Here are responses to some common questions or objections to the Tikkun/NSP perspective on Obama:
1. Obama is just responding to what the American people actually want. They are not spiritual progressives, but in fact far more conservative than Tikkun might wish, and he has to stay in touch with their desires if he hopes to be re-elected. Ditto, the Democratic Congress simply reflects the will of its own constituency. Within those constraints, Obama is doing "a hell of a job."
This objection reflects a profound misunderstanding both of what people are saying they want and also how political views are formed in a democratic society.
Polls in the first months of the Obama administration consistently showed that the majority of Americans were willing to pay higher taxes to achieve full and fair health coverage for all Americans and to repair the global environment, that they opposed the generosity extended to the banks and would have preferred generosity toward the unemployed and victims of unfair or greedy lending practices in regard to home mortgages, that they would have supported an independent commission to explore the crimes around torture committed during the Bush administration, and that they would have supported many other aspects of a progressive political agenda. It has been Obama himself who has insisted that he didn't want to extend taxes to the middle class to pay for health care, instead of praising the generosity of the American people for being willing to sacrifice for the sake of creating and sustaining the Caring Society.
But this openness to sacrifice for a higher good is now changing. In the early days of the Clinton administration, a similar openness was expressed by Americans, but once it became clear that the Clintons themselves were more interested in their own popularity than in pursuing a consistent values-driven vision for changing America, most Americans started to follow suit.
Here's how the mass psychology of politics works: When people believe that nothing can be changed, that politics is going to respond to the interests of the powerful and ignore the interests of the powerless, they lose interest in politics. Instead, they tell themselves that they ought to pay more attention to their own well-being. At that point, they no longer look at a program such as health care in terms of higher values like "caring for others" and instead look at it from the standpoint of "what's in it for me and how much will I have to pay for it?" And this is true with regard to everything -- if people believe that they are living at a moment when people are just out for themelves, they don't want to make personal sacrifices or support programs that are not going to maximize their own personal material well-being.
On the other hand, when people think that they are living in a time when their political leaders are actually idealistic and seriously committed to building a really new kind of economic and political reality, then they get inspired and believe, "Yes, we can!" At such moments, they are willing to raise their own taxes, make personal sacrifices, and open themselves up to hope.
So, there is no such thing as "what the American people ‘really' want." Those desires shift in accord with Americans' perceptions of what is possible and what everyone else is willing to fight for.
Of course, their perceptions of what is possible are usually shaped by the media and by the powerful. So it's important to find political leaders who are willing to stand for a different kind of world and fight for their vision, and to create a mass movement to back those leaders.
That's why we think it prudent for Obama to give the talk we've articulated in the editorial in the September/October issue of Tikkun. He will likely be successful if he focuses on the Caring Society and promotes the New Bottom Line that is given real content by our Spiritual Covenant with America and our Campaign for a Global Marshall Plan, which you can read at www.spiritualprogressives.org.
2. Obama is really just a centrist politician. You got tricked into believing he was more than that by your own wishful thinking, but actually Obama has all along been a mild centrist, and that's why he has surrounded himself with the likes of Rahm Emanuel and Summers and Geithner, and why he hasn't brought into the White House anyone like Rabbi Lerner or Sister Joan Chittister or Cornel West (the three co-chairs of the Network of Spiritual Progressives).
When he fought for our votes during the Democratic primaries, Obama went out of his way to convince people in the liberal and progressive world that he was more attuned to their ideas than Hillary Clinton. His writings convey a spiritual progressive worldview, and he assured me that he shared that worldview when he met with me privately in 2006, reaffirming the perspective he had articulated when he spoke to the Tikkun Conference during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1996. So if we in the progressive world concluded that he would fight for a progressives agenda, that was not because of wishful thinking but because Obama himself nurtured that expectation in us in order to win our support.
In any event, this objection misses the deeper point made in the answer to the first objection, which I'll restate this way: Obama will be the Obama you voted for if you and I are able to create the political movement that can push him to be who he was in the Spring of 2008. If Obama is greeted by large numbers of people wherever he speaks who are demonstrating and demanding that he return to his more visionary self, and who continually demand that he adopt the New Bottom Line and speak and act from that perspective, he will increasingly do just that. At the moment, it is the Right that has organized people to come to Obama's public town meetings on health care, while liberals and progressives have not made visible a demand that he be more visionary, like the Obama we voted for.
3. You're playing into the hands of the Republicans if you make public criticisms. He has enough negativity coming at him from the Right. Give the guy a break -- he is, after all, the most decent and smartest president the United States has had in fifty years.
The people who are actually playing into the hands of the Republicans are those who, having backed Obama for the presidency, now sit passively by and wait for him to redeem America. It won't happen.
Obama is not the Messiah. He needs your help -- and the way to help him is to support him to be the person he presented himself as being during the Democratic primaries. Obama is surrounded by people who think that being principled is "unrealistic." Only you can change that by giving support to that part of him that would like to say back to his advisers: "No, in order for me to be realistic, I need to respond to the people who originally backed me, because without their enthusiastic support there's no way to build the public kind of support that will counter the negativity coming at me from the Right." But Obama can't make that argument as long as we seem to be saying, "Whatever you do is fine, Barack ... we'll just back whatever you do." It is we who are betraying him by not supporting the part of him that wants to be the most idealistic Obama he can be.
4. Obama is trained as a community organizer, and his goal is to bring people together to work out a middle path that gives something to everyone. You'll never change that.
All the more reason for us to create a loud voice demanding a spiritual progressive approach to politics. Right now, Obama is hearing primarily from the Republican Right, the media defenders of the status quo, and the centrist Democrats. The middle point between these forces lies somewhere between the Center and the Right. In order to even get him back to a place where he could begin to incorporate some of our ideas, we need to make him feel that there is a strong voice coming to him from his left, and that that voice has something creative and relevant to say. That's why you should become part of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and take this editorial around to everyone you know.
5. If Obama did what you want him to do, he'd be killed. Obama knows that -- he can read history. He knows that the same forces that killed President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. will kill him should he ever pose a serious threat to the military or to the corporate elite.
While we think this objection is paranoid and we doubt that Obama's policies are unconsciously shaped by this kind of fear, we believe that the president must provide leadership even at great personal risk.
Obama knew the risks of becoming president. The real insurance policy is to repeat and repeat the need for a New Bottom Line and to educate Americans about that vision, because the more people share that vision, the less likely it is that would-be assassins will think they can accomplish a great deal by killing the chief but not sole promoter of that vision. In short, we can protect Obama's life by building a movement to his Left.
If the fear for Obama's life is grounded, he would certainly have been better off to have chosen a vice president who was demonstrably further to the Left than he -- like Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey or Senator Russ Feingold -- so that right-wingers would know that if they killed Obama they'd get someone even more clearly committed to a progressive agenda. We hope that he'll do that when he runs for re-election in 2012.
6. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't get popular by saying, "I have a complaint." The progressive forces are too negative and so is this approach by the NSP and Tikkun.
Actually, Martin Luther King Jr. became a famous leader who could give you "I have a dream speech" to 300,000 of us marching with him in D.C. precisely because he had spent ten years organizing demonstrations that focused not on the dream but on the complaints being raised by the Civil Rights Movement. It is important that we continually affirm the fundamental goodness of Obama, his decency, and our respect for him. But it is equally important that we provide a prophetic critique.
7. Can't you just go and meet with Obama and deliver your perspective directly without the need to build a whole movement?
Actually, no. We don't have that access. Our friends in the White House are careful to use their access to promote their own programs, not to weaken their access by presenting a fundamental challenge to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's worldview or being seen as responsible for helping us get Obama's ear.
8. Why don't the Republicans, the Right, and the elites of wealth and power feel that they have to compromise too?
The Right and the Republicans have already engaged in thirty years of ideological conditioning of the American public to such an extent that most of the media and much of the American electorate just accept the right-wing ideology as common sense.
They talk ideology, but the media only calls it "ideology" when someone comes forward to say that government should serve the interests of middle class and poor people as much as it now serves the wealthy.
To change anything, to make any serious advances, the Democrats have no choice but to challenge the dominant worldview, even though that may make them appear to be provocative. But please note that we don't advocate making the ideological challenge in terms of rich vs. poor, a language that feels tired and boring to many, but instead in terms of love, responsibility to each other, caring for others, generosity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. These principles stand in contrast to the dominant ethos of me-first-ism, individualism, selfishness, and materialism. These are terms that speak across traditional Left-Right divides and may offer the most effective possible challenge to the dominant ideology.
The Dominant Ideology in America
Here's the essence of the dominant ideology spread by Republicans and centrist Democrats and the media, which serves the interests of America's economic and political elites:
Domestic Policy:
Allow the economic marketplace of capitalism to work its will, and it will solve all problems. Government should only intervene to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful, because when their needs are met they will keep the system going, and the system will allow benefits to "trickle down" to everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone else is on their own, and while it's fine to encourage private charity and genuine emotional caring about the plight of the disadvantaged, and even bemoan the growing distance in income between the wealthy on the one hand, and the shrinking middle class on the other, it is wrong to use government to try to rectify these inequalities, since government is inevitably inefficient and will require higher taxes, which usually decreases the incentive of wealthy people to invest their wealth. Instead, we should use public funds to help the large corporations, by building infrastructure (highways, ports, airports, etc.), training their employees with the skills they will need (hence the increasingly narrowing of educational systems shaped to be "service stations" to the corporations rather than places to teach people to think critically and creatively), and giving them tax breaks as incentives. The goal of economic life, in this view, is constant growth -- the idea being that if the American economy expands endlessly, it will "lift all boats" and everyone will be better off. In practice, however, this goal has had a very different consequence: as the economy expands, it is the rich who get more and more wealth, while the middle class and poor actually have a decrease in their income and wealth. Meanwhile, the expansion of the economy is made possible by the increasing extraction of resources and raw materials from third-world countries and the undermining of their domestic economies. This setup creates environmental and economic havoc worldwide. And that's when things are going well in the United States!
Foreign policy:
The goal is to maximize American economic penetration and domination of the world economy. The means is to create local elites who will benefit personally from allowing the Western countries to set the conditions of trade so that it benefits Western corporations, even as it disadvantages the vast majority of people in the third world. Ironically, this can be portrayed as in the interests of third world countries, by showing that the total wealth or total income of third world countries is increasing, and thus they are seemingly benefiting. But what this obscures is that it is actually only the 10% of the population of these countries -- the economic elites and the small middle class -- who are doing better, while the vast majority are actually doing worse. Backing this whole arrangement are the military forces that are frequently trained and partially funded by the United States and other Western countries. The simple solution to all foreign policy is: domination, either directly through our military, or indirectly through elites we've supported as long as they support our corporations' economic interests.
This is the dominant ideology. As long as it prevails, any serious reform is impossible.
Pro-capitalist Liberals
Given that liberals can count on the media to constantly re-enforce the dominant ideology I have just described, it may be slightly unfair of us to keep talking about the liberals' lack of backbone. The truth is that many who call themselves "liberals" actually share this serve-the-establishment worldview, so they are acting in accord with their deeply held principles, only they tend to hide those principles when running for elections against conservatives who religiously embrace that same way of thinking. They know that the only way to generate public support during elections is to pretend to be a champion of working people, the great middle class, and to do that they have to sound like an alternative to the liberal cheerleaders of establishment interests.
Even those liberals who genuinely do oppose this pro-capitalist-elites worldview find it hard to continue to articulate an alternative, particularly when they realize the massive ideological momentum behind the dominant ideology inside the Beltway. Many liberals find that they can only return to their true ideals when they are in their districts meeting with constituents who help remind them that it was not to support but to oppose the vested interests that these constituents supported them in the first place.
A Transformative Alternative: The Caring Society
The only way to change this dynamic is to push for the clearest articulation of an alternative worldview. And since the media will ignore our attempts to put that worldview forward, or caricature and ridicule such attempts, the one chance we get to put forward that alternative is when we elect a progressive president, because s/he has a powerful "bully pulpit" from which to project an alternative way of thinking.
What, then, should be the alternative proposed by Obama and the liberals and progressives who voted for him?
Our answer is rooted in our understanding that if we want to win a majority of Americans to a new worldview, we have to speak in a deeper and more appealing language than that which has characterized the liberals and progressives for the past 150 years. So we call our alternative a "spiritual progressive" worldview or, for those who fear that the word "spiritual" is a slippery slope leading toward commitment to a God they don't believe in or to an end to the separation of church and state, we also call it "a politics of meaning," recognizing that most people want to live a life that has a higher meaning than simply accumulating money and power. In a language that everyone can understand, what Obama could and should be saying is that the world and the United States need to build the Caring Society guided by a New Bottom Line.
Unfortunately, there is no way to advocate for that New Bottom Line without engaging in intense public struggle with powerful forces that will try to ridicule, revile, or repudiate the ideas we advocate. Those who seek consensus are willy-nilly playing into the hands of the powerful and the status quo, and yet that status quo does not work in the interests of most Americans, of world peace, or of global economic and ecological sanity.
The best way to be a real ally of President Obama is to lovingly and respectfully critique policies that do not accord with this New Bottom Line and to tell Obama and everyone you can reach (friends, family, etc.) that the way to evaluate Obama is by this standard. Is he succeeding in getting Americans to adopt a fundamentally alternative way of thinking to that which has dominated both political parties in the past thirty years? If not, if he doesn't succeed in popularizing the Caring Society and our NSP version of the Global Marshall Plan and the New Bottom Line, don't be surprised that all of the good things he does now will soon be undone as future administrations dismantle the good stuff.
9. Isn't it presumptuous and fanciful to think that we -- ordinary citizens, students, young people, retired people, working class people, and middle class people -- could have an impact? What could we really do?
It's up to us not to abandon Obama to the pressures he is under. One of Tikkun's interns during this summer of 2009 described to us the excitement on her college campus in Ohio as students "took ownership" of the Obama campaign, made it their highest priority, and went door to door for weeks before the election, helping to take that swing state and make it into an Obama state on election day. What those students learned is what others learned before them in the 1930s during the New Deal, and in the 1960s and 1970s during the years of "the New Left." It's something that people need to relearn in each generation: that history can be made by you and me -- ordinary people, young people, and retirees, by people who tend to watch passively and think they can't have any impact. This issue of Tikkun is being sold on more than a thousand campuses throughout the United States as a way of taking our message to a new generation -- the message that "yes, we can" is not only about winning an election, but also about building a sustained social change movement that can shape the dynamics of the Obama years and make them what we all hoped for. In doing this, you and I can give Obama the only support that really matters.
10. Won't your path simply lead to gridlock?
Not necessarily. The very members of Congress who now have been a huge obstacle to many parts of Obama's program could become much more sympathetic if they felt pressure to do so from their own constituents. If Obama emphasizes that his goal in 2010 is to support candidates for office who support his New Bottom Line, and even to support challenges in the primaries to Democrats who do not go along with his program, he may actually be more effective in getting his programs passed through Congress. But if Obama enters the 2010 elections without having introduced an alternative way to think about politics and economics, people will judge him by the dominant paradigms that tend to favor the rich and the powerful. Instead of seeing the continuing Republican/Bush depression as proof that more needs to be done to dislodge the mindset that created the economic meltdown, the public will fall into the trap set by Republicans who will say, "See, the country tried the ‘socialist' plans of Obama and they failed, so now elect us." There is no way to counter that likely electoral defeat except by educating Americans about the need for a New Bottom Line and building a movement for the Caring Society.
What Can YOU Do?
1. Go to www.spiritualprogressives.org and become a dues-paying member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
2. Register and come to our Washington, D.C., conference to "Support Obama to BE the Obama We Voted For" June 11-14, 2010. The conference will not just be critical -- we will focus on our positive vision and ask you to bring your ideas, as well! Get everyone you know to come too -- this is our first NSP conference in several years, and it's going to be fabulous. More details will soon appear on our website.
3. Create a monthly discussion group (in your community; on your campus; in your church, synagogue, mosque, or ashram; or in your professional organization, union, or neighborhood) focused on the ideas in this editorial, the ideas articulated in the Network of Spiritual Progressives' Spiritual Covenant with America and our Domestic and Global Marshall Plan, and the ideas in Tikkun magazine (you'll receive a free subscription when you join the NSP).
Give special focus to the articles under "Abiding Perspectives" and "Current Thinking" on our home page, and to our Tikkun Daily blog site. Urge people who come to those discussions to attend the national conference in June 2010 and to join the NSP as a dues-paying member. If would-be members can't afford membership costs as listed there, they can simply write us a letter explaining what they can afford, include a check for that amount, and we will welcome them as a member at whatever level they can afford. Money is NOT our bottom line -- though we are very financially challenged and really need financial support -- and it's tax deductible, because we are a 501-c-3 non-profit.
4. All this is very tricky, because Obama has his own organization working though the Democratic Party, and of course, they are asking you to support Obama by backing all his compromises and avoiding any worldview-promotion. So you have to explain to your friends the difference between doing that and giving him the real support he needs as described in this editorial!
5. Volunteer or become an intern (unfortunately unpaid) at Tikkun's office in beautiful Berkeley, California, in the culturally rich, politically alive San Francisco Bay Area! We welcome not only students and recent grads, but also people in mid-career who want to take a break from their normal routine, or retirees of any age. If you are open to being an intern or volunteer in our Berkeley office, go to tikkun.org/interns to learn more about the opportunities available.
6. OR, you can do some important volunteer work from home -- just tell us about your skills, or about what part of the Spiritual Covenant with America, the Domestic and Global Marshall Plan, or our campaign to "Support Obama to BE the Obama You Voted For" most excites you, and we'll suggest ways that you can help us from home.
7. Make a tax-deductible contribution to Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives. If you can, please donate online. You can also send a check to Tikkun/NSP at 2342 Shattuck Ave, Suite 1200, Berkeley, CA 94704. Or call us with your credit card info: 510-644-1200.
8. Send prayers and good wishes for the Obama presidency. Allow yourself to hope, once again, and to tie that hope to the building of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
