Barack Obama’s nomination by the Democrats is the most significant progressive electoral victory in several decades. The hard work of peace, environmental, social justice, human rights, anti-racist, women and gay activists created the climate in which he could win. But the Left could only win because Obama was able to embody the spiritual dimension and elicit in many Americans deeply repressed desires for community, mutual recognition, authentic and non-manipulated feelings, and ultimately a sense that our lives have a higher meaning than the frenetic pursuit of money, power, fame, sexual conquest and accumulation of things that have dominated American life for many many decades under Republican and Democratic presidencies alike.

There have been a lot of bad feelings expressed by supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton about the sexism she experienced on the campaign trail, and some feel that she ultimately lost because, as a woman, she did not get equal respect. The sexism by the media and by some men in the primary states was indeed fierce and disgusting. But we have to ask what man, even one as smart and hard-working as Hillary Clinton, could have done as well in these primaries, if he had represented, as she did, the established leadership of the Democratic Party who voted for the Iraq War and continued to fund it? Her gender and resulting support from women helped her overcome that supreme obstacle.

Exit polls indicated that a significant portion of Senator Clinton’s voters were considering voting for Senator McCain instead of Senator Obama. It may be that some of those were disgruntled feminists who want to punish the Democratic Party for decisions that hurt Clinton’s candidacy. But not many fit that category, because McCain’s opposition to Roe v. Wade and his likely packing the court with yet more right-wing justices who seek to dismantle women’s rights makes him an unlikely candidate for feminist support. The majority of those of Senator Clinton’s former supporters who will vote for McCain were people who were attracted to her more because of her appearance as the militarist candidate who talked the language of  “obliterating Iran” and who had to be pushed kicking and screaming into the position of calling for an end to the Iraq war in 2009. Far from working against her, it was only her gender that made it possible for her to have held together in the same electoral coalition the feminists with the anti-choice and most pro-war elements in her party, and no man taking her political stance as a supporter of a militarist consciousness  for many years would have had a chance against Edwards and Obama in the political climate of 2008.

Obama supporters and, we are certain, the overwhelming majority of Hillary supporters, believe it is important to try to overcome the bad feelings of the very hurtful campaign and to celebrate this very simple fact: Tens of millions of Americans have been willing to contemplate and support the possibility that either a woman or a Black man could be the next president of the United States.

Realists, wake up. It was you “realists” who only a short while ago were teaching us that no Black and no woman could ever make it to that level of power in the racist and sexist realities of American society. They may not this time in 2008, but the certainty that they cannot is once and for all broken.

This is how it has always been in our world. Most of us get intimidated into passivity because “the realists” badger us into accepting a reality we despise. Yet the most significant changes in human history have always occurred because some small group of people was not willing to be badgered that way any more.

Of course, what changed wasn’t changed by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, but rather by hundreds of millions of interactions that have taken place on a daily basis for at least the past thirty years between people influenced by the anti-racist and feminist movements and people who had not yet gotten the message. Now they get it, have assimilated it, and are ready to work with it.

Something very powerful is changing. The willingness of so many Whites to vote for a Black man who started his career as a community organizer and who remains committed to social justice and an end to poverty may at times feel like a modern day miracle, even though his programs may be deficient in some ways. Ditto the willingness of so many White working class men to support a woman candidate for president is a reason to rejoice. That a woman was able to become the more conservative mainstream candidate deserves our appreciation, because even though—having watched Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir in office—we know that a woman may end up being just as insensitive to the suffering of the poor and just as militarist as any man could be, we recognize that the struggle against sexism and the uprooting of the worldview it has generated (including in particular “toughness” as a central value) is one of the most important struggles taking place in the world today, and one that we wholeheartedly support.

Could we please, as a society, take a moment, perhaps this July 4th, to celebrate the goodness and decency in so many Americans that made this shift possible, made possible major advances in the struggle against racism and sexism? It’s certainly worth celebrating! And even a reason for pride in what is good in America!

While we are at it, we should also acknowledge the wisdom of Republicans in not allowing ageism to keep them from supporting John McCain. Though the media did its best to stir up “concerns” that a man who would be in his mid-seventies would be making critical decisions should John McCain be elected president, the voters nominated him because they agreed with his politics. Perhaps they know what the media won’t acknowledge, that age does not have the same impact on everyone, that an older man or woman may have as much wisdom, life energy, soul and body beauty, intellectual clarity  and even sexual potency (read Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal!) as a younger person, if not more, and that the discrimination against older people is irrational and a moral evil that needs to be combated. It’s a testimony to growing political maturity in America that the 2008 elections are not being determined by age, race or gender.

And talking about overcoming discrimination, if you’ll pardon the digression, we could also use this July 4th to celebrate the decision of the California Supreme Court to allow gay marriage. Tikkun has vigorously opposed homophobia in the religious and secular worlds from the moment we started as a magazine, and we are proud to note how many people of faith are now assembling to counter the efforts by the gay-bashers to pass a constitutional amendment for California this coming November that would re-impose the ban on gay marriage. Recent polls indicate that a majority of Californians now support gay marriage. Let us hope that in this, as in so many other spheres, California is the vanguard of future cultural transformation.

LEARNING FROM OBAMA’S MISTAKES IN THE SPRING

The Obama campaign would be wise to reflect on the underlying meaning of some of the problems it faced in the spring. For our purposes, we can start with Senator Obama’s remarks to a small group of SF Bay Area Obama funders in which he talked about the bitterness he was encountering in many voters in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania who, he seemed to be suggesting, were so unmoored by their constantly deteriorating economic circumstance that they were turning to anti-immigrant sentiments, reliance on guns, and religion.

The media, responding to Senator Hillary Clinton’s attacks on what Obama said, focused on the seeming elitism in Obama’s statement—portraying White working class and lower middle class voters as ethically inferior because of their alleged bitterness. But Obama had meant no such thing—he was accurately reporting his own experiences in talking to thousands of people who were rightly angry about the way that our government has skewed our economy to favor the rich at the expense of everyone else.

But why include religion in a list of responses to this anger when the other two items were clearly seen as negative by his San Francisco supporters? The answer, of course, is that those supporters, like most of the activist elements in the progressive world, often do see religion as just as much a problem in American culture as guns and anti-immigration sentiments.

Seeing religion as a substitute gratification grabbed on to by people who are otherwise oppressed is an insight that has been part of liberal and progressive culture for at least 150 years. Unfortunately, Senator Obama, like many in the liberal and Marxist traditions of the past 150 years, got it wrong—because he identified the needs that are being systematically denied as purely material, thereby falling into the “It’s the economy, stupid” mistake of the Left.

In the research we did for ten years at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health we found that it was not only material, but spiritual deprivation that was at the heart of much of the pain that Americans experience today. That’s why even at the height of American prosperity in the Clinton years, a powerful resurgence of right-wing religious forms was providing an avenue of expression for people whose needs were being ignored by the liberals in the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party, and even in parts of the liberal churches.

Similarly, the revival of a religious Left has not gotten much traction to the extent that it adopts the liberal political and economic agenda and makes it “religious” by finding some useful Bible quotes to back up the peace and justice planks of the Democrats. Valuable as that may be, it too misses the deeper pain that has led people to embrace right-wing religions.

What we discovered in groups that we ran for over ten thousand middle income working people is that most people spend their days in a work world governed by the “bottom line” that judges institutions and social practices to be efficient, rational or productive to the extent that they maximize money and power. Day after day, people breathe in the message that to be rational in this society is to “look out for number one” and treat other people instrumentally—that is, as valuable to the extent that they help us achieve our own goals and desires.

We were struck, however, by how bitter many people feel about this way of life. Over and over again, middle income working people told us that they felt they were wasting their lives because their economic survival required them to do work that in no way
connected to their hunger for a higher meaning to their lives, what Rev. Warren correctly described as a desire for a purpose-driven life.

Moreover, as people bring the values of “looking out for number one” and believing that getting their own needs is the highest possible good into their personal lives, they find that their families and friendships become increasingly unstable, as more and more people switch from one relationship or marriage to another, imagining that the next one might satisfy yet more of their needs. No wonder people feel lonely, afraid, and deeply troubled by a society in which the narcissism is bred not by some peculiarities of one generation or another, but by the fundamental notions of rationality that predominate in all of the major economic and social institutions. For a full account of these dynamics, please read my book The Left Hand of God (paperback, 2007, HarperOne).

For this very reason, we’ve been urging candidates in every political party to embrace a “New Bottom Line” in which corporations, social practices, government policies and individual behaviors are judged rational, efficient or productive not only if they maximize money or power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacity to treat others as embodiments of the sacred and to respond with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of the universe.

In seeming to endorse a reductive materialist explanation rather than articulating the real spiritual crisis, Senator Obama, whose writings and public talks in the past clearly demonstrate a profound understanding of the politics of meaning/spiritual politics that has been at the core of Tikkun since its inception, may have critically weakened his credibility among many who might otherwise embrace his candidacy.

If Senator Obama does explicitly embrace a spiritual politics, he can transcend the left/right dichotomies that have torn our country apart. What remains to be seen is whether he can do that in the context of a Left whose religio-phobia is both pervasive and unconscious (many on the secular Left have as little clue of the put-downish nature of their feelings and remarks toward religious people as men had forty years ago about the nature of their sexism), and a media determined to make every mistake into a fatal error no matter who the candidate. We will be addressing this issue at our meeting at the Democratic National Convention in Denver (our gathering will take place at St. Paul’s Church, 1615 Ogden Street, Denver, on Sunday Aug. 24 and Monday Aug 25th).

Rev. Jeremiah Wright

A second issue that emerged in the primaries was focused on Obama’s close relationship with his own pastor, Rev. Wright, in light of Wright’s sermons castigating the American empire. In his sermons, Wright often went far over the border of civil discourse, as when he said “God damn America.”

Yet that is precisely the discourse of many of us trained in the prophetic tradition. The biblical prophet Jeremiah and many of the other prophets made clear that God was in fact going to damn the Jewish society and the Temple of ancient Israel unless they changed their ways, in particular how they treated the poor and the oppressed. When Isaiah stood outside the Temple on Yom Kippur, he told those who had brought their animals for sacrifice and were piously observing the fast for this day of atonement that God considered their fasting and sacrifices detestable because the worshippers had not cared for the poor and homeless and had not liberated the oppressed.  

What Wright has been saying is what many writers in Tikkun have been trying to say for the past twenty-two years: that the American empire will also be destroyed, and perhaps along with it much of the rest of the world, unless we are able to get off our path of materialism and selfishness structured into the capitalist system and take a new path of love, generosity, caring, and awe and wonder. This is the essence of the repentance (teshuva) that spiritual progressives must embrace and persuade the American majority to embrace. Only that repentance could have the capacity to save human civilization from destruction in the next hundred years (some say thirty years).

Wright was correct in thinking that Barack Obama is not articulating these prophetic messages, but has sought to shape his campaign in policy terms that fit rather than fundamentally challenge the dominant ideas that shape contemporary American politics, economics and our corporate-driven globalization of selfishness and materialism.

What a perfect moment, Wright and some of his supporters believed, for the voices of a religious Left to come forward and insist that the Democrats, both Clinton and Obama, really understand and address the deeper problems facing American society, and challenge the blind identification of “progress” with endless material growth rather than with spiritual enlightenment and ethical and ecological sensitivity. For several decades many of us Liberation theologians have raised this critique, and because of Wright’s special relationship with Obama he was perfectly positioned to have a positive influence in American self-understanding if only he took care to help those who did not share his perspectives to recognize what was legitimate in his critique.

Sadly, Wright’s own personal and political limitations undermined his capacity to articulate his critique in a way that could be heard by the majority of Americans. Filled with rage, he seemed little concerned with having his words understood. And that made it easier for Obama to then avoid the truth in the content of many of Wright’s statements and to focus only on the legitimacy of his rage, which Obama did beautifully by seeming to equate that rage with the moral legitimacy of the pain being experienced by White working people in the United States.

In acknowledging once again the suffering of White people, Obama was also challenging the political correctness discourse of the Left which has often devolved into debates about who is “most oppressed” among various groups whose needs have been systematically ignored or repressed. Obama’s point was that if we are to transform American society, we need to have a movement that is not only composed of oppressed groups who are fighting against each other for a larger piece of the pie. For decades we’ve been urging the progressive forces to focus more on the suffering of White working class people and, yes, in particular the ways that this society has systematically maltreated White working class men, while the Left has seemed to care nothing about them.

At that point in the campaign, after Obama made his deservedly famous speech on race in which he gave equal attention to the suffering of Whites as to the suffering of the normal categories of “the oppressed,” the debate could have ended. Instead, Rev. Wright came back with a series of TV appearances to keep the issue alive, and in the last such appearance once again returned to a dismissive and put-down language of others, and simultaneously embraced and extolled Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim homophobe and racist whose anti-Semitic remarks have made him anathema not only to the Jewish establishment but to people like me. If you want to understand why Farrakhan is anathema, please read the heated dialogue between me and Cornel West on this topic which appears in the book we wrote together in 1995, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin. The only thing that has changed since we wrote the book has been the virulence of Farrakhan’s homophobic and anti-Semitic statements.

After Wright’s TV performance, Obama totally disassociated himself from Rev. Wright, and, a few weeks later when a Catholic priest visited Obama’s Chicago church and made strongly put-downish remarks about Hillary Clinton, Obama resigned from that church. It remains to be seen whether this same set of issues will be re-raised in the general election campaign through sleazy attacks by the GOP supporters who ran the attacks on Senator Kerry in 2004.

Obama would be wise to disassociate himself explicitly from the bashing of Whites and White men, and the religio-phobia that has been a stock-in-trade of the Left (and even more so of how the Left is perceived by the rest of the population). The more Obama discusses the suffering of Whites and White working class men, and the more he affirms the importance of a spiritual politics along the lines we’ve developed in the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ Spiritual Covenant with America, the more his candidacy will be successful in doing the very kind of uniting he has promised for the United States.

OBAMA, ISRAEL/PALESTINE AND AIPAC  

Middle East peace advocates were shocked and deeply distraught the day after Obama’s team celebrated his capturing the Democratic presidential nomination, when the Senator followed Senator McCain and Senator Clinton’s appearance at an AIPAC gathering by trying to outdo them in pandering to the Likud agenda that is now defined by many in the Jewish establishment as the only way an American can be labeled “pro-Israel.” While Obama has backed away from his most egregious statement (that Jerusalem must remain “undivided,” the code word used by hard-liners to indicate their unwillingness to share Jerusalem as part of a Palestinian state, despite the desires of the close to 150,000 Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem), the attempt to prove himself “loyal” to “the Jews” (which doesn’t, apparently, include most Tikkun-style Jews) may significantly limit what he can accomplish once in office (as it would McCain or Clinton).

Obama enthusiasts argue that the most important goal at this point is for Obama to get elected, and once elected he will “flip-flop” back to a peace perspective on Israel/Palestine and even on Iraq where his call for withdrawal in the first year has now been seriously qualified by talk about the need to consult with the military before implementing his plans (Bush having already shown us the relevant point, that the President gets to pick his own military commanders on the basis of what they are likely to see and tell him). Others urge “critical support,” noting that Obama even in office is unlikely to challenge the AIPAC-formed right-wing consensus in the Jewish world unless we in the peace movement begin to coalesce, focus our resources and energies in the way that J Street promises to do, and give Obama reason to believe that the peace camp can provide him adequate “cover” for a more principled stand.

Still others in the progressive world remain skeptical. They argue that unless Obama builds a political base for a peace consciousness now, while he is running, his presidency will prove to be little more than a rerun of the tragic Clinton years in which the Clintons retained power by embracing the worldview of global capital and its desire to downsize government’s capacity to put restraints on the worst excesses of the capitalist system. The main lasting achievement of the Clinton years was the election of the worst president in modern American history, whose tenure continues for another six months. We don’t need a re-run of that kind of presidency.

Or do we? At least some in the liberal world are saying that if that was all that Obama could bring us, it would still be so much an improvement over another Republican presidency as to make it worth it to swallow one’s criticisms of Obama’s capitulation to AIPAC.

That’s the current debate. Since as a non-profit we have to be super-cautious in putting forward our own views on this kind of electoral matter, we can only conclude by asking you: Where do you stand? (Write to: letters@tikkun.org).