I am writing here as a rank-and-file member, not a leader, in the political struggle. My internal monologues may or may not speak to others who, like me, are highly attracted to Michael Lerner’s vision but are not so adept at carrying it out. Like many of us I have a love-hate relationship with electoral politics.

  • Love the people who fought tooth and nail for us to have votes and political rights.

  • Aware that the power elites fought those heroes and lost some major battles to them. The power elite wanted to pursue their wars with our money as they pleased (Charles I got into a spat with Parliament about that and lost his head), wanted the slaves to stay slaves, wanted to make their money any way they pleased and let us go to the wall (and so called every promoter of trade unions, safety regulations and nets, everyone who cared about the powerless, “Commies” and “enemies of freedom”).

  • But also aware that electoral politics function as a safety valve for the power elite, enabling them to concede some big battles while winning the war. (They ridiculed FDR for saying his New Deal would save America from socialism and fought him hard, but of course he was right, it did. They waited a good long while before mounting an all-out effort to reclaim their privileges, and they haven’t taken us all the way back there yet, as my official What You Will Get From Social Security letters promise me).

  • Aware that life is compromise and innumerable ordinary lives like mine have been made safer and better from progressive legislation passed after elections were won.

  • Hate the way money and media manipulation work on our fears, while our vision and hope is ridiculed.

  • Love the Michael Lerner / Peter Gabel approach to this in their many editorials, articles and books (which is why I am here). They advocate shifting the emotional tone of the Left away from anger, bitterness, demonization of opponents (including contempt for working class religious people), and appeals to purely materialistic issues — however well justified that tone may be — and towards an understanding of people’s deeper longings for meaning, for a caring society more even than for a wealthy one, for honesty in politics, for vision of what could be, for appeals to hope and cooperation. They believe this would actually work, politically. I agree. It would. But it’s just too radical for the Left.

  • Am baffled by our human tendency, including my own, towards rejecting the spiritual wisdom of the ages. Don’t we all deep down know that a primary focus on how we have been wronged is not as healthy as a focus on how we could hear the other’s pain and how we could love and work with the other? Don’t we know that happiness actually derives, once one’s most basic needs are met, from giving more than from receiving? Given our frequent inability to act on these insights, should I be spending my time on electoral politics when I could be learning and teaching the kind of spiritual wisdom without which electoral politics is doomed to cycles of partisanship?

  • Listen, bub, past progressive wins have demonstrated that in fact people can and do respond to vision and hope over fear and loathing, even without them all becoming spiritually enlightened people.

  • Or maybe it is that at specific historical periods there has been just enough spiritual enlightenment of all kinds (politically aware or not) going on to enable those appeals to work (without all the spiritual teaching and learning out there, it wouldn’t happen — e.g., without Methodism and the evangelical awakenings and the slaves’ own spiritual practices, no abolition of slavery: is that right?).

  • So should I personally be working at the individual and small group spiritual end of that (in my case probably my UU congregation that I’m neglecting) or at the electoral visionary ideas end (Tikkun and the NSP)? Whichever I’m best at, I guess, or most drawn to. And right now that’s Tikkun, where I am attempting to learn what Michael Lerner can teach, which is huge and actually not at all easy for an old countercultural, lefty, agnostic, cooperative individualist with a sociology PhD to absorb. I am finding it hard intellectual and psychological/spiritual work.

  • So back to how I vote: I want to vote for a good and radical third party

  • But I’m aware that the first effect of a popular third party would be to split the left/liberal vote and enable the big money boys (neoliberal Republicans) and their enablers (libertarians, swearing all along that all they want is freedom for the individual, while their votes enable big money to enslave the country) to win. And then they create such horror (Bush) that we are all susceptible to just voting them out when a likeable neoliberal Democratic guy talking of hope comes along (Obama). I had an Obama sticker on my bike, I worked the phones for him, even though I feared Andrew Sullivan was right in this 2007 Atlantic piece, that he was a thorough centrist (and that his real appeal to the young and the center was simultaneously his progressivist appeal to hope and his centrist promise that “he could take America – finally – past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us”). Guilty. But then I think, with many of us, that what he’s done is way better than what McCain would have done (here’s Rachel Maddow’s argument for that case) … unless you buy the idea that things have to spiral down and down before the masses swing to progressive politicians. Do we need more wars, unemployment, inequality, loss of safety nets, before radical socialist ideas can revive? Perhaps we do. But it’s hard to believe it, in the absence of strong progressive political leaders and grassroots movements. Maybe the times will create those leaders and movements, if the times get bad enough. Or maybe it’s fascism that will appeal instead, as in Germany in the 20s and 30s. So let’s be safe, and vote the neoliberal Democrat.

  • I do not know what to do about this cycle, other than help build grassroots movements that see it, hate it, reject it, and start creating radical alternatives based on love. That’s what I want to do. But the friends of mine who do that best, who really get people of different races and classes in deep connection with each other and working for the common good, don’t get involved in electoral politics at all: Washington DC is irrelevant to their work in inner city hell. Friends of mine whose restorative justice work could end the prison system as we know it, and who do depend on elected liberal DAs, judges and other city officials, are nonetheless in a phase of primarily building the programs and the evidence that they work. There is a lot of preliminary work to be done in building movements from the bottom up, before you get to put a huge amount of energy into the electoral end of it. So if I join them it feels to me like going back into the counterculture, where I’ve been all my adult life in spirit if not in practice (after counterculture immersion in food politics and cooperatives in my 20s I retreated to self healing in my 30s and 40s through love, family, manual labor, writing science fiction and eventually finding a spiritual community, then awakened to the need to be a responsible citizen to make sure a Bush is never elected again, at which point I joined the Network of Spiritual Progressives). It’s a cycle.


I’m learning. It’s a cycle but I think I am on an upward spiral of learning rather than just going in circles. I hope that the wider progressive and spiritual cultures are as well. I think we have major catastrophes and hard times to come and we need to learn all we can to be ready for them. Does this sound anything like what you are learning? Are you on this same kind of spiral, though maybe in a very place on it? How do we bring forward an electoral politics based on convincing and real appeals to hope and cooperation, not so much to fear and loathing? The answer is: read Michael Lerner’s post on HuffPost this morning! (now posted here too).


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