[NEohioPAL]The Election

[LissyGulick at aol.com]

Dear friends,
The following article was forwarded to me by a dear friend. It is long for 
this forum, but worth it in terms of the wisdom and hope it confers:


The Democrats Needed and Need a Religious/Spiritual Left   -  November 3,2004


Warm greetings to friends of the Tikkun Community!


Democrats Need a Religious Left By Rabbi Michael Lerner


>For years the Democrats have been telling themselves it's the economy, 
stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of middle income Americans 
have voted against their economic interests to support republicans who have 
tapped a deeper set of needs.  Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a 
society that seems to  place materialism and selfishness above moral values. 
They know that  "looking out for number one" has become the common sense of our  
society, but they want a life that is about something more-a framework  of 
meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend the grasping and 
narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will admit  that they have material needs, 
and that they worry about adequate  health care, stability in employment, and 
enough money to give their  kids a college education. But even more deeply 
they want their lives to have  meaning-and they respond to candidates who seem 
to care about  values and some sense of transcendent purpose.

>

>Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the political 
Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with 
a coherent worldview that speaks to their  "meaning needs." Most of these 
churches and synagogues demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even 
if the flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what  
members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they rarely find 
in the rest of the society. And a sense of community that is offered them 
nowhere else, a community that has as its central theme that life has value because 
it is connected to some higher meaning than one's success in the marketplace.

>

> It's easy to see how this hunger gets manipulated in ways that liberals 
find offensive and contradictory. The frantic attempts to preserve family by 
denying gays the right to get married, the talk about being conservatives while 
meanwhile supporting Bush policies that accelerate the destruction of the 
environment and do nothing to encourage respect for God's creation or an ethos of  
awe and wonder to replace the ethos of turning nature into a commodity, the 
intense focus on preserving the powerless fetus and a culture of life without a 
concomitant commitment to medical research (stem cell research/HIV-AIDS), gun 
control and healthcare reform., the claim to care about others and then deny 
them a living wage and an ecologically sustainable environment-all this is 
rightly perceived by liberals as a level of inconsistency that makes them dismiss 
as hypocrites the voters who have been moving to the Right.

>

>Yet liberals, trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion and tone- deaf 
to the spiritual needs that underlie the move to the Right, have been unable 
to engage these voters in a  serious dialogue. Rightly  angry at the way that 
some religious communities have been mired in  authoritarianism, racism, 
sexism and homophobia, the liberal world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility 
to religion that it has both  marginalized those many people on the Left who 
actually do have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge 
that  many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the ethos of 
selfishness in American life.

>

>Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by insisting that 
a serious religious person would never turn his back on the suffering of the 
poor, that the bible's injunction to love one's  neighbor required us to 
provide health care for all, and that the New Testament's command to "turn the 
other cheek" should give us a predisposition against responding to violence with 
violence.

>

>Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk about the strength that comes 
from love and generosity and applied that to foreign policy and  homeland 
security.

>

>Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk of a New Bottom Line, so that 
American institutions get judged efficient, rational and productive not only to 
the extent that they maximize money and power,  but also to the extent that 
they maximize people's capacities to be loving and caring, ethically and 
ecologically sensitive, and capable of responding to the universe with awe and wonder.

>

>Imagine a Democratic Party that could call for schools to teach gratitude, 
generosity, caring for others, and celebration of the wonders that daily 
surround us! Such a Democratic Party, continuing to embrace its agenda for economic 
fairness and multi-cultural  inclusiveness, would have won in 2004 and can win 
in the future.

>

>(Please don't tell me that this is happening outside the Democratic  Party 
in the Greens or in other leftie groups-- because except for a few tiny 
exceptions it is not! I remember how  hard I tried to get  Ralph Nader to think and 
talk in these terms in 2000, and how little response I got substantively from 
the Green Party when I suggested  reformulating their  excessively politically 
correct policy orientation in ways that would speak to this spiritual 
consciousness. The  hostility of the Left to spirituality is so deep, in fact, that 
when they  hear us in Tikkun talking this way they often can't even hear what we 
are saying--so they systematically mis-hear it and say that we  are calling 
for the Left to take up the politics of the Right, which is exactly the 
opposite of our point--speaking to spiritual needs  actually leads to a more radical 
critique of the dynamics of corporate capitalism and corporate  globalization, 
not to a mimicking of  right-wing policies).

>

> If the Democrats were to foster a religions/spiritual Left, they would  no 
longer pick candidates who support preemptive wars or who appease corporate 
power. They would reject the cynical realism that led them to pretend to be born
-again militarists, a deception that fooled no one and only revealed their 
contempt for the intelligence of most  Americans. Instead of assuming that most 
Americans are either stupid  or reactionary, a religious Left would understand 
that many Americans who are on the Right actually share the same concern for a 
world based on love and generosity that underlies Left politics, even though 
lefties often hide their value attachments.

>

>Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up their 
attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are fundamentally 
stupid or evil. Its time they got over that elitist  self- righteousness and 
developed strategies that could affirm their common humanity with those who voted 
for the Right. Teaching themselves to see the good in the rest of the American 
public would be a critical first step in liberals and progressives learning 
how to teach the rest of American society how to see that same goodness in the 
rest of the people on this planet. It is this spiritual  lesson-that our own 
well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and on the 
well-being of the earth - a lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of 
virtually every religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived 
Democratic Party.

>

>Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get  over the 
false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted  for Bush could 
never be moved to care about the well being of anyone but themselves. That 
transformation in the Democrats would make them  into serious contenders.

>

>The last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their 
legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King. 
We cannot wait for the reappearance of that kind of charasmatic leader to begin 
the process of re-building a spiritual/religious Left.

<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/lissygulick/index.html">Lissy Gulick </A>

http://www.geocities.com/lissygulick/index.html