Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/54/)
I contend that it is our failure to cultivate practical curiosity, our inability to reckon with the complexity of democratic governance and leadership that is responsible for the low numbers of people within the United States who identify as liberal or progressive.
Gary Dorrien claims that “Obama governs with deep caution, even timidity, as he pushes for risky things.” I disagree. What Dorrien sees as timidity, I see as genuinely democratic leadership in the face of formidable challenges—not only economic, environmental, and military crises, but also a resolutely recalcitrant Republican party and a deeply divided Democratic party, unable to muster agreement on the contours of financial regulation, economic stimulus or health care reform.
My complaint to the politicians in the current electoral race is this: why are you so eager to pander for our votes that you refuse to tell us what modern-day sacrifices we all as citizens, ought to be making on behalf of the needs of fellow Americans and our world neighbors?
Like Robertson’s Coalition crusaders, we need to make it clear that when the election is over, no matter the outcome, we are not going away; that when we make a call to action, that the call is answered.
Feminist and black womanist reflection have long held that one’s personal experience always has political and universal implications. In light of this claim, the womanist lens that guides my approach to The Obama Question is especially intrigued by Gary Dorrien’s attempt to debunk and redirect racially politicized assumptions that undergird some progressive and leftist perspectives.
The manner in which the current political discourse in the United States is marred by shortsighted discussions of the “good” and the nature of morality capable of pushing the nation toward its better self is glaring. While neither seems willing to acknowledge this, both the religious Right and the religious Left have fallen short with respect to these ideological challenges.
If Obama can re-establish the fundamental moral priority for the nation of the public or common good to what the founders originally held dear and what the biblical tradition teaches, he might have a fulcrum by which to pry the American moral spirit free from the prison into which the Tea Party and severely conservative Republicans have confined it.
President Obama is a political pragmatist and said so repeatedly throughout his 2008 campaign. Unfortunately, many of his supporters failed to understand the full meaning of that reality.
Stopping the tsunami requires every tool in our kit, even the choice of a timid and misguided plugger—whom we need to prod, push, and often militantly oppose—over the stoker. Plugging the leak opens up prospects that the people will mobilize rapidly from below and rebuild the levy while quieting the floodwaters.
As we confront the current election and the next four years, many progressives are reflecting upon how we reached this juncture and what role we should play moving forward. Given the partisan character of our country and the mixed results of the current administration, what are spiritual and religious progressives to do?
Michael Lerner: So you’re running for president. Could you tell me a little bit about who you are and how you came to run on the Green Party platform?
I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but I have lost faith in national politics. Yes, I’ll vote in the coming elections and do my part to get the less sold-out, less anti-communitarian candidate in office. But I no longer look to the top tier of centralized government to solve our problems or help us grope toward conclusions together.
For me, big government has become as abstract as the corporations that made it possible. The more I study the emergence of corporate capitalism, the more I see central government as the other side of the same coin: a booming peer-to-peer society was intentionally dismantled during the Renaissance in order to reassert the authority of the aristocracy.
Truth be told, we live in an era of deepening stagnation and political stalemate. With the labor movement—the traditional countervailing power that drives progressive politics—at its historic nadir, we cannot expect the kind of systemic transformation we need to come from Washington.
America’s political dysfunction is a symptom of a national identity crisis. Americans are drawn to incompatible views of human purpose. I appreciate how Gary Dorrien (writing in both this issue of Tikkun and in The Obama Question) frames the broken mirror of national identity in two panes. In one is yearning for unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth; in the other is yearning for self-government—that is, a desire for rightful power to apply core values in the creation of public policies and practices, including those that pertain to wealth. Not only do large blocs form around these two yearnings, but many individuals seem internally split by the competing desires. They want leadership, but no clarity comes from political or religious leaders. If this crisis goes unsettled for much longer, the system will founder. That fact should cheer no one, for in the present state of affairs, tyranny, not revolution and reconstruction, will follow.
It is time for progressives and others to shift the critique of Obama away from an exclusive focus on the policies and practices of his administration and instead develop a new language for politics—one with a longer historical purview and a deeper understanding of the ominous forces that now threaten any credible notion of the United States as an aspiring democracy.