[P2P-F] Fwd: Why the Right Keeps Winning and the Left Keeps Losing

Tue Nov 11 12:12:59 CET 2014

hi kevin,

can you republish this one to our blog ?

thanks a lot,

Michel
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <magazine at tikkun.org>
Date: Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 6:49 AM
Subject: Why the Right Keeps Winning and the Left Keeps Losing
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com

    Tikkun
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ymkCcITikkhoYAPGS%2B%2FiJ1tyQGwR7R8O>
  to heal, repair and transform the world       *A note from Rabbi Michael
Lerner*  Join or Donate Now!
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=F8dp5nSyEckYd5WX8mHjxcvCdMeZiM0P>

Salon.com recently published my analysis of why the Right keeps winning.
You can read it online here
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=SwgIRjcsUl6aGCRpfNMZ%2B8vCdMeZiM0P>.
Below is a slightly updated version of that analysis, which you can also
read online here
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=e%2FzKfKhl2rpuVb69Yj1O8MvCdMeZiM0P>.
Please share this via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, send it
out to any lists you are on, and post it on your own website. In the wake
of the 2014 elections, I see many people retreating into despair or denying
that there really was a decisive loss in the midterms, but I have not seen
many progressives offering new strategies to alter the political landscape.
The strategy I outline below has not been tried during the last forty years
of our country moving more to the right than to the left. If you agree with
what I’m proposing below, help me create this discussion in your hometown
as a first step toward reversing the increasing dominance of the Right.

Why the Right Keeps Winning and the Liberals and Progressives Keep Losing

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Why does the Right keep winning in American politics, sometimes through
electoral victories, sometimes by having the Democrats and others on the
Left adopt what were traditionally right-wing policies and perspectives?
Sure, I know that progressives won some important local battles in 2014: A
few towns in California, Texas, and Ohio banned fracking. A few towns in Ohio,
Massachusetts, Florida, and Illinois supported ballot measures to overturn
Citizens United. Richmond, California, stood up to Chevron, and Berkeley
stood up to "Big Soda."

But the overall direction of the country for the past forty years has given
increasing strength to right-wing politicians in the Republican Party and
opportunists in the Democratic Party who effectively do much of the same
work that these right-wingers would do when they win political power. So
why has this been happening? And why do so many people end up voting to
elect politicians who are committed to enacting policies that hurt the
economic well-being of a significant section (not the majority, but many)
of the people who voted for them?

I asked this question first to thousands of people whom my research team
and I encountered when I was Principal Investigator for an NIMH-sponsored
study about how to deal with stress at work and stress in family life. At
the time Ronald Reagan was president and he had won in part by winning many
votes of middle-income working people.

The answer given by the media then, and often proffered today as well by
the Democrats is, “It’s the economy, stupid.” They didn’t give that
explanation up when Reaganomics produced heavy economic losses for working
people who continued to vote Republican, and they didn’t give that
explanation up when the Clinton/Gore years produced a booming economy and
yet Gore lost (OK, he won but for the Supreme Court, but that was only made
possible because of how close the vote was—and why would it have been so
close if “the economy” is the determining issue?)

Nor am I convinced when recent statisticians show that those with the least
income give ten votes to Democrats to every eight they give to Republicans,
thus supposedly showing that people always vote their economic interests.
The issue remains: those whose economic interests are not served by a
politics that caters to the wealthy (those eight who vote Republican when
the Republicans over and over again try to dismantle economic programs that
might help them) continue to support those politicians, and that gives the
Right the electoral edge it would never have on the grounds of its
policies (most people who vote for them, according to recent polls, don’t
agree with their specific policy positions).

What my research team discovered was the following:

1. Most Americans work in an economy that teaches them the common sense of
global capitalism: “Everyone is out for themselves and will seek to advance
their own interests without regard to your well-being, so the only rational
path is for you to seek to advance your own interests in the same way.
Those who have more money and power than you have are just better at
seeking their own self-interest, because this is a meritocratic society in
which you end up where you deserve to end up, so stop whining about the
differences in wealth and power, because if you deserved more you would
have more.”

2. Now here is the central contradiction: most people hate this kind of
reality. They believe that it is in stark contrast to the values they would
like to live by but simultaneously they also believe that the logic of
capitalist society is the only possible reality, and that they would be
fools not to try to live by it in every part of their lives. This message
is reinforced in our workplaces and also by almost every sitcom and
television news story available. But most people hate that this is the
case. They often will tell you, “Everyone is selfish and materialistic, so
I’d be a fool to be the one person who is caring for others in a world
where everyone is just out for themselves.” Unconsciously, many people
adopt the values of the marketplace, and these values have a corrosive
impact on their own friendships, relationships, and family life.

3. So when many Americans encounter a different reality in right-wing
churches that have specialized in creating supportive communities, they
feel much more addressed there than they’ve ever felt in progressive
movements that focus on economic entitlements or political rights and
sometimes disintegrate due to internal tensions over dynamics of relative
privilege and unproductive feelings of guilt. Only rarely do these liberal
or progressive movements actually manifest a loving community that seems to
care specifically about the people who come to their public talks or
gatherings—the experience is more about hearing a good speech than about
encountering people who want to know who you are and what you
need—precisely what happens in most right-wing churches.

Is it really a surprise that people who so rarely encounter this kind of
caring among the people with whom they work or the people whom they see
angling for power or sexual conquest in the movies and TV would feel more
seen and recognized for having some value in the Right than in much of the
Left? Sadly, the cost of belonging to those right-wing churches is this:
that they demean or put-down those deemed to be “Other”—those who are not
part of their community. These “others” (including feminists, African
Americans, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and increasingly all liberals)
are blamed for the ethos of selfishness and breakdown of loving
relationships and families. This is ironic because in fact the breakdown of
loving relationships is largely a product of the increasing internalization
of the utilitarian or instrumental way people have come to view each other,
a product of bringing home into personal life, friendships, and marriages
the very values that the Right esteems and champions in the competitive
economy.

 4. The Democrats, and most of the Left, have little understanding of this
dynamic and rarely position themselves as the voice challenging the values
of the marketplace or the instrumental way of thinking that is the produce
of the materialism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace.  So even
when facing huge political setbacks, as in the 2014 midterm elections, you
will hear the smartest of liberals and progressives acknowledging that what
is needed is some kind of unifying worldview that the Democrats have failed
to articulate in the six years that they have occupied the White House and
had the majority in the House of Representatives. They imagine that if they
can put forward a pro-working class economic program, that will be
sufficient to change the dynamics of American politics.

They are right that they need a coherent vision, but it can’t solely be an
economic populism. What people need to hear is an account of the way
the suffering they experience in their personal lives, the breakdown of
families, the loneliness and inability to trust other people, the sense of
being surrounded by selfish and materialistic people, and the self-blaming
they experience when their own relationships feel less fulfilling than they
had hoped for are all a product of the triumph of the way people have
internalized the values of the capitalist marketplace. This suffering can
only be overcome when the capitalist system itself is replaced by one based
on love, caring, kindness, generosity and a New Bottom Line that no longer
judges corporations, government policies, or social institutions as
“efficient,” “productive” or “rational” solely by the extent to which they
maximize money or power. Instead, liberals and progressives need to be
advocating a New Bottom Line that focuses on how much any given institution
or economic or social policy or practice tends to maximize our capacities
to be loving and caring, kind and generous, environmentally responsible,
and capable of transcending a narrow utilitarian attitude toward other
human beings and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and
radical amazement at the grandeur and beauty of all that is.

Progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party need to develop a
Spiritual Covenant that can apply this New Bottom Line to every aspect of
our society—our economy, our corporations, our educational system, our
legal system. In short, a progressive worldview that deeply rejects the way
most of our institutions today teach people the values of “looking out for
number one” and maximizing one’s own material well being without regard to
the consequences for others or for the environment. Armed with an
alternative worldview, progressives would have a chance of helping working
people stop blaming themselves for their situation, stop blaming some
other, and see that it is the whole system that needs a fundamental
makeover.

But many liberals and progressives are religiophobic and thus believe that
talk of love and caring is mere psycho-babble. As a result they cede to the
Right the values issues rather than providing an alternative set of values
in which love and generosity and caring for the Earth would take center
place. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives have developed a model
of what it would look like to put values such as love and caring into
political practice. Doing so would include implementing a Global Marshall
Plan and passing an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution. The latter amendment would require that all state
and federal elections be financed solely through public funding—all other
monies would be totally banned. The amendment would also require any
corporation with an income above $50 million/year that is operating or
selling its services or products within the U.S. to get a new corporate
charter once every five years. Such charters would only be granted to those
that could prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social
responsibility to a panel of ordinary citizens who would also hear the
testimony of people around the world who have been impacted by the
policies, behavior, and advertising of those corporations. We in the
Network of Spiritual Progressives have also begun professional task forces
to envision what each profession would look like if they were in fact
governed by The New Bottom Line. Read more at spiritualprogressives.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=GbGSO4ohrDmsjHF4MYufRcvCdMeZiM0P>
.

The environmental movement had the possibility of helping people make this
transition in consciousness had it focused more on helping people see that
the planet is not just an economic “resource,” but a living being that
nurtures and sustains life and which appropriately would engender awe,
wonder, and radical amazement, and hence celebration of the universe of
which it is a part. But in order to be “realistic,” most major
environmental organizations, and even most of the local anti-fracking and
local-oriented environmental initiatives have avoided this spiritual
dimension, instead framing their issues in narrow self-interest terms that
are then countered by the supporters of fracking, pipelines, and other
environmentally destructive approaches by pointing out that these
approaches can generate jobs and revenues. Stick to framing things on
narrow and short-term material self-interest terms, and the corporate
apologists have a plausible if misleading argument. It’s only when you
address the environment in terms of the New Bottom Line that you can
provide a way to reach people who otherwise get attracted to the arguments
of the Right.

What the Left keeps on missing is that people have a set of spiritual
needs—for a life of meaning and purpose that transcends the logic of the
competitive marketplace and its ethos of materialism and selfishness, for
communities that address those needs, and for loving friends and families
that are best sustained when they share some higher vision than
self-interest. The reason that the gay and lesbian struggle for marriage
equality went from seeming impossibly utopian to winning in a majority of
states in a very short while was that the proponents of that struggle
switched their rhetoric from “we demand our equal rights” to “we are loving
people who want our love to flourish and be supported in this society.”
That same kind of switch toward higher values and purpose, and touching
into our shared desire for loving and caring world, could make the Left a
winner again, instead of a consistent loser.

 5. Nothing alienates middle-income working people more than the usual
reason progressives and liberals give for why they are losing elections or
failing to gain more support for their programs: namely, that Americans are
racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or just plain dumb. Most Americans
may not know the details of the programs put forward by political movements
or parties, by they know when they are being demeaned, and that is
precisely what gives the Right the ability to describe the Left as
“elitist,” thereby obscuring the way right-wing politics serves the real
elites of wealth and power.

And then radio and TV right-wingers effectively mobilize the anger and
frustration people feel at living in a society where love and caring are so
hard to come by—against the Left! This is the ultimate irony: the
capitalist marketplace generates a huge amount of anger, but with its
meritocratic fantasy it convinces people that it is their own failings that
are to blame for why their lives don’t feel more fulfilling. So that anger
is internalized and manifests in alcoholism, drug abuse, violence in
families, high rates of divorce, road rage, and support for militaristic
ventures around the world.

The Right mobilizes this anger—and directs it against liberals and
progressives. And that actually feels great for many people, because it
relieves their self-blaming and allows them to express their frustrations
(though sadly at the wrong targets). Only a movement that understands all
these dynamics, and can help people understand that their anger is
appropriate but that it is wrongly directed can progressives hope to win
against the Right.

But instead of addressing that anger against the political and economic
system, the Democrats are often seen as champions of the exiting system
(and not mistakenly when President Obama seems more interested in serving
the interests of the 1 percent than in challenging the distortions of the
banks and the investment companies and the powerful corporations. All the
worse that after the 2014 election, Obama is once again talking about
finding common ground with the Republicans—that has guided his policies for
the past six years. Democrats keep on thinking that if they look more like
the Right, they’ll win more credibility. All they win is the disdain of the
majority.

 6. As if all this weren’t bad enough, the Obama presidency has put the
final blow to liberals and progressives by eliciting hope in a different
kind of world, then capitulating to the special interests. People who
allowed themselves to hope in 2008 may need decades of recovery time till
they can again believe in any political path—or we need psycho-spiritual
progressive therapists who can help us build an alternative both insides
and outside the Democratic Party. We need to speak honestly about this
disillusionment and help people feel less humiliated that they believed in
Obama’s rhetoric of hope. And we need to show that many people who at first
seem impossibly right-wing actually want a world of love and caring too,
and have never heard liberals and progressives speak that kind of language.

 7. The first step in recovery is to create large public gatherings at
which liberals and progressives can mourn our losses, acknowledge the many
mistakes we’ve made in the past decades, and then develop a strategy for
how most effectively to challenge the assumptions of the capitalist
marketplace that are shared by too many who otherwise think of themselves
as progressives. Without this kind of a recovery process, we are likely to
end up with more and deeper despair in 2016 and beyond.

Our Network of Spiritual Progressives is taking a step in this direction by
trying to reach out to people in every ethnicity, race, and faith or
atheist community, and inviting you to the University of San Francisco in
San Francisco, California, on December 14 for a one-day gathering (starting
after church to respect those who go to pray on Sunday mornings) to discuss
these issues and to start developing a winning strategy for healing and
transforming our world. We will post more info at spiritualprogressives.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=aBvXWAoOkiLVfdPHWps8McvCdMeZiM0P>
starting
next week (November 20).

If you live in another state and want to attend something like this, then
work to assemble a large group of people. If you do so, we will come to
your part of the country to shape a discussion of this sort for the people
you know. We need hundreds of such meetings to help reorient the liberal
and progressive forces, not discounting all that they are doing, but only
seeking to help them integrate into that work a shared worldview (the New
Bottom Line) and a psycho-spiritual sensitivity that will make them far
more effective.

We’re happy to also publicize other gatherings sponsored in any place in
the United States where people are willing to see how badly we need a
fundamental rethinking of the assumptions that have led liberals and
progressives to become so unsuccessful in capturing the imagination and
loyalty of the American people.

<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=rEmV0MeqK4nb436sfjZUE8vCdMeZiM0P>

*Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of *Tikkun*, author of the national
*bestseller The
Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right*, and
chair of the interfaith and secular-humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual
Progressives. He invites readers who agree with this proposal to contact
him at **rabbilerner.tikkun at gmail.com <rabbilerner.tikkun at gmail.com>** to
begin to implement with him this strategy for societal healing and
transformation.*

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