The hypocrisy of Veteran’s Day in the United States is stunning.

It is mind-numbing, mind-blowing, jaw-dropping, stomach-churning-turning astonishing. On Veteran’s Day, we talk about the heroism of the women and the men who serve in our military. We talk about how much we honor them. Yet, the other 364 days of the year, we seem to forget our veterans. Veterans are homeless in the United States of America. Many need to be in rehab programs for drug and alcohol abuse, and they are not because of a lack of space. They suffer from physical, psychic and moral injury. On Veteran’s Day, we say we care. The facts say we do not care.

by Wendy Elisheva Somerson

The five young Jewish activists who disrupted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans earlier this week shouted familiar criticisms of the Occupation. What was unexpected and new was the way the U.S. and Israeli media portrayed the protest, seeming to hear the critiques with fresh ears and unusual sympathy.

The five activists from the Young Leadership Institute of Jewish Voice for Peace disrupted Netanyahu’s speech at the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly on Monday, November 8, five separate times. The first activist unfurled a banner that read, “The Loyalty Oath delegitimizes Israel” and yelled the same message until she was escorted out of the hall by security. Separated by pauses of a few minutes, the four remaining protesters each unfurled banners and yelled similar messages while they were escorted out: “Silencing dissent delegitimizes Israel,” “Occupation delegitimizes Israel,” “The siege on Gaza delegitimizes Israel,” and finally, “The settlements betray Jewish values.”

With each additional disruption, some members of the crowd grew increasingly agitated, and attacked the protesters before security was able to lead them out. Appearing uncomfortable, Netanyahu was forced to respond to the protesters at least twice. At one point, he remarked, “Israel is guilty until proven guilty,” and “the greatest success of our detractors is when Jews start believing that themselves. We’ve seen that today.”

As an anti-Occupation activist (I helped found Jewish Voice for Peace’s Seattle chapter), I have been pleasantly surprised by how much press the youth activists’ action is receiving and even more surprised by how much of it is positive. Anti-Occupation activists are often depicted negatively or completely ignored by the press; however, I believe there are at least three reasons for this newly sympathetic coverage:

This is a satirical response to “How to Write about the Gnu Atheists, a Guide” which is itself a satirical rebuttal to the way the new atheists have been characterized by critics. For the most part I agree with the points raised in the piece and hope religious critics of the new atheists will reflect on it. I am writing this piece to simply point out that the new atheists have over generalized and distorted religion in many of the same ways that critics of the new atheists have critiqued them. Thus, this is my satirical “guide” for new atheists who are critiquing religion and seeking the best methods for their approach.

How to Write about the Religulous

The first and most important thing to do when writing about the religulous is to conflate all religion with the belief in a supernatural god. By identifying all religion with an abusive and cruel “celestial dictator” it will ensure the maximum ability to attack and ridicule your target. It also provides the advantage of avoiding the complexity of various religious people who use the words God, sacred or divine but do not mean an omnipotent personal being or anything outside or above the laws of the universe. To help make your case you can borrow this line from popular anti-religious atheist blogger Greta Christina, “The thing that uniquely defines religion is belief in supernatural entities. Without that belief, it’s not religion.” Or this one from Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), “To be religious is to be a theist.” Following this definition it’s crucial that you primarily focus on the Abrahamic faiths and ignore things like the Buddhist Churches of America (the oldest Buddhist group in the U.S.) Sure they meet on Sunday mornings, sing hymns, sit in pews, use sacred texts, send their children to Sunday school and listen to a reverend or minister. But they don’t believe in a supernatural god so they don’t really count and you can safely ignore them. It’s better to take the Buddhists off the “religion can be harmful radar” because a lot of liberal Westerners see Buddhists as pure, esoteric, spiritual and enlightened, so it’s best not to confuse these good people by including Buddhists among the religulous.

Perhaps like Sam Harris you do believe that Buddhism is a religion. If you agree you have two options. One is to ignore all the good things Buddhists have done and focus on the bad things: list all the wars Buddhists have fought or discuss abusive eastern gurus, for example. We explain how to do this below, but the key point is that the bad things are the result of the religion, the good things are not. This tactic works well with Christianity. If you can’t make it work with Buddhism your second option is to argue for the elimination of Buddhism as a religion as Harris does in the essay “Killing the Buddha.” But to do that you must make sure not to discuss the contents of any World Religion text as it might be confusing to introduce more atheist religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism and other strands of Buddhism. And at all costs avoid mention of Unitarian Universalism, a religion with 19% atheists and 30% agnostics.

Whatever you do, don’t admit that you can be an atheist without being anti-religious.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 10, 2010, the Truth Commission on Conscience in War will release its groundbreaking report on the “moral injuries” of veterans in a Washington, D.C.press conference. Will you be in the D.C. area this week? Consider attending the press conference and its accompanying events (below).

The Truth Commission on Conscience in War is a national coalition of over 60 religious, veterans, academic, and advocacy groups. The Commission’s report calls for greater religious freedom and protection of moral conscience in the military, citing “moral injuries” suffered by veterans, and announcing next steps. Dr. Rita Brock, Chair of the Commission Planning Committee, Rev. Herman Keizer, Jr., veteran, former Army chaplain and host of the Truth Commission, as well as five veterans will speak.

The Commission report draws on testimony from veterans, theologians, ethicists, physicians, and other experts at a public hearing in New Yorklast March. Among the veteran testifiers, Logan Mehl-Laituri revealed the need for further protection of a soldier’s religious freedom: “If I could serve our country without killing, I never would have been a conscientious objector…Christ bid me drop my weapon, and I had no choice but to respond.”

Tikkun readers may recall Chet Bowers’ article The Trouble With Liberals in our JanFeb 2008 issue. Bowers messed with our readers’ minds by arguing that environmentalists are conservatives, Native Americans rights activists are conservatives, but “conservatives” like Bush, Cheney and the American Enterprise Institute are market liberals and not conservative at all. They are distinct from social justice liberals, but like them support high growth industrialism. Here’s another piece that is trying, in a different way, to redefine how we use these terms in the interests of shaking us up and getting us to recognize potential allies:

Progressives and Conservatives – A Case For Exquisite Harmony

by Neil Hanson

Neo-cons or neoliberals? Have neoliberals hijacked conservatism?

If weʼre to have a chance at salvaging something of the secular, pluralistic democracy that founded this country a couple of hundred years ago, a couple of groups whoʼve been tricked into thinking theyʼre opponents need to see past a few minor differences into the vast common ground they share. They then need to turn their combined attention toward the real source of dissonance and destruction in our culture.

The “trickery” thatʼs occurred is the hijacking of conservatism – its very nature and foundation – turning the word on its head so that folks who are, in fact, truly conservative end up supporting neoliberal ideas and candidates that are actually extreme right-wing ideologues. Enough talk of things that sound truly conservative is sprinkled into the rhetoric to keep folks from thinking too much about it, and at the end of the day, folks who are truly conservative end up alienated from their progressive brothers and sisters, rather than in league with them as the large overlaps in their ideologies should suggest.

Photograph by Toni Verdu Cabro

Security and Peace

By Jonathan Granoff

May God’s grace and peace be with us In the name of God, the Most Merciful, Most Compassionate. We are all interested in peace and security. Inner peace, the source of peace, is an inside job. One important aspect of a healthy inner life is prayer.

The evidence of real prayer is whether it opens the heart to love, regardless of whether we pray quietly, out loud, within a tradition, out of a tradition, facing the east, the west, up or down. If it’s prayer, it opens the heart to God’s love. If it doesn’t, it’s not prayer.

The evidence of prayer is love and the evidence of love is caring for other human beings. The evidence of that caring and that compassion is service. And the evidence, experientially, of service is a clear conscience. The evidence of a clear conscience is inner peace. Inner peace gives us the capacity to receive wisdom. Wisdom further reinforces our humility as we realize it is a gift, not something we can achieve through egocentric willful effort.

When I was a teenager I believed that science was the route to all the best answers to the most important questions. I would have applauded Sir Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: “There is physics and there is stamp-collecting.” It took the sixties to loosen up my views, to help me recognize that there were things not measurable by science, but true none the less. Love and literature were two early examples; the power of spirituality came later. Today my views are closer to what Stephen Jay Gould called Nonoverlapping Magisteria , the perspective that there are areas of expertise over which science holds sway, and other areas over which it does not, and that wisdom can best be reached through exploring both. But as I have opened to ideas in the world outside science, I am horrified at how of increasing numbers of people are moving the opposite way, abandoning science, logic, rationality and embracing magical thinking.

Magical thinking is the idea that what you think changes the physical world directly. In a harmless form, I learned it when my family watched Saturday night hockey games, and my mother warned my brother and I that any premature celebration before the final siren would certainly cause the Canadians to suddenly lose the game. In a more dangerous form, it is promulgated through books like “The Secret” which teach that if you choose to believe that you will be successful, you will (and if you aren’t it’s your own fault for not choosing to be.) It is a belief which allows the rich to feel that they simply chose to be rich, and the people who were poisoned by drinking the effluent dumped into rivers from their factories chose that, so everyone gets what they wanted and no guilt is necessary.

This is a response to Miki Kashtan’s post on Privilege and Needs.

Miki, I respond to this kind of large scale analysis very much. I want to respond about one of your binaries: Security/Community. I have a longing for a community that will give me security, and many fears also. And some degree of hope that those fears can be addressed, along with awareness of what a huge and central task that is for us. My experience, and that of others who I hope will comment, may help us take the discussion further.

In lieu of a community I can put all my earnings and work and energy into, with reasonable expectation that it will support me when I can’t work, in illness or old age, I have savings. I haven’t maximized money-making in my life, rather the opposite: I’ve tried to earn the minimum necessary to do the things I wanted to do — be an activist, writer, raise a family etc. But when we bought an apartment in San Francisco in the early 1980s because it was cheaper than renting, we hit the property boom, and now have some savings: we could discuss whether this is “earned” or “unearned” privilege, but it appears to me to be both simultaneously, and is not the point here anyway. The point is that I haven’t found or built a community I can trust to share all my savings with, so I’m hanging onto them. One could say this is simultaneously selfish and responsible, but what you are doing here is trying to get away from both the moral judgment (selfish privileged person, responsible citizen) and the notion that I would be giving up anything at all if I were to find a community I could trust enough to give my savings to.

I agree: if I found such a community, it would be a joy of huge proportions to give everything to it, including my savings.

An important feature of our recent vote went unreported. The vast majority of Americans voted by staying home. Only 41.3% of eligible voters bothered to vote (national turnout rate among those eligible to vote (the voting-eligible population or VEP) of 41.3%). If we add to them the potential voters who did not even bother to register, very conservatively another 10%, we will see that about 70% of Americans virtually boycotted our elections. The youth stayed home in even greater numbers than older Americans. Only 20% of registered eligible young voters voted. More than 80% did not bother. Why?

I believe in democracy. If a vast majority of Americans do not vote, there must be a good reason for it. I believe that the vast majority of Americans understand that their voices are not heard. Their votes don’t count. They ask, “Should I vote for the party that brought on the disaster that took my security, and can, or did take my home, or should I vote for the party that promised hope and change and did not change my precarity or loss?” Neither seems worth it.

Most Americans feel powerless. An extreme right Tea Party alternative was possible. Most correctly perceived that although such a vote registered a protest, it represented a leap out of the frying pan and into the fire. Somewhere they knew that since the overwhelming number of layoffs were in private corporations, not government, cutting government would just let those capitalists at the top pay even less taxes and laugh even louder on the way to the bank which our taxes subsidized – that very same bank that won’t loan us the tax money we gave them. That is enough to get people discouraged.

What can people do? People need a left political formation that speaks for the majority.

What is it that makes us so attached to privilege when we have it? I have seen a lot of polarity in discussions about privilege, with people who have little access to class, race or gender privilege often having disparaging views about those who do have such access, while those who do have the privilege feeling confused, ashamed or guilty, but nonetheless unable to make a decisive stand on it in terms of their own lives.

I remember in particular a striking example that happened in 1994. I was at the time part of a group of people who were very committed to a shared vision of a transformed society, similar in many respects to the vision that I am working towards these days. At one point in one gathering of the group, the person who was facilitating the gathering asked the people present what would get in their way of committing a significant portion of their income or savings to the joint project. As people responded to the question, I noticed the very vivid level of fear about having nothing left which leaked out of them. I understood then that the key to making sense of the difficulty lay in understanding the nature of the fear.

I have thought about that moment a lot over the years. The question seems even more pressing today, because our very survival as a species, it seems to me, depends on being able to reduce our consumption of resources dramatically. Because I am completely committed to doing so without coercion, I am called to find the root of the issue, so that letting go of privileged access to resources will be seen as attractive rather than a giving up.

My heart and mind are full of this movie today, after my wife and I saw it last night. Until I read this review in our local paper by Mick LaSalle, I was wondering how Tyler Perry, whose Madea movie trailers are enough to make me never want to see the movies, could possibly do justice to this womanist play. LaSalle’s review reassured me. I’m no movie reviewer and what I have to say here is a personal take that will include a possible spoiler, so it would be best to read that review instead if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

I do urge you to go. I haven’t seen as deep a take on the human condition in many a day.

Which makes it curious that almost everyone in the theater last night was Black. My wife and I (white) sat near the front, so we left among the first and then I waited while she went to the women’s room, so everyone else passed me and after a while I saw a white woman and it occurred to me that I couldn’t recall anyone else who wasn’t African American in that stream of people coming out. Maybe I missed some. But nearly all those Latinos, Asians and whites we had been lining up with to get tickets had gone to one of the other dozen movies at the multiplex. This was in Richmond, California, a city that is incidentally 36% African American. I assume it will be different in metropolitan centers, but in this neighborhood the movie had been clearly labeled in everyone’s minds as a Black movie. And not just that, but a movie for Black women, as most women came with their women friends, and I was in a small male minority.

Big mistake. This is for everyone.

Bishop Gene Robinson (photo by janinsanfran)

Today the New York Times reported on two stories that might seem only tangentially related: the new culture wars around schools’ attempts to put anti-bullying curricula into place, and the announced 2013 (early) retirement of Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the country’s first openly gay bishop. Yes, they are both about homosexuality, but what else do they have in common?

Casualties. The story on Bishop Robinson makes it clear that the uproar around his episcopacy has been hard on his personal health as well as on his otherwise healthy and happy diocese. And while schools debate about what can and can’t be said about homosexuality, young LGBT people are still at risk of self-harm and suicide because of precisely the kinds of attitudes held by those opposing the curricula.

"All your Church are belong to us!"

In the Reformation, religious controversy and gunpowder mixed together on a large scale. Previous religious disputes involved swords, catapults, burnings at the stake, or sometimes just the pulling of beards and the smashing of wine bottles. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the whiff of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate became “the devil’s incense” for theological struggles. In the West, the blog posts have replaced cannonballs as tools of controversy. But in Great Britain on the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Night keeps alive the memory of the era of “black powder theology.” In a way no one can ignore.

Guy Fawkes has long since passed to his eternal reward. But every 5th of November, he comes alive in effigy. His slouch hat and goatee once again make their appearance. Led by a procession of lit torches and the accompanying sound of firecrackers, jolly souls carry “the old Guy” to his fiery doom. Bonfires, burning in effigy, and fireworks complete the ceremony. It’s like a combination of Halloween and the Fourth of July.

Guy Fawkes’ Night commemorates the foiling of “The Gunpowder Plot,” which according to most historians would have wiped out King James, his court, and Parliament– and according to explosives experts, a good chunk of London.

On the surface, this seems to be an anti-treason and anti-terrorism holiday. Isn’t it a good thing to celebrate stopping such a horrible crime?

But there’s a deeper message to this, too. One that is very real for English Catholics.

Father to "No Islam!"

In our day, Islamophobes have used 9-11 as a means of spreading fear and hatred of American Muslims. Likewise, since the 1600s anti-Catholics in Great Britain used the bonfires of Guy Fawkes’ Night to attack English Catholics. This holiday was the capstone in the propaganda of “The Black Legend” – a term historians use to describe the image of a vast, nefarious Catholic menace seeking to subjugate the whole world to papal rule and the rebirth of “the Dark Ages.”

In reality, English Catholics were staunchly patriotic. Just as American Muslims have been key in fighting terrorism, English Catholics foiled a plot to kidnap James I in 1603, two years before Guy Fawkes’ “Gunpowder Plot.” English Catholics have generally opposed the very notion of blowing up Parliament and Crown. Although they oppose what the “Gunpowder Plot” stands for, English Catholics generally see Guy Fawkes’ Night not as a statement against treason, but as an element in the long campaign to paint Catholics as the devil.

American Muslims know what that’s like.

When will we stop associating beards with threats to "Homeland Security"?

"Does this hat make my bomb look big?"

The history of terrorism in the West has two key dates: September 11 and the Fifth of November.

9/11, of course, needs no introduction, its shadow is as prominent in our time as a Himalayan mountain overlooking a valley in Tibet. Britons excepted, we’re much less aware of the Fifth of November, in the year anno Domini 1605. The central figure of that day, Guy Fawkes, has become something of a hipster hero, thanks to the graphic novel and movie V for Vendetta. In contrast, the details of the “Gunpowder Plot” that made his name (in)famous is little known. But although we are less conscious of it, this seventeenth-century terrorism plot has left its marks on the Anglo-American mind. It was a key event in the demonization of Roman Catholicism. The fear of “popery” has, in turn, influenced the way Muslim-bashers paint a menacing portrait of Muslims today.

Which brings us to Robert Spencer. Among the legion of anti-Muslim bloggers and writers, Bob Spencer stands supreme — the alpha male of the Islamophobes, one might say. His position, as he argued in a recent debate, is “The only good Muslim is a bad Muslim.” That is, a Muslim may not be a terrorist or a jihadist only because he or she ignores or changes the basic principles of Islam. For Spencer, Islam is essentially violent — while Christianity is not.

The "Gunpowder Plot" would have devastated the heart of London. (Image: IOP/Guildhall Library)

Which makes one wonder what Bob Spencer thinks of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes’ plot, in relative terms, would have caused much more damage than 9-11 had it succeeded. Many today, including some Catholics, defend Fawkes, the way some “Politically Correct” people defend Hamas and Hezbollah. So, I ask Mr. Spencer: What’s your position? Do you condemn “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot”, and the current pro-Guy Fawkes fad?

This isn’t a “gotcha question.” I’m genuinely curious about what Robert Spencer what he thinks about Guy Fawkes’ violence. He did give an interview to the anti-modern right-wing group Tradition, Family and Property, an analogue to the Muslim Brotherhood from his own religion. We have mutual friends, so I know from his social circles there are people who reject Vatican II’s embrace of modern religious liberty and think Guy Fawkes a cool guy.

I would also like to know what Robert Spencer thinks of the way anti-Catholic bigots exploited this conspiracy — especially since James I spoke about Catholics in the same way that Spencer talks about “Good Muslims/Bad Muslims.”

We Europeans find a lot of news of the United States in our media. Many of us follow with interest, much puzzlement and relatively little understanding of the posturing, the insults, the exaggerations. Obama doesn’t look much like a socialist to us… But I was hurt the other day by the nameless Republican figure who sneered that Obama was trying to make the US more like Europe – but that Europe was 20 years behind. Behind what?

I believe that we should all be able to cultivate a healthy nationalism, a pride and love of country. But perhaps we all also need to work harder to work our way up the league tables, by learning from each other’s best practice. Take education. The United States objectively has much to learn here; her ‘end of term report’ reads much like my school reports: ‘Could do much better. Needs to try harder.’ (see UNICEF’s “big picture” comparison of the performance of schools in the world’s rich industrialized nations.) The US is close to the bottom of many league tables of school achievement. But who has got it right? Here in Europe, the Finns seem to have got a lot of things right, and apparently they’re rather overwhelmed by the visiting delegations wanting to pick up good tips. But I find that highly encouraging: clearly in some fields, we are getting more ready to look around and see what we can learn from those who seem to be doing better than us.

People need a progressive vision. The various progressive initiatives and solutions to the problems of our society and of our world seem strange standing alone. We need to put them into a larger narrative that captivates the imaginations of a coalition of American people that is large enough to carry elections.

In my opinion, President Obama was right to pass healthcare, even though it was not the kind of healthcare program that progressives wanted. He is a pragmatist, and he necessarily has to work with the people present in the room. If he had waited for this election to try to get health reform, he no doubt would be looking at the same situation only without a landmark piece of legislation to show for his time in office. The Democrats did not defend the legislation. They could have. They should have. However, healthcare is difficult to defend without placing it into a larger narrative of how a 21^st century America and a 21^st century world ought to look. The Democrats were criticized for the size of government. However, they did not defend the stimulus. That was difficult to do without putting it into a larger narrative of how it would help to bring the country back from the economic brink of disaster. They did not drive the point home that the stimulus contained money for unemployment compensation that Republicans opposed.

The Democrats did not say how the financial reform legislation would help ordinary people, especially the poor who are victims of immoral pay day lending practices. They did not say enough about how the various government interventions — TARP, money to the auto industry and the stimulus — were necessary to keep the country from going into another Great Depression. I do think that President Obama’s attempt to gain Republican support by putting tax cuts into the stimulus bill was a mistake because it took money away from projects that could have gone to giving people jobs.

As the two year reign of the Prince of Orange (Boehner) begins, my cochlea cringes in anticipation of the bombastic pre-2012 negative advertising Rove has promised to produce beginning November 3rd. We should consider a grassroots effort to amend the Constitution.

Linda Pedro, a friend of mine, led an eight mile pilgrimage through nsow and sleet in her wheelchair

Donna Edwards has proposed a 28th Amendment, titled the Free Speech for People Amendment very much like NSP’s own ESRA (the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution). Perhaps the Network for Spiritual Progressives can help her start a movement!

In my childhood, I wanted to know everything about everything, which I called “being a polymath”, because polymath was such an impressive word. I read omnivorously, and remembered almost all of what I had read. I was the star of my high school’s Reach For the Top team (short version: a Canadian high school Jeopardy). I knew all the songs on the top 30, every week, and could identify them from the first notes, to the amazement of my parents to whom all rock and roll sounded pretty much the same. Two long-remembered dreams from my childhood encapsulate this obsession. In the first, the happy dream, aliens come to destroy Earth (I was a big science fiction fan) but moved to pity, they choose one person at random and ask one question. If the question is answered correctly, Earth will be spared; if incorrectly, ZAP! They choose me; I know the answer. Everyone is awed and grateful. In the other dream, I go off to summer camp for two weeks, and when I come back I get a copy of the current top thirty. I look at it in disbelief. I don’t know any of the songs on it. I don’t even know any of the groups. I am in utter despair.

One of these dreams has come true, and – here’s a hint – it’s not the one with the aliens. I still read music reviews occasionally, and they’re about albums I don’t know by bands of which I’ve never heard. Even when they explain that the lead singer used to be in this important other band, I still don’t know him. Sometimes out of this vast ocean of ignorance there’ll emerge a familiar island, a new album by Paul Simon, or the Rolling Stones. But the waters of oblivion are rising, the islands are becoming fewer, and there are more and more column inches of reviews waving between them.

Brenda Shoshanna

by Brenda Shoshanna

Many, many questions arise in our minds when someone close to us is seriously ill. It takes a while to realize that these questions do not have one answer. They have many answers, appear in different ways, and may have different impacts on us at different times. In a sense a finger is being pointed in our direction. These questions are demanding a response . . We cannot be free from answering. Life itself is demanding a reply. Some of the questions we struggle with are:

“How is suffering truly relieved?”

“What is the best way through serious illness and beyond?”

A New York Times map depicting Republican gains (indicated by striped areas) in the House of Representatives

1. Don’t let the media frame this as a defeat of progressives. Had Obama embraced and fought for a progressive agenda, even if he had passed none of it, he would have entered the 2010 elections as the champion of the huge idealism of the American people that was elicited in 2008 and which would have led the Democrats to an electoral sweep in 2010. Being seen as fighting for the needs of ordinary people — never letting anyone forget for a moment that he had inherited the mess that Republican and pro-corporate Democrats had created, positioning himself as the champion of those who resented the Wall Street and corporate interests — his popularity would have grown; he could have won a much bigger victory for the Democrats in 2010, and that would have allowed him to actually legislate the policies of a progressive vision.

Had Obama refused to give more money to the banks and Wall Street unless equal or greater amounts were allocated for a visionary New Deal-style program for jobs and a freeze on mortgage foreclosures; had the Democrats refused to fund the escalation of war in Afghanistan; had they advocated for “Medicare for Everyone” instead of passing a plan that forced 30 million people to buy health care, but puts no serious restraints on the costs that insurance companies or pharmaceutical can charge; had Obama fought courageously for a carbon tax and ended the bargain taxes for the wealthy; had the Democrats insisted on stopping the harassment of immigrants; had the Obama Administration called for a national effort to overturn Citizens United, such as the ESRA (the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution); had Obama set up public forums at which his supporters could give him public feedback and used the web creatively to allow his supporters to weigh in; and had Obama consistently spoken honestly to Americans about the constraints he was facing and who was putting pressure on him to do what… there would have been no electoral defeat.

It wasn’t the progressive agenda that got defeated, it was the corporate-military accommodation of the Democrats and Obama who couldn’t address popular outrage, not only at the economic problem, but at the way we had been manipulated in 2008; and the humiliation many felt at having allowed themselves to hope that someone in politics would fight for what they said they would fight for.

2. Challenge the elitism in the Left. Whenever you hear someone saying that it is the stupidity or reactionary nature of Americans that led to this defeat, remind them of why, absent any other voice that they would encounter expressing their outrage, it was rational for Americans to be attracted to the right-wing voices that were expressing that outrage (albeit with programs that will actually make things worse). When Americans thought they had a chance at progressive change, they voted for it in 2008 — so they are neither stupid nor reactionary.