[P2P-F] Fwd: Trump's Victory - Mourning and Analysis

Thu Nov 10 08:18:20 CET 2016

I strongly agree with Michael Lerner's approach here:

"
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/stop-shaming-trump-supporters

"The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they
are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the
selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists,
immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it
by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native
Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was
something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white
working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once
again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being
misunderstood.

So please understand what is happening here. Many Trump supporters very
legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality.
The upper 20 percent of income earners, many of them quite liberal and
rightly committed to the defense of minorities and immigrants, also believe
in the economic meritocracy and their own right to have so much more than
those who are less fortunate. So while they may be progressive on issues of
discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism, they are
blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that
are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.

The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened
by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious
people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and
caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is
hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with
hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that
there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives
of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals
and radical activists.

The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism,
sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not
reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans. If the left could
abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping
Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden
injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive
marketplace generates.

Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering
caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to
reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition,"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner and Peter Gabel at Tikkun magazine and the
Network of Spiritual Progressives <cat at spiritualprogressives.org>
Date: Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 7:07 AM
Subject: Trump's Victory - Mourning and Analysis
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com

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I too am mourning and grieving the election results. This is a sad and
scary time for our country. Like many of you, I am stunned at the results.
We need to take time to grieve and mourn, to express our shock and even our
rage in community where we are held.

And we need to mobilize now more than ever. If ever there was a time when
Tikkun's voice is needed, now is that time. Please read the analyses below
by Rabbi Lerner and Peter Gabel to hear a perspective not available
elsewhere. We need your support, please make a super generous
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We are also holding a conference this weekend to explore - What's Next -
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---

*Stop Shaming Trump Supporters*

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

[*This article originally appeared in The New York Times. You can read it
online **here*
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=VoYZD9t540fVX7rvXlzkHo0bZ2Z1n%2Bij>*.
Below  the article, Rabbi Lerner adds some of the ideas that the N.Y. Times
took out in order to make it fit for their blog space.*]

It turns out that shaming the supporters of Donald J. Trump is not a good
political strategy.

Though job loss and economic stagnation played a role in his victory, so
did shame. As the principal investigator on a study of the middle class for
the National Institute of Mental Health, I found that working people’s
stress is often intensified by shame at their failure to “make it” in what
they are taught is a meritocratic American economy.

The right has been very successful at persuading working people that they
are vulnerable not because they themselves have failed, but because of the
selfishness of some other villain (African-Americans, feminists,
immigrants, Muslims, Jews, liberals, progressives; the list keeps growing).

Instead of challenging this ideology of shame, the left has buttressed it
by blaming white people as a whole for slavery, genocide of the Native
Americans and a host of other sins, as though whiteness itself was
something about which people ought to be ashamed. The rage many white
working-class people feel in response is rooted in the sense that once
again, as has happened to them throughout their lives, they are being
misunderstood.

So please understand what is happening here. Many Trump supporters very
legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality.
The upper 20 percent of income earners, many of them quite liberal and
rightly committed to the defense of minorities and immigrants, also believe
in the economic meritocracy and their own right to have so much more than
those who are less fortunate. So while they may be progressive on issues of
discrimination against the obvious victims of racism and sexism, they are
blind to their own class privilege and to the hidden injuries of class that
are internalized by much of the country as self-blame.

The right’s ability to portray liberals as elitists is further strengthened
by the phobia toward religion that prevails in the left. Many religious
people are drawn by the teachings of their tradition to humane values and
caring about the oppressed. Yet they often find that liberal culture is
hostile to religion of any sort, believing it is irrational and filled with
hate. People on the left rarely open themselves to the possibility that
there could be a spiritual crisis in society that plays a role in the lives
of many who feel misunderstood and denigrated by the fancy intellectuals
and radical activists.

The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism,
sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not
reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans. If the left could
abandon all this shaming, it could rebuild its political base by helping
Americans see that much of people’s suffering is rooted in the hidden
injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive
marketplace generates.

Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering
caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to
reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition. Only then
can we help working people understand that they do not live in a
meritocracy, that their intuition that the system is rigged is correct (but
it is not by those whom they had been taught to blame) and that their pain
and rage is legitimate.

Michael Lerner, the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, Calif., is
the editor of Tikkun magazine and chairman of the Network of Spiritual
Progressives.

[*Up to here is what the NY Times printed in their blog. Lerner adds a bit
more below, so as to deepen one's understanding.*]

We need to retool the discourse on the Left and train hundreds of thousands
of people to become part of an "Empathy Tribe" that can reach out to Trump
supporters to apologize to them for the ways they've felt "dissed" by the
liberal and progressive world and to help people understand that what the
actual causes of their suffering are the perverse spiritual distortions and
twisted psychodynamics of a global competitive marketplace. We can and must
help people understand that the inequalities in this society are not a
function of who is or is not talented, smart, or works hard, but instead
are a function of the class structure which will only allocate economic
security and jobs that feel fulfilling to a small percentage of the
population while the rest of the population is scrappling for the
leftovers.

What we do not want to do is deny or lessen the importance of the struggles
against racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and
xenophobia. Rather, what we want to do is insist that those struggles must
be carried out in ways that do not negate but rather affirm the pain and
suffering caused by classism and the internalization of the materialism,
selfishness and "looking out for number one" consciousness of our society.
We want to avoid the kind of discourse that we so often hear in liberal and
progressive societies in which one identity politics group fights with
another over who is most oppressed while simultaneously demanding that
others defer to their will on question a, b, or c. Please read Peter
Gabel's piece below to get a fuller sense of what we are talking about
here.

In fact, if we could learn to listen to the life experiences and work
experiences of middle income working people and the working and unemployed
poor, empathically validate their experiences, and really hear their
grievances, we would be in a much better inner place to build a
transformative movement that included people who yesterday voted for Trump.
In part, this means compassionately challenging those in the liberal and
progressive world who are now talking as though everyone who voted for
Trump is racist, sexist, homophobic, stupid and/or evil. Some fit into that
description but many do not, and when they hear themselves described by
liberals or progressives reacting to the 2016 election by demeaning or
shaming everyone who voted for Trump, they become even more attached to the
Right, and even more outraged at what they perceive to be the arrogance and
elitism of the Left.

What I'm describing here is a massive project, but one which is absolutely
necessary if the movements for environmental sustainability and a slowing
of global climate change, human rights, anti-racism, peace and nonviolence
are to have any chance of achieving the political power they need to
actually change our society. And the first step is one that YOU can be
personally involved in by circulating this analysis and Peter Gabel's
analysis, bringing your friends together to talk about it, and then
becoming an activist with us in Tikkun's interfaith and
secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming NSP-- Network of Spiritual
Progressives. So if you are not able to come to our conference this
weekend, at least join the NSP www.spiritualprogressives.org/join
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=RTR%2FLuBVi94TkNodlu8IhY0bZ2Z1n%2Bij>,
and help us create a group in your local area to help promote this
consciousness!

Rabbi Michael Lerner   rabbilerner.tikkun at gmail.com

*****

*Coercive Deference and Double Bind Politics on the Left *

by *Peter Gabel*

Many white working -class communities feel robbed of much of their sense of
worth and recognition by the impact of the global economy on the conditions
of their life and on their culture. They see elites...millionaires,
billionaires, tech wizards, bi-coastal cultural sophistocates...benefiting
from an economy that their prior economic communities have been eviscerated
by (in the rust-belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,
for example, all of whom voted in large numbers for Trump). And they feel
this marginalization and cast-asideness not just because of its material or
economic aspect, but also and in some ways more importantly because of its
denigration of their own sense of worthiness, recognition, and sense of
communal belonging and value. In this latter sense, they feel spiritual
suffering and the loss of human solidarity and love.

..

Instead of responding to this with compassion and concern, the liberal
world has communicated to this community that the world is or would be fine
if  these whites had exercised their "equality of opportunity" to pursue
their god-given right to fulfill their dreams through successfully
competing in the marketplace... except for minorities, women, the LGBT
community, disabled people, and other designated groups who must be given
"special benefits" due to past discrimination so that they can gain the
same "equality of opportunity" that the so-called "white" community already
has. This liberal attitude reflected in the mainstream of the Democratic
Party not only denies the spiritual pain of the white working class...it
also blames the white working-class for failing to succeed themselves and
for somehow contributing to the oppression of African-Americans, women, and
all the other groups whom the liberal world (correctly) wants to extend
more rights to and more benefits to.

Thus the liberal world in effect flaunts their own success as elites,
blames the working class for their own failures, and then holds them
responsible as "whites" for the oppression of other oppressed groups,
requiring them to deny their own sense of marginalization and spiritual
pain, their own invisibility, and to defer to the orthodoxy that it is the
other oppressed groups who are deserving of concern and recognition. And
even more, the white working-class communities are not allowed to comment
upon this whole process because that would be racist, or sexist, or
otherwise not politically correct for them to do. Understandably this makes
these white working class communities feel they are simultaneously in pain
and silenced from commenting on their pain, an untenable and explosive hurt
that Donald Trump perfectly spoke to in his campaign.

What we saw in the election results, furthermore, was that this dynamic was
not limited to to the white working-class, but also to white
college-educated men* and women *who voted for Trump in large numbers, in
spite of his derogatory comments about women. While these "whites" don't
face the identical socio-economic conditions of the white working-class,
they also suffer the spiritual pain of not being affirmed in a loving and
valuing way within our alienated culture, and they also are expected to
direct all their concern to designated oppressed others and deny the pain
of their own spiritual isolation. And they too are not allowed to comment
upon this because they are supposed to be guilty about the pain of others
rather than crying out themselves.

This is the coercive deference, the double-bind, that has undermined the
Left's appeal for the last forty or so years since the Left abandoned a
universalist view of human liberation in favor of an exclusive focus on the
extension of liberal rights to previously discriminated-against groups, and
on identity politics based on the past and continuing injuries to each
victimized identity group for which a designated oppressor group ("whites")
are responsible.

.

The solution to this is a new spiritual politics that sees all of us as
suffering from a capitalist social world that fails to affirm all of us as
worthy of love, respect, and recognition, and seeks to build an economy and
a culture that carries forward that loving affirmation to all human beings.
Of course this must include compassion for the historical and continuing
particular suffering inflicted on African-Americans, women, the LGBT
community and others who have been harmed, demeaned, and unrecognized, but
it must also extend a loving solidarity to the "whites"--that is to *all of
us* as universal beings with particular histories and circumstances who
long for a world based on love, care and the embrace of truly being
supported and valued.

.

Bernie Sanders did a great job of showing such a politics is possible right
now, even though he focused only on economic issues as carriers of
spiritual care and concern rather than on a fuller truly
spiritual-progressive program that would have addressed a broader array of
spiritual and communal needs. Until we move our politics in this
universalist healing direction, others like Donald Trump will continue to
succeed with messages that speak to "white" people's pain in distorted ways
with likely harmful consequences.

.

Peter Gabel is Editor-at-Large of Tikkun magazine, co-founder of the
Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics, and the author
most recently of* Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law,
Politics, and Culture.*

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