From February 2003: A Lesson Democrats Got A solid "F" On...

First, an open letter to the Democratic constituency:

How on Earth can we get the Democratic leadership to listen? Is it even possible? Surely after the defeat handed this party with the forces they managed to muster, they must realize there is something horribly wrong with their thinking?

I am hearing everywhere that John Kerry abandoned his promise to make every vote count and capitulated far too easily, and that is being used to highlight the perception that Democrats are morally weak opportunists. This is being done by a party whose leadership is so incredibly amoral it just makes my head spin to see them pinning blame on Democrats.

The one good thing that I see at the moment is that George Bush will inherit his own disasters to clean up, rather than being able to paint it all over John Kerry and the Democratic party for four years.

We must wake our leadership up, or shake it up. If our own house is not immaculate, we will never win that "good housekeeping seal." If we do get our house in order, we have the underlying vision and principles that should have us walking on clouds. How can we achieve one or the other, wake or shake?

Sincerely,

Politicasso

From February 2003: A Lesson Democrats Got A solid "F" On...

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[ EDITORIALS ]

Countering Post-Election Depression: America in the Age of Bush
A New Light for America and for Israel
Michael Lerner

This could be a very depressing year for anyone with any moral sensitivity or ecological consciousness. The tragic death of Tikkun’s best friend in the Senate, Paul Wellstone, leaves a huge vacuum of national leadership for progressive causes. The months since the November elections have been frightening for those of us who see a newly-strengthened American Right that perceives itself as having a mandate for war, a mandate for the repression of dissent and the narrowing of civil liberties, a mandate for dismantling environmental and worker protections, and a mandate for economic policies which will further enrich the wealthy and upper middle class at the expense of the poor and middle classes. The creation of a department of "Homeland Security" is likely to make us all far less secure, as co-publisher George Vradenburg makes clear in this issue’s Publisher’s Page. The appointment of Henry Kissinger to head the investigation of September 11 will ensure a cover-up if there is anything to cover up. The packing of the courts by right-wing ideologues is on the immediate agenda. And it appears that the Administration will get the war with Iraq that it desperately seeks sometime in the next few months. This could be a scary period ahead.

Some progressives are reassuring themselves by reminding us that the president received fewer votes than his Democratic opponent in 2002; or they will say that the new Congress has a weak mandate since the Republicans won a majority of votes among the less than 45 percent of the public who were motivated to vote; or they will pin their hopes on the fact that the actual number of people voting Republican vs. Democratic is very slight. But this should provide little comfort. The reality is that the Republicans will be in power for at least the next two years, and the ever-obsequious media will give them the mandate that the electorate did not.

Nor is it enough to base our hopes on the fact that some Democrats have at last gotten the message that you can’t fight something with nothing-that at the very least they need to have some kind of vision. New Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may well understand the need for a new vision. But for many of her colleagues, all a new vision means is that they have to more efficiently serve up the old-time coalition-style Democratic liberalism that has been uninspiring and one-dimensional for many decades. The central fallacy of "coalition politics" is that it has no core idea to which the different factions cohere-so when asked to articulate what they really believe, all coalition members can do is list their thirty-seven or fifty-three or sixty-one platform planks, few of which actually fit together (and meanwhile, after the first few have been articulated, the population has fallen asleep or turned the channel).

There’s much to learn from what the Republicans did over the course of the past forty years, from the time they suffered a stunning defeat in 1964 to their present moment of triumphant return. There were those among them who sought to reconstitute old-line moderate Republicanism, imagining that the defeat of Goldwater demonstrated that they had to be more like Democrats in order to get elected. But a significant group of them turned instead to create a "New Right," which aligned conservative politics with the spiritual focus of Christian evangelicals. Though the New Right knew that this direction would not produce any immediate reversals of liberal strength in the electoral arena, these leaders had the wisdom to look beyond immediate victories and to fashion a whole new ideological foundation-and then to do the painstaking work of being in the minority and staying there while convincing people of the validity of their new way of thinking. They recognized that ideas matter, and so they built their own think-tanks and national organizations that advanced right-wing ideals. They fought for their ideas in professional associations and in media that they sometimes had to create for themselves, and went through the painful work of building caucuses in churches and on university campuses. Eventually, they built the foundations for right-wing presidencies (Reagan/Bush/Bush) and now for a right-wing Congress.

That’s exactly what liberals and progressives need to do. We need to put forward an equivalent to the "Contract for America" that won the Republicans control of the House of Representatives in 1994, which they’ve held ever since. We need to offer A New Light for America to offset the dark days that we will be facing.

Conservatives spoke plain and clear, and they spoke with a willingness to challenge the dominant values. President Clinton and his folk did not respond in kind. They tried to equivocate and pretend that they shared the same values as the New Right ("we’ll dismantle welfare in a humane way," said Clinton). Clinton succeeded in part because he was able to erase some of the ideological differences between himself and his opponents, but mainly because he was able to rely on his strong personal charisma. His short-term success, however, has left the Democratic Party ideologically crippled, because opportunism is not a long-term strategy. People in the United States actually want their politicians to present a coherent worldview that makes sense of citizens’ lives and of the role their country is to play in the world. When the Democrats can’t offer an ideological alternative to the Republicans (and when they run out of Clintonesque charmers), then people tend to move toward the most articulate and loyal members of the dominant worldview-after all, if all the ideology is right-wing, why not vote for the real thing instead of some watered-down substitute?

To retake American politics, what the forces for peace, justice, and ecological sanity need is a whole new kind of voice and worldview. And that’s what we’ve been developing in our new national organization, the Tikkun Community.

Here are some of the elements that could be central to A New Light for America:

1. A New Bottom Line. Instead of our excessive focus on money and power, let’s demand that our social policies and economic and political institutions be judged efficient, productive, and rational not only to the extent that they maximize wealth, but also to the extent that they tend to produce loving and caring human beings, ethical and ecological consciousness, and a capacity to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. Use that as your New Bottom Line and you’ll quickly see how badly we need a New Light for America-because so few of our institutions are efficient or productive by this criterion.
We need to offer A New Light for America to offset the dark days that we will be facing.

A significant step toward a New Bottom Line would be the adoption of a Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Under this amendment, every corporation with income above $50 million a year must receive a new corporate charter every ten years, which will only be granted to corporations that can prove a history of social responsibility, as measured by an Ethical Impact Report, to a grand jury of ordinary citizens chosen at random. Employees, investors, and community groups would be allowed to testify to the jury about the record of social responsibility to the workers, the environment, and the well-being of the community (both where it is located and where its products are sold or used).

2. Generosity and Open-heartedness as the Path to Security. No amount of wars with Iraq or Korea (or whoever else Bush designates as our next enemy) will be able to protect us from the anger about American selfishness that provides the foundation for recruits to terror.

The United States contains only 5 percent of the world’s population, but owns 25 percent of the world’s wealth. Meanwhile, two billion people live on less than $750 a year, and one billion live on less than $375 a year. Does it surprise you to know that every day over ten thousand children die of diseases related to malnutrition? This picture will only change when the United States adopts a new foreign policy whose central goal is to end world hunger and homelessness, create a global system of health care accessible to and affordable for everyone, and participate in a worldwide crusade to save and enhance the natural environment (rather than, as now, participate in its destruction).

A New Light for America must be a light of peace and hope, challenging the fantasies of those self-described "realists" who imagine that they can beat terror with power (look at how dramatically that strategy has failed to produce safety or security for Israel). It is as the force of kindness and generosity, not as the force with the most effective military (which we are already), that Americans can create a world in which we are truly safe.

Let’s start by taking the $1.5 trillion dollars the Bush tax cut gives to the rich and upper middle class and use that instead to fund the building of the infrastructure for ending global poverty and illness, homelessness and hunger. That will do more to dry up the cesspools from which the fundamentalist and ideological haters recruit their followers than any amount of "counter-terrorist" violence will ever do.

If the Democrats are too scared to speak this truth, don’t expect them to ever have anything important to say about terror except some form of "me-too-ism" mixed with some wimpy civil libertarian doubts that will appear to most people to confirm their suspicions that the Democrats are just like everyone else, except less so.

3. Education for Caring, Gratitude, and Awe. Instead of rewarding students solely for how many traditional skills they can accumulate, we need to teach three central values in schools: an attitude of caring for others, an ability to feel and express gratitude for the many blessings we have received from past generations, and a sense of awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. These compassionate and spiritual attitudes can be taught-as Waldorf schools, religious schools, and many private schools have learned. We need to make sure public schools teach these values too (in non-denominational ways, of course) so that low-income minority parents have the same choices as other parents in how their children are taught.

4. Nature is too precious to be sold. Our task is to honor it, preserve it, restore it, and stand in awe of it. This is a spiritual attitude toward the universe and it stands in sharp contrast to those who primarily want to sell nature for private profit. We are opposed to the efforts to privatize all parts of nature (for example the recent efforts to sell rivers and other drinking sources to private corporations) and we want to repair the damage done by over-commercialization and the narrow utilitarian attitude toward nature. This is partly about ecology, and partly about a sense of reverence for all that is. We must share a sense of responsibility based on our role as stewards for all of creation.

These proposals are the tip of the iceberg of what we in the Tikkun Community call a politics of meaning (or an "Emancipatory Spirituality") that could become the source of a New Light for America. A fuller account is available on our website at www.tikkun.org (see the Founding Statement of the Tikkun Community). The ideas are there. The question is, are the Democrats willing and able to use them?

No. The Democratic Party will not be ready to embrace this kind of truly progressive vision as long as they concern themselves with policy details instead of with the big picture. Many Democrats do want a world based on love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity. They don’t act on that vision because they think it’s not "realistic." So, instead of speaking from their hearts, they keep on talking as though they have lost contact with their own humanity, and then wonder why they don’t inspire confidence.

Nor will the Democrats develop into a true opposition party if they keep trying to show that they do not oppose the president. Instead of putting forward an alternative vision, the meta-message constantly conveyed by the liberal forces is this: "We believe x, y, and z, but not enough to fight for those ideas; we really want to go along with the president, with the Republican leadership, and with the corporate leadership of the country. We don’t want to offend anybody by standing up for anything that might require a fight." And most Americans conclude: "I’m not going to trust these people, because if they won’t fight for their own ideas, how can I expect them to fight for America or for my interests? I’d rather have someone who seems strong and sure of what they believe in-because in any event the details of politics seem too confusing to know which of these sides is really right about the substance of the issues, but only one side acts as though they believe they are really right."

Many Americans are scared of the world today. They won’t be an easy sell for a politics that talks about caring for others as the best way to build security. They’ve been taught by both Democrats and Republicans to believe that we are in a world filled with enemies and that we need a bloated defense department and a huge security apparatus. It won’t be easy to turn this national conversation around-just as it wasn’t easy for the Republicans in the midst of the 1960s to start building a New Right political consensus. Democrats will certainly never be able to get into the conversation if they aren’t willing to actually stand for what they stand for. Americans will only take a chance on a progressive strategy for security if they can believe that the people to whom they are turning actually have a backbone and the ability to face the scary part of the world with real determination. So far, Democrats haven’t shown that sort of backbone. For example, in the last election, the Democrats (following the lead of Al Gore) called for a reduction of Bush’s $1.5 trillion tax cut to $1.1 trillion. Where is the principled difference there? More recently, they’ve called for UN involvement in the war on Iraq, but they have not objected to the way Bush bullied the UN into voting for a resolution that will give him a freehand to pursue a war should he so choose. Again, what’s the principled difference? Only that the Democrats seem more moderate in pursuing the same end.

Nancy Pelosi may be a source for change. She is a very decent person with middle-of-the-road liberal politics. But it’s not clear that she does or could understand the value of the approach we are suggesting. I still remember how the Clintons momentarily embraced this way of thinking, and how it played a critical role for them in the election of 1992, but how, once in D.C., they became convinced that it was unrealistic to seek to change the dominant discourse in the country and in the media, and more expedient to try to accommodate to it (a path that quickly led to the triumph of the Republicans in 1994). Nancy Pelosi would need a core of solid advisors and supporters among the Democrats to take the kind of courageous position we are advocating-and frankly that sort of core group just isn’t there. Apart from a handful of people like Denis Kucinich (Democrat of Ohio and chair of the Progressive Caucus, to which Pelosi belongs), even the liberal Congresspeople can’t be counted on to go for a new vision. The truth of the matter is that they are decent people, but their worldviews are that of the old Democratic Party, the Labor movement, and the social democrats ("what people really want are a few good material benefits, and if we deliver them those benefits that will be enough for them to re-elect us"). This old-time religion of the Left, essentially a hard-core materialist worldview, is overtly hostile to the kind of spiritual vision that would make it possible for Democrats to think in the kinds of terms that would make A New Light for America seem plausible.

Facing this, was it any surprise to hear Nancy Pelosi reassure the country that her selection as Minority Leader would not mean a turn to the left by the Democrats because she was elected to serve everyone, not just those who agreed with her own personal liberal politics? It’s this kind of mealy-mouthed liberalism that has lost the Democrats any prayer of ever recapturing power.

To be sure, Pelosi is facing a situation in which a sizable chunk of Democrats would bolt to the Republican Party were she to push for a deeply principled and morally coherent party. But let them bolt-that would be the best thing for the Democrats and for the country. If the Democrats actually had a coherent worldview along the lines I’ve suggested in the four points of the "New Light for America" described above, they would undoubtedly face further decline during a period in which there was a serious national realignment. But then, if they could stick to that program and the values that underlie it, they, like the New Right before them, would experience a powerful renaissance of energy that would eventually turn into substantial political power.

If the Democratic Party faces a time of rebuilding, the next question on the minds of many of us is this: Are the Greens capable of filling this vacuum? After all, it might be argued, many of the major changes in the two party system historically have come from third parties that articulated a more coherent worldview.

There are two objections to this argument in the present moment. First, a significant segment of progressives (including some in the Tikkun Community) believe that the Ralph Nader candidacy of 2000 was a major cause for the election of Bush, and that, had Gore been in power, we would not be facing the current dire circumstances. It’s not likely that they are going to be willing to work with the Green Party-at least not on the national level. Second, and more decisive if correct, the Greens don’t seem to be much more open to a politics that talks about love, generosity, open-heartedness, and a New Bottom Line than anyone else. The Greens are far more principled than the Democrats in terms of their willingness to articulate a progressive politics, but it is a progressive politics within the context of the old paradigm. We have already seen that that paradigm is incapable of mobilizing more than 5 percent of the national vote even with an articulate spokesperson like Ralph Nader, who is a veritable legend of principle and progressive activism. There are some inside the Greens who believe that the party could be moved toward the new spiritual vision we advocate. But if what they have in mind is simply to add the provisions of a politics of meaning to a coalition style program that has twenty-seven other points to it, that won’t change the way the party is perceived. Our point is that the redistribution of wealth is very important, but it is only one dimension of a better society, and unless this emphasis on material well-being is incorporated into a larger vision that validates non-material needs and talks unashamedly about the need for a world based on love, mutuality, generosity, and compassion, it cannot succeed. Until the Greens can talk unequivocally about a New Bottom Line of love and generosity and kindness, they will only be perceived as a left-wing version of the old Democrats.

There are some people in the Tikkun Community who are thinking about creating a spiritual politics party. There are others who are wanting to form a caucus to push for spiritual politics along the lines of A New Light for America inside the Democratic Party or the Greens. We’d like to know your opinion on this-send us an email to magazine@tikkun.org and we’ll send you a questionnaire we are doing to elicit our readers’ thinking.

Perhaps what we should advise both the Democrats and the Greens and all other varieties of liberals and progressives is this: "Stop what you are doing and start to develop an inner spiritual practice. Get in touch with your own mortality, the fragility of your own lives, and the absurdity of ego-tripping. Get in touch with your own heart. Ask yourself if you had not gotten into politics whether you think you’d really be moved by the kinds of things liberal or progressive politicians talk about, or whether you too might not want to just retreat into personal life? Dare to be honest with yourself. Listen to your own heart. Clear out the clutter of the voices telling you to accomplish something, and instead just listen to the deepest voices within you and ask them to tell you how close you are to the highest God or Spirit energy within you, or what you need to do to get closer to that. You don’t have to believe in God to know what we are talking about-just contemplate your own mortality and ask whether you are being true to the deepest values of your soul. And ask yourself what is keeping you from speaking the very deepest truths you know, which must certainly be about something more than critiquing George Bush’s Iraq adventure or his assault on civil liberties, important as those are to challenge.

Democrats and progressives rarely think this way, but that’s the point-it’s time for them to stop thinking in the old way, and to start to recognize that when somebody says that an idea is "utopian," that’s a high recommendation. The world that the practical politicians have given us isn’t working-it’s leading to war, inequality, and ecological destructiveness. It’s time to go in a different direction. And that’s what a politics of meaning or an Emancipatory Spirituality is about-and that is the basis of the Tikkun Community. Join it and help us build this alternative way of thinking!

WE WANT TO HEAR from you! Use our direct link to share your views. Or write to "Letters," Tikkun Magazine, 2342 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 1200, Berkeley, CA 94704; Fax: (510) 644-1255. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.