Introduction

We asked many spiritual progressives to write their “advice” or “concerns” to the candidates, some of which we have sent directly to the relevant campaigns and some of which we are printing here.

We are not writing as political consultants, but as people connected to a spiritual vision. Tikkun Magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives are non-profits to whom contributions are tax-deductible, but for that very reason we are prohibited from endorsing any candidate for office or any political party.

We were distressed to discover that the people we asked to write to the Green Party or to Nader and the women we invited to write did not get their articles to us on time for this issue. We are embarrassed to have only men writing these particular letters and we will do everything we can to ensure that this never happens again.

We start with some reflections by our editor Rabbi Michael Lerner on the strategies being followed by Obama and McCain, and then some letters by a few of our most thoughtful writers.

Presidential Strategy 2008

by Michael Lerner

Is it Smart For Obama and Other Democrats to Run to the Political Center?

“Hey, we don’t need any philosophizing or ideological rhetoric—when you are a few weeks from the actual voting, the only thing that counts is getting elected, and then you can do all your philosophizing afterwards. Winning is what counts.”

We have learned to expect that argument both from alleged “centrists” in the Democratic Party like Majority Leader of the House of Representatives Stenny Hoyer, who managed to keep the funding for the war in Iraq moving smoothly through a Democratic controlled Congress, and from the “liberal wing” of the Democrats, who imagined that they had won a great victory when they got Nancy Pelosi elected Speaker of the House (before she became an enabler of Bush’s militarism, pro-torture policies, and invasion of domestic civil liberties, while strenuously insisting that “impeachment was off the table”).

But now we are also hearing it from many progressives: particularly those who correctly feel that they made a mistake in 2000 in backing Nader not only in the states where it was “safe” to do so (namely, where it was so clearly either Bush or Gore who would win that a protest vote was not going to impact at all) but also where it was not so safe—Florida and Ohio.

In fact, the majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention seemed so overwhelmed by the allure of victory that they would barely give a moment to think seriously about the issues being raised about how smart it is for Obama or other Democrats to run to the political center.

And yet, at the grassroots level nothing was more hotly debated in the summer of 2008 than this very question. It started the day after Obama clinched his nomination, when the Senator made a speech to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that seemed to compete with the best of the right-wingers in the Bush Administration about who could be the most militaristic in defense of Israeli hard-liners (he actually topped them with his use of the phrase “Jerusalem must never be divided”—code words for the notion that the 250,000 Palestinians living within Israel’s ever-expanding definition of Jerusalem could not be part of a Palestinian state and that state could not share Jerusalem and locate its capital in the city where one of the three most important Mosques of Islam was built). It continued with the good Senator chastising the Supreme Court for forbidding capital punishment in the case of child rape and congratulating them on supporting gun rights, and then voting for a bill that would absolve the major phone companies of their violations of our civil liberties by joining with the Bush Administration in illegally tapping over a hundred thousand phones in the United States, and then seeming at times to run away from his stance of withdrawing troops every month from Iraq till they were all gone in 16 months. Instead of challenging the militarism and pro-business slant of American politics, much of the summer Obama seemed to be showing the militarists and Wall Street how “responsible” he would be. When he seemed to be saying that he was not against war, but merely wanted to move the location from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan, when he endorsed offshore oil drilling, and when he failed to critique the profit-oriented ethos of our society that had led to the gas and home mortgage profiteers speculating in ways that were destructive to the economic well-being of the entire society, it seemed to many of his previously red-hot supporters that Obama was not really who they thought him to be.

And progressives began to wonder when this race to “the Center” would ever end? Conservative columnists began to move away from their previous characterization of Obama as a starry-eyed idealist who had no practical sense and started to worry about him precisely because they saw him as a “realistic” and power-oriented candidate who might do precisely the pandering necessary to get the votes he needed. (They pointed also to his commitment to right-wing Cubans to continue the economic boycott that has kept Cuba from flourishing under the Castros and his alleged statement to the Israelis that when he would “negotiate” with Iran it would only be to deliver personally an ultimatum which, if rejected, would be followed by potentially war-inducing sanctions.)

But the political “realists” who dominate the media and who surround Obama from the Democratic Party and from many of his corporate donors have it all wrong. Over and over again they’ve tried the same strategy, and it is almost always both a strategic and moral error, based on a faulty understanding of human beings and a major struggle that goes on inside almost all of us.

The struggle to which I refer is between two worldviews that contend within our consciousness, at least for the past ten thousand years. On the one hand is the worldview of fear or domination or “power over.” Briefly stated: “We live in a world in which others are interested only in themselves and their immediate families and are motivated solely by the desire to maximize their own self-interest regardless of how it impacts on others. You have been thrown into this world all by yourself, a world filled with self-interested others who will seek to dominate and exploit you—unless you find a way first to dominate and exploit them. The only rational way to live is to be on your guard, continually alert to the possibility that they will take advantage of you. This fearful reality can only be made safer if you get power over others before they get power over you, so you need to put major energies into accumulating power to protect yourselves. This is the only path to safety and personal/homeland security.”

The other worldview has a quite different message: “You didn’t come into this world all by yourself, but rather through a mother, and that mother (or whoever fulfilled that role for you) provided you with good enough mothering to keep you alive and allow you to experience unselfish love (i.e. your mother had no reasonable expectation of a ‘return on her investment’ of kindness, generosity and attention that she gave to you in your first few years of life). No matter how many conflicting motives and neuroses may have emerged later, you could not have survived without that first massive dose of love. And from there you have good grounds to realize that there is another strategy for survival in this world which you have actually experienced—maximizing love, kindness, generosity, caring for others. If you reach out to others with this approach, you will develop relationships that are the best path to safety and security in this world.”

Most people on this planet have both voices in their heads, and at any given moment are somewhere on the continuum between hope and fear, between love and domination. Where exactly depends on their own childhood and life experiences (how much loving versus how much hurtfulness and disappointments with love they’ve experienced), the ideological or religious ideas that they’ve internalized (because every religion has within it those who hear their God’s voice primarily through the framework of fear and those who hear it primarily through the framework of hope, so depending on which variant of their religion or their worldview they’ve accepted they will give more or less credence to the voices of fear or hope, domination or love), and their own assessment of where the social energy is going at any given moment (because when it’s moving more toward fear, then those voices and worldviews within one’s own consciousness seem more “real”; and when it seems as if more people start moving toward hope, then one’s own voices of hope and the possibility of a world with love and generosity suddenly seem more plausible).

The central issue in politics, then, is not about left, right or center, but about hope vs. fear. If you want a world based on justice, peace, ecological sanity, human rights, civil liberties, and economic well-being for all, you have to elicit in people their capacity for hope and for love, caring and generosity. Conversely, to the extent that people think that love, caring, generosity and hope are all pipe-dreams that have no chance in “the real world,” they become attracted to politicians who speak to their fears and tell them that the ideologies of “domination over the evil others” is the sophisticated and grown-up way to understand the world.

In contemporary America, these two voices do not have equal power in the public realm. The voices of cynicism are not contained in the political Right—too often the mobilization of cynicism has been a central part of the discourse of the Left in the post-modernist period following the 1960s. Yet that cynicism has only strengthened the hold of the Right in American politics. To the extent that people become cynical about the possibility of generosity and caring-for-others as a motive for “the other,” they become certain that it is pointless and self-destructive to champion nonviolence and demobilization of American militarism and economic/political domination of the world, ridiculous to think that the majority will ever be willing to reduce their material standard of living in order to save the planet from endless exploitation, and pure fantasy to believe that their own efforts toward living a life of caring for others will ever be matched by others.

Given this cynicism, anyone who actually wishes to build a politics of peace, social justice and ecological sanity has to place his or her major focus on validating the scenario of hope and undermining the “fearful realism” that dominates the consciousness not only of the media and the opportunists, but of all of us. Even the progressives and liberals. Everyone of us has such a strong tendency to fall right back into our despair about the possibility of a different kind of world.

It was Obama’s ability to stay true to that message of hope that gave him his victory in the Democratic primaries. And it is likely that if he can convince people that that is what he is really about, that he really believes in a world of love and kindness, generosity and caring, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, what we in the Network of Spiritual Progressives call the New Bottom Line, then what will happen in November will confound all the cynical media realists and the Democratic Party advisers and the experts of every variety: because people who believed themselves to be “on the Right” or conservative will be so touched by this appeal to their own internal (and subordinated) voice of hope and love that many will defect from their own fears and vote for Obama.

Conversely, if Obama continues to do more of what he did in going to AIPAC, etc., the voices of fear and cynicism, even within those who supported him previously, will reappear. That doesn’t mean that they will vote for another candidate, but that they will feel less impelled to convince their friends and neighbors that something really new is happening in American politics. And without that sense that love and generosity are making a comeback in America, those who have been stuck in the fear and domination worldview will not have much of an incentive to give it up. And at that point, all that the Right has to do is manufacture some new terrorist incident or some attack on U.S. interests abroad to get the fear juices really rolling and the openness to Obama really closing.

In fact, it is the fear and domination caucus of the Congressional Democrats, pushed on by AIPAC, who are already setting the stage (probably unconsciously) for precisely this set of circumstances. These Democrats have championed a resolution to encourage what most in the international community define as an act of war: an imposed blockade of Iranian shipping. If this, or any of the other provocations the Bush Administration puts or has already put into place, actually work to push Iran to assert its right to survive by retaliating, or if Israel takes a yet more bellicose stance or attacks Iran, the fearful voices will come to the fore in the majority of Americans.

There is a way to counter that, but it cannot be started only at the last moment when the bullets and bombs are flying.

Obama needs to articulate and defend a full-scale endorsement of a new approach to foreign policy: what we call the Strategy of Generosity. He has got to say, and then keep saying, that the best path to Homeland Security for the United States and for Israel does not lie in the strategy of domination, but in our capacity to care for other people and make them feel cared for. He needs to endorse the Global Marshall Plan and explain to the American public why its underlying philosophy points to a new direction in what values should govern our society. He needs to explicitly commit himself to immediately banning torture, closing Guantanamo and other places like it, and absolutely rejecting a war with Iran and vigorously opposing it should the Bush/Cheney people manage to create the pretext for one in the next months or even after the election. He needs to talk about a single payer health care system and a New Bottom Line for judging when we are being successful as a society and when not. Only if he has laid the ground work for a strengthening of our own internal voice of hope and generosity can he resist the reemergence of fear that might bring McCain into office despite all the sins of the Bush Administration that McCain has so energetically endorsed.

Of course, if Obama does win, the “realists” will tell us that it was “inevitable” because all people really care about is their own economic well-being, and that hasn’t been flourishing in the Bush years. The deeper reality will be that if Obama doesn’t manage to maintain a principled stand on the issues, faced with a worsening economy people may in fact revert to a domination and fear view of politics, and that might nevertheless lead them to vote for Obama. But if fear is the basis for his victory, he will have no mandate to pursue policies that could generate a surge of hope once in office.

In my next editorial I’ll recount some of what happened to Bill Clinton after an election in which he frequently quoted from the ideas he was reading in Tikkun (Hillary told me that she and Bill read every issue very carefully in the years leading up to 1992) but then abandoned those ideas and fell back into the realism that his Democratic Congress pushed for, a realism that quickly led to the reemergence of a right-wing dominated Republican Congress in 2004, effectively ending any chance of the Clinton Administration becoming a sustainer of liberal or progressive politics. You can read more about this in my books The Politics of Meaning and in The Left Hand of God, or wait until the next edition of Tikkun (which will not be coming out until the beginning of December, so that we can include election results in November).

Some people have told us that it’s not fair to expect a political leader to have the clarity of a moral prophet. But we say the contrary: it’s only when moral prophecy shapes public policy that America and indeed the entire world can be saved from the suffering otherwise certain to dominate the American agenda for the coming decades: environmental destruction, more wars, less freedoms, more anger and fear and cynicism.

But isn’t this editorial itself a manifestation of that cynicism? Not at all. It is precisely because we believe that Obama and McCain both are human beings who have the capacity to respond to their own highest voices that we can urge them to come back to those voices of love and hope that sometimes get clouded by what they perceive to be the realistic necessities of politics. Equally important, we believe that it is possible that you, their constituents, could still have a very important part in shaping what they will say in the public sphere and in what policies they follow. Obama does not have to be in bed with AIPAC to win the majority of American Jews, or in bed with the Cuban hardliners to win the majority of Latinos, or in bed with the militarists to show that he will be a tough fighter for American interests. You can remind him of what he already knows, and let him know that the voice of hope and love and generosity is precisely the “realistic” path for him, and precisely the ethical path that you need to hear from him in order to become his champions. (And for those who are supporters of McCain or Nader, you too can play a similar role for your candidate, though we are not here going to spell out how.)

Our task as human beings is to transform and heal (tikkun) this world. It is precisely in staying true to our highest vision that we can be most effective in politics, and every other realm as well. Obama, McCain, and Nader will succeed in their own ultimate purpose on this planet to the extent that they too can stay true to their highest mission and help other people to stay true to their own highest mission. That is what a spiritual politics must ultimately be about.

Is it Smart For McCain to Become a Hard-Line Right-Winger?

Senator John McCain’s victory in the Republican primaries was primarily a function of his ability to combine loyalty to the Bush Administration with a reputation as a maverick whose creative thinking made him the kind of person who might capture independents and wayward Democrats. Yet ever since winning the nomination, that appeal to independents has been potentially undermined by a series of flip-flops that made even John Kerry’s pitiful 2004 performance look like the platform of a consistent peacenik.

The reasoning about McCain and his prospects follows a similar line to that articulated in the above editorial on Obama, so I won’t try to make each point again. Suffice it to say that McCain has given the Democrats lots to challenge as he switched from the Senator who opposed torture to a strong defender of water-boarding and other forms of torture, opposed wire-tapping ordinary citizens and then flipped just like Obama on that one, championed the environment but then went for the cheap shot of drilling on our seashores while knowing full well that such an approach would have negligible impact on rising oil prices but dramatic negative impact on the environment, and the list goes on.