Beyond the 2016 Ballot Box (2016)

As a nonprofit, we at Tikkun are barred from endorsing candidates and political parties (though you, our readers, are not, and we are not barred from printing your responses and letters on our website). But we can talk about the issues.Many of our readers have been delighted to witness and support Senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Some have made the argument that even if Sanders could never defeat a corporate-financed Republican candidate who harped on the senator’s radical past, simply having Sanders’s ideas presented to the American public during presidential debates in the fall will do more good and make more progress toward changing the American political consciousness than would eight years of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Her administration, some progressive critics believe, would inevitably be run by the same people who controlled the economic, political, foreign, and military policies of the Clinton and Obama presidencies: people who effectively erased most progressive ideas from public consciousness.Many progressives rightly wish that progressive ideas were far more widely understood and intelligently discussed in American politics. I ask you to consider with me why we, as progressives, have not created a national organization for the left that would have an impact equivalent to the Tea Party’s success in placing far-right ideas before the public consciousness. Why have we been unable to generate a national understanding of a progressive worldview? Record-setting crowds of thousands of people have turned up to cheer on Sanders, but what will that campaign do now to move them beyond an election-oriented activism that will fade once the ballots are counted? What specific steps is the Sanders campaign taking now, at the moment when it draws large crowds? What measures are his supporters taking to create an organizational framework that persists beyond the 2016 campaign?I contend that one part of the reason we don’t yet have such a national organization of progressives is the widespread belief that change must come from the bottom up, and that any nationally organized movement would by definition be top–down in design. Leftists still adhere loyally to the bottom-up mentality—that is, until presidential-election fever every four years produces a seasonal change in their tune and the reallocation of their money and energies in support of whichever progressive candidate might win the Democratic Party nomination for president. I do not for a second wish to diminish the contribution that Sanders is making with his campaign, but now is the time to envision a long-term national strategy among those of us who still remember promises by the Obama and Kucinich campaigns to create such an organization—after the election! If it isn’t created now, while their supporters’ attention is focused, it is unlikely to happen afterward.Now I’m a strong believer in the importance of local organizing. But I also believe it can have only limited impact if it does not simultaneously work on other, more expansive fronts.There are literally millions of Americans in any given year involved in local projects for social justice, peace, nonviolence, economic and political equality, environmental sanity, challenging discrimination and prejudice, and ensuring the rights of women, the LGBTQ community, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities, and animals. Yet in my fifty-two years as an activist I’ve watched generations of similar people abandon these struggles, either because they thought they were already won or never would be—both mistaken ideas. Most of these local struggles avoided efforts to add another dimension to their activism: to challenge the larger economic and political systems that need to be changed. They evaded discussions of how those larger changes could be achieved, and skirted any discussion of the world they wanted to build, to say nothing of the strategies and organizational forms that would be needed to build it.The organizing strategies of these local organizations have often been influenced by what have become known as Alinsky-style organizations. I had the opportunity to meet with and address one such organization, the same one that trained Barack Obama in Chicago, the city where the Alinsky model reached its perfection and enjoyed new successes in organizing in churches, synagogues, and mosques.The key ideas of this organizing style are these:These are actually smart rules for winning tiny fights, like getting a new stoplight on your corner to stop speeding traffic, or forcing a school in your district to stop expelling students for minor disciplinary infractions, or even for something more important like getting your city to raise the minimum wage. But they are less relevant when you’re interested in combating systemic racism, like police violence against minorities and discrimination in housing and employment. Just look at the despair of people in Ferguson, Missouri, a year and a half after the first protests that followed the murder of Mike Brown, or at the dismay of environmentalists trying to protect the planet from destruction, or at any number of the groups attempting to reverse the vast economic inequalities generated by global capitalism.I’ve watched as millions of people engaging in these narrowly focused struggles come away without any sense of their connection to all the other struggles going on in the world. I’ve watched as a group of anti-fracking activists in one small town ignored the campaigns of anti-fracking activists elsewhere and remained on the sidelines as activists in nearby towns fought to prevent a pipeline from cutting through their community. Often missing is a discussion of the ways the global capitalist order creates dozens of new assaults on the planet’s life-support system at a faster rate than activists can put a stop to them.Eventually people become disillusioned as assaults on social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, health care, retirement security, etc., outpace the advances being made by local struggles. Not having learned about any shared strategy among the different struggles—and worrying that their activism keeps them away from their children and families and depletes their own economic well-being—they begin to feel their time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.A similar shortsightedness affects national single-issue organizations. As important as their social justice or environmental sustainability work may be, they rarely encourage serious exploration of the economic and political systems that underlie the problems they confront. A movement to humanize the legal profession ends up focused on teaching lawyers how to meditate and take care of themselves but fails to focus on how to change laws to be less class-biased and subservient to the needs of the wealthy and powerful. A movement to bring ethics into psychology may halt psychologists’ participation in torture, but falls short of helping psychologists empower people to challenge the devastating impact of a narcissism-generating society and competitive marketplace. A movement for integral medicine rightly disputes one-dimensional views of human beings in medicine, yet avoids challenging all the economic and political realities that encourage people to treat each other as objects to be manipulated rather than subjects to be treated with love, respect, and generosity. So even progressive professionals who genuinely want to contribute to the healing of the world focus on narrowly defined problem areas, and end up becoming non-activist donors instead of uniting with others to build a coherent progressive movement on the national and international levels. Most people never hear talk of an organized progressive worldview, not to mention a spiritual-progressive worldview.The result of all this is that for much of the past forty years the country has moved further and further to the right on most economic and political issues, except on matters of identity politics. In those spheres, feminist, African American, LGBTQ, and other identity-politics activists have often focused on undermining at least a part of the ideology that generates discrimination based on their racial, sexual, or gender identities. Yet they’ve often avoided anything beyond self–or identity group–empowerment, ignoring the class structures that leave so many people feeling disempowered, thereby setting themselves up for right-wing-manipulated backlash against their so-called special interests.It’s not that people’s caring for each other has been snuffed out, but rather that it has been narrowly channeled into one’s own family, religious, ethnic, or geographical community. Meanwhile, our daily experience in the competitive marketplace, reinforced massively by the media and the champions of global capitalism, infuses us with the belief that everyone is out for themselves and that nothing much can change, so we must narrow our expectations and the scope of what we come to believe is “realistic.” These forces are increasingly successful in putting forward worldviews that sanctify the competitive marketplace, helping people believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that economic mobility is easy to achieve if they work hard and “merit” success. In this fantasy meritocracy, people have no one to blame but themselves if they don’t “make it.”Polls indicate that most Americans hold a set of contradictory beliefs, at once recognizing that the economic and political spheres are unfairly tilted toward the well-being of rich and powerful, yet engaging in self-blame for not having been more successful. They are delighted by outright assaults on the unfairness of it all, yet still hope inwardly that someday they might become one of the rich—and hence, they are unwilling to support measures to create genuine economic and political equality lest their imagined future wealth be limited should they suddenly ascend the class ladder.Many believe that “there is no alternative” to the way things are now. And one major reason they think so is that they almost never hear an alternative presented. The Democratic Party is called “liberal,” yet the vast majority of those who have been its presidential and congressional candidates are beholden to the interests of the rich and powerful—people who are uninterested in articulating what an alternative system might be. Even those candidates the media dubs leftist “populists” rarely go beyond the ideas developed 100 years ago by the Progressives and then by New Deal Democrats. No wonder that most people do not believe there is an alternative to the capitalist system, and do not risk offending the powerful rich or their corporations for fear of making them more likely to move their money and businesses outside the United States or simply disinvest and lay off huge swaths of working people. Why risk that, they reason, if you have no other system to replace global capitalism?The Sanders campaign has shown once again that a significant population of Americans can be mobilized toward a more positive vision. But to keep that energy going, we will have to build a national organization to provide leadership and direction to a coherent and powerful progressive movement. This movement requires the following elements:An effective national organization of progressives must speak to the hunger for a higher meaning for life than the accumulation of goods, and connect this meaning to the need to preserve the earth by reducing the consumption of its raw materials to a sustainable level, limiting the goods and services available to those absolutely necessary and consistent with planetary survival. It must foster an ethos of awe and wonder at the grandeur of our universe rather than a desire to “conquer space.” It must reject views of progress that depend on endless growth without regard to how that growth contributes to the well-being of everyone on the planet. It must unashamedly call for the Caring Society—Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth, and give focus to the ways that we can replace capitalist thought-conditioning with institutions that foster and enhance our capacities to be loving, generous, empathic, compassionate, cooperative with each other, and filled with love of life. And it must recognize those who do not yet agree with this vision as equally valuable and deserving of respect, even as we strongly challenge ideas and practices that are destroying humans and the environment.This is the kind of discussion that localist focus almost always avoids, because the media and the political leadership of our country for the past fifty years have convinced many that these discussions are unrealistic and hence a waste of time, certain to divide rather than unite us. Yet without the national organizations and political parties able to encourage this kind of discussion, our country is likely to continue its march in an ever more militaristic, human rights–and civil liberties–denying, and environmentally destructive direction.So don’t be shocked if even the most progressive political leaders, if by chance they are able to get elected, end up reinforcing rather than fundamentally challenging the worldviews that sustain the globalization of selfishness and materialism. Without a national movement in place, we will see only a flash-in-the-pan upsurge of progressive anger without a coherent worldview, political program, or strategy. It is not “the state” but “the movement” that withers away without these four levels of activity for social change. If the Sanders campaign creates an ongoing organization beyond 2016 that explicitly links to these four goals and embraces the consciousness articulated above, it will have played an important role in transforming our society, whether he wins or not.