol Moseley Braun were not electable, and that therefore we should stop listening to them, many liberals and progressives did. In fact, the media guaranteed that the non-internet–literate crowd would stop listening to them by simply refusing to report what they said. When, after an eight or nine-person presidential debate, the New York Times, Newsweek, and other media reported only what the candidates they deemed electable were saying, liberals and progressives went along with this because there was no point in fighting to hear the words of the unelectable.
That put most liberals and progressives in the camp of Dean, who had creatively used the Internet in the early buildup to the primaries to avoid these dynamics, until in the two months before the Iowa primary the mainstream media began talking about Dean's alleged angry (and hence unelectable) personality. Once Iowa and New Hampshire voters had been convinced that anger at Bush's policies was somehow a character flaw that would block electability, they responded to the call of Anyone But Bush by voting for candidates that the media had made electable. Distorted by constant replay, Dean's concession speech in Iowa took on the appearance of a (now-famous) self-destructive primal scream or yelp, as the media proceeded to do to Dean what it had been doing to Kucinich et al. Suddenly Kerry became the favorite because of media-generated electability. Many progressives and liberals then felt they had no choice but to jump on board with Kerry despite his vote for the war. Perhaps they privately revived fantasies that his days as chair of Vietnam Vets Against the War in the early 1970s might play some role in his consciousness should he ever become president.
If we are trying to decide whether a candidate believes in a coherent worldview that coincides with our own deepest ethical and spiritual truths, we can make that determination ourselves by listening to what they say and have said and done in their public lives. But if we are trying to decide whether they are electable, we give the power to the media and the pollsters to tell us who we should be backing. The result is that many of the candidates who most closely represent the American people's highest ideals can be pushed out of the race, opening up the way for a candidate who fulfills the ideals of those who own and control the media.
All this does not mean there is a media "conspiracy." When the Times and Newsweek presented the candidates to us in the Spring of 2003, their judgments were not based on conspiratorial goals, but on their own honest assessment of who would appeal most to the average American. Given the long history of media marginalization of progressive and visionary voices in the past, Americans tended to vote for candidates who presented a narrow range of views that are today called "the political center." Taking that to be "reality," the contemporary journalist then assumes that this will define the choices of the moment, and so gives vastly disproportionate attention to those who will represent to the electorate the kinds of views that proved popular in the past. The result is a vicious circle, in which the media marginalizes the most visionary progressive voices because these voices have been marginalized in the past.
Add to that vicious cycle the media's attempt to be "savvy," an endemic cynicism that Michael Bader and Jay Rosen have analyzed in these pages, and you get perfectly decent journalists telling themselves that the outsider voices will never be heard, so why bother to let them be heard? And then those same dynamics lead all the friends and advisors of the candidates to whisper in their ears advice about how to tone down whatever their own thinking is in order to be "realistic" in this media context, and so they do so in compliance with the rotating pressures of each on each. Ultimately, the good folks who want change end up not voting for anyone who would actually embody their own views. They think that in so voting they are being realistic and responsible, when actually they are recreating the very reality that they had hoped to change.
"If all this is what it takes to beat Bush," some people may respond, "then I'll do it and worry about a better world at some later date." Yet this kind of thinking may be deeply flawed, not only on ethical but on pragmatic grounds. What we've been trying to tell liberals and conservatives for many years is this: it is only a different worldview that has a real chance of changing the political dynamics that have generated conservative dominance in all three branches of government.
Since our inception in 1986, Tikkun has been articulating what that alternative must be.
First, we've opposed a politics of demeaning the Other. We have powerful criticisms of George W. Bush, just as we had of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, and just as we've had of the Israelis who supported the Occupation, the Palestinians who have supported terror, the neo-cons who have supported a wide variety of reactionary programs, and the fundamentalists (Islamic, Jewish, and Christian) who have too often ignored their own religion's injunctions to compassion and social justice. But we have rejected the political tendency to see our opponents as embodiments of pure evil or to delight in finding their personal flaws as a cheap way to make political hay. We often find ourselves quite uncomfortable with the kind of demeaning of George W. Bush that focuses on his alleged stupidity or cowardice—we reserve our criticisms for the public actions and discourse of our elected leadership and for others who act in the public sphere, not for their personality or character.
Next, we've objected to the tendency to blame Americans for all the distorted policies of our government. We are proud of America and of much that it has stood for in the history of the past 215 years. Unrelentingly critical as we may be of the racism, sexism, and imperialist policies pursued by America's elites, we are also appreciative that those elites were committed enough to democratic values and civil liberties to allow the space for democratic movements to challenge and often counter their wishes. Though the battles to build a morally and ecologically healthy, just, and peace-oriented society are still ongoing, we insist that a movement to change America must articulate a deep love for this country and a deep appreciation for the goodness of the American people.
In fact, the reason we are not discouraged from putting forward a transformative vision of what could be in America is because we reject the notion that our current societal distortions are an accurate reflection of what Americans would want if they had enough information and opportunities to hear the kind of alternative spiritual understanding of contemporary events that we present in Tikkun. Give us a well-funded hour news show on prime time national network tv, twenty major newspapers in various regions of the United States, twenty local tv stations, and a few hundred million dollars to run a presidential campaign and a few senatorial campaigns, and we'd quickly demonstrate the idealism and generosity of the American people that rarely finds forms for public expression in the contemporary configuration of American politics. Our affirmation of the goodness of America and Americans is a central part of our healing vision.
We've argued that the old-line socialist/materialist conception of the world underlying progressive and liberal politics since at least the middle of the nineteenth century must be transcended. Transcended doesn't mean rejected. We have always enthusiastically agreed with liberal and progressive notions of democratic control of the economy, fair redistribution of wealth, guarantees of employment, health care, education, and protection from the greedy excesses of the competitive marketplace. We've been allies to the liberal and progressive fights so much that when the media sought to discredit our politics of meaning in the mid 1990s (in the days when Hillary Clinton was telling the country that it needed a politics of meaning) they suggested that all we were doing was repackaging old liberal ideas that had been part of the tradition for the past 150 years.
Yet the Tikkun vision is far more than that. We can accept much of the liberal and progressive program, but we contend that it is fundamentally limited, and in certain respects deeply flawed, because it has too narrow a conception of human needs. Human beings certainly need economic and physical security—we reject all attempts at a spiritual politics that talks about "values" while ignoring the material well-being of the human race. We don't need the right-wing fundamentalist (Jewish and Christian) brand of spirituality that takes biblical quotes and misuses them to cover selfishness and materialism, celebrating American military power and ignoring the hungry and the homeless.
But we've also rejected the notion of a Maslow-based hierarchy of needs ("first satisfy material needs, then the spiritual needs"). The twenty-plus years of research we conducted at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health with middle-income working people showed us that people are often willing to sacrifice material security for the sake of higher meaning in their lives. They hunger for a framework of meaning and purpose that transcends the individualism, selfishness, and competitiveness of contemporary market-driven societies.
We call this framework a politics of meaning or an Emancipatory Spirituality. Central to its vision is the call for A New Bottom Line, so that instead of judging institutions, social practices, and individual behavior as rational, productive, or efficient only to the extent that they maximize money and power, we insist that they also be judged by the extent to which they maximize human capacities to be loving, ethically, ecologically, and spiritually sensitive, and capable of overcoming narrow utilitarian attitudes towards others. We replace this utilitarian and materialist approach to the world with an approach that recognizes the sanctity of others and responds to the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement.
Applied to international politics, an Emancipatory Spirituality would insist that the only path to security for the United States is to reject the paradigm of domination over others and insist on the paradigm of cooperation and mutual caring. In a world where two billion people live on an income of less than two dollars a day, and an average of 30,000 children die every day (yes, every day) from diseases related to malnutrition, those who live at the top of the world's food chain will always live in fear that military prowess will prove inadequate to protect them.
A politics of meaning candidate would insist that America's long-term security will be most effectively guaranteed when the United States is and is perceived to be:
a. The leading force for global redistribution of wealth, the elimination of poverty, homelessness, and hunger, and the creation of adequate health care and education for all humanity.
b. The leading force for ecological sanity and reconstruction of the world's systems of production, transportation, and distribution of goods and resources along lines that will permit preservation and reconstruction of the damage done to the planet by 150 years of environmentally irresponsible industrialization by capitalist and socialist societies alike.
c. The country in the vanguard of embodying a new ethos of global social justice, generosity, and genuine kindness and caring for others.
As a first step to implement this, let the United States commit to leading the way for a Global Marshall Plan—so that all the advanced industrial countries commit for the next twenty years to tithe one-tenth of their GNP to the purpose of building the economic infrastructures of poorer countries in a way that is both ecologically sensitive and enhances democratic participation and sensitivity to the particularities of cultural nuances and traditions. Such a plan will have to incorporate market mechanisms as well as generous but carefully thought out ways to supply food to the hungry and clothing and housing for the homeless.
As a down payment on this plan, let's take the money that President Bush wants to put back into the hands of the rich and immediately dedicate it to providing health care for every American on a single-payer plan, and provide funds to eliminate hunger in every corner of the globe. Osama Bin Laden and his extremist followers will be far more challenged by that move than by any other anti-terrorist strategy.
Let a liberal or progressive candidate for office make the case consistently that the best security is a world where poverty has been eliminated—and that this is not only our moral duty but in our best self-interest. Let such a candidate argue that the only world worth fighting for is a world in which we recognize that we are all in the same boat, stop polluting the world's environment and dumping our wastes, and instead work together to make the world safe and loving for everyone. And let the candidate explain that this is also the best way to deal with the immigration problem in the United States: Make the rest of the world economically viable and people won't be crashing our borders.
A candidate who is willing to speak in this language would also have no problem endorsing the Geneva Accord—or at least unequivocally calling for an end to the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and for a new spirit of reconciliation and open-heartedness. A progressive candidate should be talking in a way that reassures both Israel and Palestine that building peace and reconciliation is high on the American agenda.
Endorsing what we in the Tikkun Community call a "progressive middle path" would be understood as a manifestation of a larger foreign policy vision that sees strength as emerging from cooperation rather than domination. Let America show Israel the way by dramatically reducing our defense budget (by at least 50 percent) and adopting a Global Marshall plan. Speaking from this moral standpoint, rather than from a place of economic coercion, the United States could play a major role in reshaping the political dynamics in Israel.
The key here is the oldest teaching of all the world's spiritual traditions: the unity of all humanity, the equal sanctity of all, the overcoming of ego, and the recognition of our place in the whole. If we thought of ourselves as the human family, and someone came along and told us that we could work it out so that two thirds of our family would have enough to eat, and 10 percent of our family could live at a high level and enjoy more food and more comforts than we could possibly want, but at the cost that one third of our family would be close to starvation, who among us would sign up for such a deal? It's only because most Americans have not been taught to think of themselves as part of the human family, and have no idea that the deal that gets us a land of plenty is intrinsically linked to the deal that produces poverty and hunger for others, that they go along with our current foreign policy. A spiritually informed foreign policy rooted in caring for the Other is realistic precisely because Americans are, like most other people on this planet, fundamentally decent, generous, and kind.
Domestic policy must reflect this same spiritual vision. In every arena, let us liberate the goodness of the American people, affirm our shared desires to be giving and to care for each other.
Most people recognize that fundamental changes are needed in our school systems. We sympathize with the desire of working families to have schools that teach the basic skills necessary for their children to compete in the current world. No candidate could afford to deny to America's middle-income and poorer families this set of skills that upper-middle–class and wealthy families guarantee to their own children—and that will require well-paid teachers, smaller teacher-student ratios, and decent school buildings. But this typical liberal agenda is one-dimensional.
Classes rarely focus on what makes life meaningful, or prepare students to build a life based on love, caring, ecological sensitivity, spiritual depth, or moral responsibility. But imagine if a progressive candidate were beginning to talk about a world based on kindness and generosity instead of on domination and fear of the Other. Educating children for such a world would require a very different orientation than the obsessive focus on testing that is doing so much to distort our schools. Imagine a school system that gave high priority to fostering a student's capacity to be caring, cooperative, generous, and morally and ecologically responsible. Imagine a school that gave serious attention to developing a student's ability to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at all that is. Imagine a school that taught children how to celebrate all the goodness of others, to see themselves as the current embodiment of the unfolding of the consciousness of the universe and as capable of increasing the level of love, cooperation, and mutual recognition among all peoples. Imagine a school that taught genuine gratitude, that encouraged joy, that valued love, and that saw its heroes as those students who were most capable of sharing their skills and their caring with others. Instead of sounding like dry technocrats, let a candidate speak to a vision of schools that foster the highest values in our students, that speaks to the very hunger for a different set of values than the "show me how my kid can make more money" values they settle for as the best they can hope for from public schooling.
What's the point, some people will ask, of developing in students the capacity to be caring when they will have to enter the "real world," in which the bottom line is money and power and they are evaluated primarily in terms of how well they've developed whatever skills are deemed necessary by the corporate economy for maximizing the bottom line? Won't we just be creating dysfunctional students who will fail?
A good point, and one that a progressive candidate could address head on by calling for the Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the U.S. Constitution. The SRA calls for every corporation with a gross income of over $30 million a year to get a new corporate charter once every ten years. Such a charter would only be granted to those corporations that could prove a history of social responsibility as measured by an Ethical Impact Report, and as assessed by a jury of ordinary citizens (to avoid a new regulatory agency, given the way that those agencies quickly become dominated by the corporations they seek to regulate). The SRA would give all the decent people in corporate life a chance to finally be able to overcome the Old-Bottom-Line mentality which constrained them to make environmentally destructive choices or policies that are insensitive to workers' rights in order to preserve their own jobs. With the SRA the corporate leadership will be able to argue to their own investors that they have no choice but to be more socially responsible lest they lose their corporate charter. The dynamics in corporate life would dramatically change in favor of policies that were more humane and ecologically sensitive. A discussion about the SRA would have a transformative impact even if the SRA itself never got passed—just as the struggle for the ERA transformed how we think about gender even though it never was passed.
Liberals have been right to insist on universal health care, and alternative medicine has moved this discussion beyond the traditional mechanistic model and helped us understand that because we are conscious, love-seeking, mind-body-spirit beings, our health care is going to require building an environment in which genuine caring for each other replaces the frantic search for profits that dominates contemporary health care systems. Most people know that their health care has become worse at every level since the defeat of the Clinton plan in 1994. That decline is a reflection of the triumph of an ethos of selfishness and materialism, qualities that are in their essence the opposite of what "health caring" needs to be about. Let a candidate acknowledge that it is not only health care recipients, but also service providers who suffer in this process. Let them talk to doctors, nurses, and others who work in the health care arena and learn of the deepening crisis in the lives of so many that is created by the extreme disjunction between their desire to serve and care for people on the one hand, and the pressures of the marketplace that force them to curtail their caring to serve the needs of the health care profiteers. As the cycle continues, more and more people in health care shut themselves off from their own deepest motivations to serve humanity, and instead end up developing a cynicism that helps them manage and repress the pain of not being able to live up to the sacred profession they imagined themselves to be in. They then become the vehicles to communicate this cynicism to a new generation of health care workers, who are taught that in order to be "realistic" and be perceived as "professional" they must subordinate their idealism to the requisites of the insurance companies and health care profiteers. A progressive candidate could seek to convene public gatherings in every community in the United States to allow the health care workers themselves to speak about this process.
A progressive candidate must talk about the most fundamental of all issues: the desire that we all have to be caring for each other. A health care system must provide effective ways for us to mobilize this caring, legitimate it, and create opportunities for ordinary people as well as professionals to pour forth our desire to support and affirm each other's beauty, uniqueness, and sanctity.
This process of affirming goodness, creating opportunities for mutual caring, and allowing for a new ethos of generosity could be repeated in every arena of work. Imagine a campaign in which each week a given profession was highlighted, and a public gathering was created in every Congressional district in the United States where people in this profession could discuss what a New Bottom Line of generosity and caring would look like in their field. For 2004, imagine starting the first week on the issue of health care, followed by law, education, community safety, media, care for seniors, environment, and economic growth. Imagine if a campaign were seeking to encourage ordinary people to have these conversations in every neighborhood, and the discussion became the major focus of the campaign—so that the "get the vote out" campaign flowed from the involvement of people in real neighborhood and town meetings discussing the kind of society they actually wished to create for themselves.
This of course would be a very different kind of campaign than has ever been waged by a mainstream candidate.
Let a progressive candidate speak in a language that evinces genuine caring for the Other. When the media comes at them with the hostility and seeming superiority of its cynical realism, let that candidate hold his ground, insist that most people really would prefer a world of love and caring, and reject the notion that evil and cruelty are necessary parts of human destiny.
This direction is also the only way to counter the very clever attempts by some right wingers to make a Defense of Marriage anti-gay constitutional amendment into a central issue of the campaign. Liberals will get nowhere if their response to this is primarily in terms of gay rights. While we at Tikkun have always been champions of gay rights, we believe that the only way to secure them is to address the deeper anxiety generated by the dissolution of family life that then gets unfairly and irrationally blamed on gays and lesbians. In the research at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, we discovered a widespread anxiety about the crisis in family life. Liberals have typically ignored or misunderstood this problem by dismissing it as nothing but a cover for anti-feminist and anti-gay sentiment. But the reality is that many Americans feel deeply unhappy about a world in which the one institution that was supposed to be about love and caring—the family—has become increasingly unreliable.
What we further discovered, however, was that family instability is deeply tied to the triumph of narcissism, me-firstism, and selfishness that are themselves rooted in the ethos of the marketplace. Liberals and progressives cannot position themselves as champions of the family if all they have to offer is a set of economic benefits for the poor, because most people understand that family instability, while accelerated by tensions rooted in inadequate material supports, crosses class and economic boundaries and cannot be reduced to material needs. A serious pro-family program would have to challenge the Old Bottom Line and help people understand that family instability is often (not always) rooted in a society which gives lip-service but no real support to love and caring and generosity. Want a loving family? Then build an economic and social reality that values love over power, generosity and kindness over money. Because the real source of danger to the family is the Old Bottom Line, not queers. The SRA is actually a far better Defense of Marriage than the assault on gays that right-wingers want to make a central part of the 2004 election.
In my books Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul and The Politics of Meaning, I lay out more of the details of what an Emancipatory Spirituality could look like as a political program. In Peter Gabel's book The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning there is a vision of an ethically sensitive legal system. In the writings of Jerry Mander, Andrew Kimbrell, David Korten, Vandana Shiva, Peter Singer and others there emerges a picture of a compassionate globalized economy. And there is a wealth of programmatic thinking put together by Marianne Williamson in her collection Imagine, and in the writings of Roger Gottlieb, Cornel West, Arthur Waskow, Ian Mitroff, Michael Bader, Jerome Segal, Thich Nhat Hanh, Karen Armstrong, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein, Lama Surya Das, Jim Wallis, Riane Eisler, Zalman Schachter Shalomi, Duane Elgin, David Batstone, Thomas Berry, Svi Shapiro, Edmund O'Sullivan, Brad Blanton, Samuel Oliner, Douglas Noll, Starhawk, Zygmunt Bauman, Thomas Moore, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and many more.
In every arena from health care to education to programs for honoring society's elders to developing an economic program that will give democratic control over corporate life, we at Tikkun and our allies in the emerging spiritual politics of the Tikkun Community have been developing the concrete details so that a serious, spiritually sensitive party could move beyond slogans and describe how some of our major institutions could be rebuilt with a New Bottom Line. The program is there. The details are available. Most people who talk about "Anyone But Bush" would agree with the more detailed vision spelled out in these works. They are not based on adherence to a particular religion, and the most militant atheists will find most of the ideas completely acceptable.
What is lacking is not agreement—but the moral courage to fight for what we really believe in.
Most people want a world of kindness and generosity, but as Peter Gabel has argued in these pages (see "Law and Hierarchy" in this issue), most people have felt humiliated at times in their lives when they found themselves disappointed by others who failed to deliver the love and sensitivity that was being promised. Eventually, many people develop thick layers of self-defensiveness over their deeper yearnings, fearful that they will once again be humiliated should they allow those yearnings to be revealed. It is this fear that gives energy to the conservative's "common sense" that the world cannot be based on kindness and generosity.
Conservatives present a politics that mixes two very different elements. They affirm the higher meaning needs, and religiously affirm the value of love. But then they refuse to imagine building a world based on love. They imagine that such a world is for heaven or for "the second coming." Instead, they revert to a picture of a world filled with hurtful and evil people who will hurt us if given a chance. Believing that this evil inevitably will dominate this world, that being "realistic" requires defending oneself against the "evil other," they champion economic and political policies that assume mutual estrangement and hostility. To protect themselves in such a world, they assume the need for a harsh and punishing attitude toward the Other. Those who believe in human goodness or the possibility of love triumphing in this world, on this planet, are dismissed as naïve and childish. The triumph of conservatism in the past fifty years has been to move this religious pessimism from the margins of the extreme right to the "common sense" cynical realism that dominates the media and public discourse.
This conception of "realism" undergirds the media's perceptions of "electability." Convinced that most Americans will always share the media's own cynical realism, journalists and commentators marginalize anyone who does not instinctively recognize the ontological necessity of giving up on a larger vision of social change. Yet desperately trying to accommodate to this cynical realism creates a contradictory dynamic for liberals: as they prove their electability by scaling down their vision, they re-enforce a deep pessimism about politics that leads many of their supporters to despair and withdraw from political involvement. As their own supporters learn that the candidate they support is acting from a deep personal conviction that it is unrealistic to try to change very much, they ask themselves why they are bothering to get involved at all—why not just focus on their own self-interest, since that seems to be what their political leaders are doing? Ironically, when these liberals succeed in getting elected, they find themselves unable to mobilize the support that they need for any serious or visionary changes. Subject to ever-increasing pressures to be realistic and accommodate to the conservative political climate that they themselves helped generate by scaling down any visionary discourse in their own party, they often take the "realistic" path while in office (e.g. Clinton abandoning welfare to make himself re-electable, then finding that he could accomplish little because his conservative discourse had demobilized the progressive base of supporters who could have allied with him in pushing for substantive social change).
Many Howard Dean supporters are on the verge of deep depression. After months of tireless sacrifice for their candidate, they are beginning to feel that progressive politics have been repudiated by the American electorate. Yet what actually happened was a playing out of this Anyone But Bush dynamic of electability and realism. Dean won many of his supporters from the ranks of those who might feel closer to Kucinich on the substantive issues, but who were convinced by the Dean campaign that they should back a candidate who the media was saying was more electable. So when the media turned on Dean, portrayed him for a solid two months before the Iowa caucuses as unelectable, Dean followers had no intellectual or moral foundation to challenge the "electability" argument. Supporting Dean because of his alleged electability, and convinced of the "anybody but Bush" approach, many Democrats who deeply opposed the war in Iraq ended up accepting the media's self-fulfilling prophecy that Dean could not win, and therefore switched allegiance to Kerry or Edwards—even though these candidates supported the war—on the supposition that maybe one of them could win.
Meanwhile, putting a final stab through the heart of his most loyal followers, Dean undermined himself on the one issue that had most energized his core supporters—his maverick style that promised serious confrontation with the elites of wealth and power. When he allowed the media to convince him that declining support indicated public discontent with his alleged radicalism, Dean toned down his approach in the two months before Iowa and began to accumulate the endorsements of Al Gore and mainstream politicians, put business-as-usual political operatives into key campaign positions (including figures from the AIPAC), and made it clear that he was interpreting his declining support as a reason to become more moderate and mainstream.
The denizens of the Center rejoiced at Dean's declining fortunes in February, 2004. After Dean's loss in the Iowa caucuses, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and other champions of the war in Iraq used the victory of Kerry and Edwards to make the point that "the American people" really wanted a candidate who would support the Iraq war and use this moment to reconstruct the entire Middle East (with who knows how many more interventions necessary)!
Given what the media was interpreting as a defeat for the antiwar forces, Democratic voters in subsequent state primaries, fearful that if they stuck by their own antiwar views they might be backing an unelectable candidate (Dean), started switching in large numbers to candidates further from their own ideals, thereby creating a sudden drop in support for Dean. Viewing this, Dean supporters are in danger of dropping out of politics altogether because they feel that they wasted their energies by being "too idealistic." But the truth is the opposite—they weren't idealistic enough. They identified with the Dean campaign not because they were sure it was the campaign that most closely resembled their own substantive views, but because it was the one that was most "realistic" or electable. In so doing, they validated a way of thinking about politics which would (as it turned out, very quickly) be used to defeat their efforts and allow for the re-emergence of the unexciting political mush of the middle that has rarely energized enough support to win an election for Democrats unless it was being conveyed by a sexy and charismatic figure like Clinton.
What is needed is a campaign that speaks to people's deepest fears and reassures them that a different kind of world is possible—that helps them overcome their depressive "certainty" that it is "ridiculous" to hope for a world of love and kindness and generosity. Only such a campaign can provide a serious alternative to the worldview of fear that drives people into the arms of the Right.
And that means someone who can talk with strength, commitment, and no ambivalence about the need for a world based on love and caring. People want a strong parental figure to reassure them that the world can be safe. Not a compromiser and waffler, not someone whose views change with the political winds, but someone who emanates strength, certainty, humor, warmth, and genuine caring for others. Not someone who leads with anger, but someone who communicates compassion and generosity of spirit even as they powerfully insist that the most practical path to the security we all desire is the most idealistic and visionary path. Please don't wait for that kind of political leadership to emerge in the political world. Be that person. Be that leader. Be the loving and principled person who emanates love and generosity and a certainty that others will eventually respond in kind—and we will. And join us in Washington D.C. April 25–27, 2004, for our Tikkun Conference and Teach-In to Congress so that we can build the supportive community within which you can find nurturance for being the embodiment of your own highest ideals.
__________________
My nipples are asymetrical... and that's a feature not a bug.
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04-18-2004 05:13 AM
