For those who follow the Christian tradition, Christmas is a time of hope and promise in the unlikely person of a child. It is a time of celebrating the birth of the one spoken of by the prophet Isaiah and heralded by Handel as the “Prince of Peace.”

Yet religion and war have become so grotesquely interconnected that we can scarcely tell them apart. Indeed, to suggest that war is antithetical to the message of Jesus is to risk accusations of treason, heresy or both.

Most people are unaware that for the first few hundred years of the Church, Christians were total pacifists. For example, St. Martin of Tours refused to fight against the Gauls in 336CE because of his faith. In spite of the Church’s history of complicity and the downright instigation of war, a vein of this ancient ethic has persisted throughout history.

In the dominant culture, religion and war have become so enmeshed that some areas of the military have become evangelistic recruitment centers. Politicians and ministers alike fawn over our military as if war and religion were made for one another. Military commanders have become aggressive in promoting a “weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Steven Green, the soldier who raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl before murdering her and her family, says that he “didn’t think of the Iraqis as humans.” While our troops include many good people whose consciences would be repelled by Green’s deeds, the reality is that we must desensitize ourselves and dehumanize the enemy in order to go to war and in order to kill.

One military training cadence shows the perverse nature of training for war: “Bomb the village, kill the people/throw some napalm in the square/do it on a Sunday morning/kill them on their way to prayer. Ring the bell inside the schoolhouse/watch those kiddies gather round/lock and load your 240/mow them little mother f….s down.” (See the movie The Ground Truth - its trailer follows.)

All photos on this post are from the rally

In conversation with the staff here, Tikkun intern Eamon O’Connor has been developing his critique of the famous rally and of the left critics like Medea Benjamin, Chris Hedges and more than a few Tikkun readers and writers who, in vigorously dismissing the rally, missed something crucial about it. This is about how to engage people in political discourse in the future, not just about what happened at the last election.

By Eamon O’Connor

Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity may have come and gone in popular consciousness, and most people will remember it as little more than a hybrid media spectacle/ Halloween party thrown by our nation’s most popular political satirist — a Be-in for a generation raised on a diet rich in irony. The event left many progressives shaking their heads, wondering why worthier causes couldn’t garner the same attention, or attendance. After heaving a collective sigh of frustration, or indifference, we went along with our business. But those who are concerned for the possibility of efficacious public demonstrations would do well to reconsider the Rally to Restore Sanity. In an age of profound cynicism, it is critical to be fluent in the language of satire.

We never endorse candidates or parties. But the debate on the Left about how to deal with Obama’s betrayal of his base has political implications that go far beyond who to vote for or what political party to support. We present, without endorsing, these two quite different perspectives. Stephen Zunes is a contributing editor to Tikkun Magazine. Chris Hedges has written for Tikkun. Both are smart and serious progressive voices. We at Tikkun urge and the Network of Spiritual Progressives urge you to vote on Tuesday!

My Support for Ralph Nader, Ten Years Later: Lessons Learned for 2010

by Stephen Zunes

Like many people who campaigned and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, the upcoming tenth anniversary of that disastrous election and awareness of the tragic results continues to haunt me. While it was perhaps the most serious political misjudgment I have ever made, it is important to recognize why at the time it seemed to be a quite rational course of action. It is also important to recognize what both the Democratic Party as well as progressives who are tempted to support left alternatives to the Democrats can learn from it.

Read the whole article here.

The Phantom Left

By Chris Hedges

The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for “moderation.” And while we waste our time talking nonsense, the engines of corporate power – masked, ruthless and unexamined – happily devour the state.

… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. — Charles Dickens

As Van Jones said, MLK's great speech was not titled "I Have A Complaint."

There’s still time to work phone banks this weekend for our preferred candidates. But are you going to support the Democrats, the Greens or another outsider party? And whoever wins this week, how do we build hope and momentum for creating a Caring Society going forward? There was another fine jeremiad by Chris Hedges on Truthdig this week doing his best, incidentally, to persuade you not to vote Democrat. The opening paragraph:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

Those of our readers who don’t like Eli Zaretsky’s excoriations of Obama on Tikkun Daily won’t like Hedges’ writing either. Both are saying things about the defeat of liberalism by corporate hegemony that I imagine middle of the road historians in a hundred years, if there are any, will find fair comment about this era. The question is, though, how we respond when we are in the middle of it. How do we build our own sense of hope and agency?

The quite appropriate photo used on AlterNet to illustrate Hegdes' post. Photo Credit: cometstarmoon

Hedges’ latest is called “Is American Yearning for Fascism?” What I want to ask you, our readers, is: is this country really psychologically and politically similar enough to Germany in the 1920s, which is his main comparison, to be seriously in danger of fascism? As someone raised outside the U.S. who has still lived longer outside it than in, I am more impressed by how cussedly libertarian so many Americans are, how much the love of guns is allied to a “leave me alone” attitude. I know we are all prone to obedience and are more easily seduced by authority than we would like to think, but the American libertarian attitude seems very ill suited to fascist movements of the kind that take over the state and run it. Am I wrong?

Here’s what Hedges writes about current “movements” — mostly unnamed in this post though he names the Oath Keepers, Citizens United, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin:

Meet your favorite author! Every Monday night I interview a Tikkun author on a conference call that you can join, and you can ask questions and make your own comments: half radio show, half virtual town meeting.

It’s free to you, but we ask on the honor system that if you join the call more than once that you do something to keep us going financially: subscribe to the magazine, join the Network of Spiritual Progressives (which includes a subscription) or donate. These three are the ONLY ways we have of surviving. But of course when you listen to this audio on the web it’s free to you and at no cost to us, so you can squeak by without feeling guilty that you haven’t contributed… or you could contribute anyway for the sheer joy of it.

There is some wonderful stuff on these weekly calls. You can download MP3s for your ipod or listen on your computer. All the past audio is saved here. We had a backlog after our last intern (the wonderful Daniel O’Leary) left, and now two volunteers have come forward to do the editing of the audio and conversion to MP3s (the most wonderful Jeff Moskin and Jack Lampl), and they have cleared the backlog.

So now you can hear all these great people. This last Monday, for example, Tikkun Daily’s Lauren Reichelt gave one of the very best of these interviews. It’s one thing to read her stunning article in Tikkun about community organizing, and another to hear her talk about it with such clarity and enthusiasm. If you wondered whether your vote for Obama had helped anyone or not, listen to Lauren tell how totally the new administration has turned around her work of providing health care to a low income county in New Mexico that is as large as Massachusetts and in which most people have no health insurance. Under Bush she kept a low profile and started blogging incognito lest she draw attention to herself and lose more for her district faster (her description reminded me of how dissidents in the old Soviet Union wrote samizdat); under Obama she has developed strong relationships with the administration and is writing openly under her own name. Links are in the first paragraph below.

Sending me the edited version of Lauren’s call, our volunteer just wrote “Very interesting and inspiring. Will be sending the link to a few colleagues.”

Here’s everyone from this year:

Protestors take over the 880 freeway in Oakland in both directions as part of last week's Day of Action for education funding. Photo: Reginald James/TheBlackHour.com

Chris Hedges put up another vehement piece on Truthdig on Monday: “Calling All Rebels.” Representative quotes:

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism… The old game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country… The engines of social reform are dead…. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power.

Editor’s Note: Last week, AlterNet ran an article that featured a piece by Chris Hedges and another by Rabbi Michael Lerner, titled: “Should Progressives Give Up on Obama?” The article incited lively debate in the comments section and now, Rabbi Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and head of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, has penned a response to the article’s comments addressed to him by AlterNet readers. It follows here.

The dispute between me and Hedges is about what is the best strategy to rebuild a powerful anti-corporate movement, not about whether or not we like Obama’s policies. As editor of Tikkun, I’ve been outspoken in opposition to his war in Afghanistan, his continuation of the human rights violations of the Bush administration, his handing trillions to banks and investment companies rather than creating a national bank to fund social projects and allowing the privately owned banks to be dealt with by the “free marketplace” that conservatives have been praising all these decades, his failure to support Medicare for Everyone (single-payer) health care reform and instead embracing policies that will further enrich the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, his support of “cap and trade” rather than a carbon tax to stem global warming, his capitulation to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rather than using American power to end the Occupation of the West Bank, his rejection of the Goldstone recommendations on Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza, his support for firing teachers in Rhode Island for working at a school that did not meet the teach-to-the-test absurdities of No Child Left Behind rather than question the validity of the goals that are measured by that legislation, and the list goes on and on and on.

These terrible policies are plenty reason to be angry at the Obama Administration. But they have not provoked a huge outcry, even among those most adversely impacted by those policies. Just last week Tikkun received advice from some leading African American progressives that in their community Tikkun was losing credibility by being so outspoken in critiquing Obama, given the widespread perception in that community that attacks on Obama from whatever corner are really expressions of covert racism. Nor have those who have lost their homes to escalating interest rates on mortgage loans or those who have lost their jobs while the money that could have saved them has poured into the coffers of the rich managed to assemble on the streets of our country to demonstrate their outrage.

So when developing a strategy, one must take into account the emotional temper of Americans today including their continued willingness to support the Democratic Party, in no small part because of a perception that had Nader not run in 2000 there would never have been a Bush presidency or a war in Iraq or the irresponsible economic policies that led to the economic meltdown.

So those of us who wish to stop the growing corporate dominance of the world and reverse the destruction of the environmental destruction of the planet and the erosion of human relationships and ethical values in our society that is labeled “the globalization of capitalism” but which I prefer to call “the globalization of selfishness,” need to develop smart strategies to change the consciousness of Americans.

I believe that there are three elements to such a strategy:

I was happy to see AlterNet post this significant debate as one of their lead articles today, under the title “Should Progressives Give Up on Obama? Chris Hedges vs. Rabbi Lerner.” Common Dreams posts Michael’s piece here.

As I write this there are 68 comments on the AlterNet site, and 318 on Common Dreams! If you are used to our comments culture here on Tikkun Daily you may be put off by the scathing tones of many of the comments, but persevere and there are well-made points. At least some people are wrestling with the ideas. (With one exception the quotes here are from AlterNet.) One writes:

I applaud both Hedges and Lerner for their thoughts and efforts to grapple with the serious challenges of framing our discourse around the urgent need to frame our shared goals for this society in a manner that represents the best of what we can be. Reading both pieces requires a little time and a lot of reflection and I hope that those who comment have done both.

Whether people’s points are well-made or not, you get the pulse of the Left, and much of it is indeed very angry. This is representative of many:

Many of the specific failures highlighted by the article I linked to Tuesday by Chris Hedges criticizing the performance of the Obama Administration are legitimate points. But the way Hedges’s positions are stated, and the conclusions drawn from them are not the path of spiritual progressives, in my view. There was too much anger in his statement overshadowing our spiritual progressive commitment to compassion and to a spirit of generosity toward others with whose politics we disagree. And not enough sympathy for the problems anyone would face trying to get elected as President and to repair the damage of the past 30 years.

I have great respect for Chris Hedges, as one of the very few people who was a respected journalist at the New York Times and subsequently left the Times in protest of the way they ignored those of us in the anti-war movement who were warning about the lies of the Bush Administration and opposing the use of violence to achieve US ends in the Middle East, and because I am grateful that he has written a brilliant article in Tikkun on the Obama Brand and has accepted our invite to speak at our conference in D.C.

Yet in this post I want to state places where I disagree with Hedges article, although I do at first affirm some things that are right about Hedges’ position even while I don’t affirm the tone and style of his communication (which, to be fair to him, was written for a different venue and not at all like the more nuanced pieces he has put into Tikkun magazine). I hope you read this through to the end, even while grumbling that it is too long (I know, but here is a basic truth about communication: if you are referencing ideas that are already popular in the culture, you can do so with a short slogan; but if you are trying to introduce new ideas that do not resonate with the “established wisdom” or “common sense” of the culture, it often takes a nuanced discussion that is longer — and hence the nuanced position may feel too long to people who have been accustomed to the dumbing down of popular discourse by the media and the politicians.)

Despite what Chris Hedges wrote, I have met Obama personally and privately on several occasions and do not believe he is a liar or a conscious manipulator. I do not agree with the decisions he has made since he won the Democratic nomination for President, and particularly after he became President, and I’ve gone out of my way to communicate in a clear, firm way those criticisms, and to do so in a positive language that showed exactly what he could do to change his approach.

I have posted the rest of this long statement on our Current Thinking site along with Hedges’s article, many of your responses to that article and your responses to this one of mine (which I emailed out to our list before posting here), so please check them all out there.

Chris Hedges’ piece on Truthdig yesterday deserves to be widely read. He writes:

Chris Hedges. Flickr/Cheryl Biren

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives….

The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists….

It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be.

The rest is here. My recommending the article is not meant to be an endorsement of Chris’s position any more than our circulation of other articles is meant as an endorsement of them.

Despite having engaged in numerous debates with Christians, Muslims and Jews across the liberal/conservative spectrum Christopher Hitchens still holds to an amazingly ignorant understanding of the liberal religious heritage. His understanding of who is and who isn’t a Christian is perhaps the most disappointing and surprising piece of evidence for his myopic interpretation of religion. While rejecting conservative Christians’ theological claims about God, the Bible and Jesus, he accepts their understanding of who is and is not able to be considered a Christian. In a recent interview with Marilyn Sewell, a Unitarian Universalist minister and self-professed liberal Christian, Christopher Hitchens paraphrased C.S. Lewis to explain the boundaries of who constitutes a Christian. It’s not surprising then that a recent blog post by Dr. Ray Pritchard of “Keep Believing Ministries” for a conservative Christian site called Crosswalk was entitled, “Christopher Hitchens Gets it Exactly Right.”

During a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, noted atheist Christopher Hitchens laid down some seriously good theology… In one of the delicious ironies of our time, an outspoken atheist grasps the central tenet of Christianity better than many Christians do. What you believe about Jesus Christ really does make a difference.

What did Hitchens say?

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Why is Hitchens so quick to accept such an orthodox interpretation of the boundaries of Christianity? His brain seems to short-circuit when he has to think about religion in complex ways. He wants to hold firmly to an either/or dichotomy–the very same one which he is critiquing fundamentalism for. In debates he has stated that he is “Protestant atheist” meaning that he recognizes the validity of the various reformation movements which liberalized, expanded and diversified Christianity. But which denomination of protestant atheist is he? This isn’t clear but it is apparently not one which falls outside of his or C.S. Lewis’s orthodox boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. Isn’t is shocking that of all people, Christopher Hitchens is in agreement with the many forces in history which have led to the extermination, torture and destruction of “heretics” for simply believing the “wrong” form of Christianity? Since when is Hitchens so concerned about who is and isn’t a Christian?

Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

Josh Stanton’s post about Sexy Jewish Stereotypes was not just the most popular post of last week on Tikkun Daily: it actually overtook Rabbi Lerner’s Israel as Idolatry to become the third most popular post of all time on this blog, behind two about health care (here and here).

The post featured a photo of a young Jewish woman in expensive blond hairdo, pink tiger-striped top and leather pants.

Hmmm. What does this say about our readers? Happy for young Jewish women to be free and finally approved by the wider society as hot? Or just in need of some eye candy in a spiritually approved context (it’s on Tikkun after all, it must be permissable)?

What? I’m not sounding happy about this post? Am I some kind of puritan or something? I don’t want young women to be liberated in their sexuality? Or men (in particular) to have pleasure in looking?

Let’s do the “liberated in their sexuality” bit first. Here’s a wise comment about the “sexual revolution” that my generation launched, that comes from the pages of Tikkun and is more representative of our attitudes. It was written in 1988 but is entirely relevant today:

If we came of age in the 1960s, we were told that sexual revolution presaged the total transformation of society;

Chris Hedges is a man who has seen, lived and reported on hell for much longer than any human being should do, and he knows that others have had it worse. I expressed my deep disagreement with the darkness of his vision here, but nonetheless I think that when he warns us about the prospects for American fascism, we should take him seriously. Of our returning vets, he says:

We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society.

I’m doubly lucky this week that my friend Be Scofield, who interned a while back at Tikkun, is now at Starr King seminary and invited me to hear Rev. Wright on Tuesday and Chris Hedges today.

I hadn’t realized that the former war correspondent and current hard-hitting opponent of both the Religious Right (or the heretical Christian Fascists as he would prefer that we think of them) and the New Atheists, one of the stars of the spiritual progressive world, had himself gone to seminary (Harvard Divinity School).

His talk to the seminarians today was alarming, about:

• the lack of literacy and critical thought in America
• the primacy of the image (TV and advertising) that works its manipulative emotional way with us however critical we are of it
• the nature of corporate “reverse totalitarianism” (in which ideology is subservient to profitmaking, unlike other totalitarian or theocratic states)
• and the likelihood that this round of stimulus will create a financial bubble that will burst and leave us in much deeper trouble, prey to pseudo-Christian fascist demagogues who will have a field day due to the bankruptcy of liberalism.

Much of this sounded convincing to me, and he had wise words about what to do about it. Our question should never be “How can we elect good people?” but always “How can we limit the damage done by mediocrities in power?” This to me is the essence of democracy, from Magna Carta onwards. Noone ever bothered to organize democracy, with all the conflict that entails, to deal with good rulers, only with mediocre and bad ones.

But I started to get confused when Hedges said, approvingly, that Dan Berrigan (the famous radical Catholic priest) had not been interested in the Obama/McCain election struggle last year because, Berrigan said, quoting his brother Phil, “If voting was that effective it would be illegal.” Hedges went into a riff about how the 60s Left failed because it was secular and therefore was seduced by power. It takes a religious Left to hold onto the ethical core. It’s not our job to attain power, he said, our loyalty is to another Power. He quoted Paul Tillich to the effect that all institutions are demonic.

This was too much for me. Hedges had already spoken approvingly of habeas corpus, slavery abolition and something he called “functioning democracy.” But history teaches us that those were achieved by the exercise of power, by people who thought it worth acquiring power in order to hold the mediocrities in power to account. To say that institutions, which are ubiquitous in human society, are demonic, is too close to saying human beings are demonic, for me. There is a power dimension to everything we do, every penny we spend, every speech we give to students, every relationship in our lives: if we can’t have a theology or psychology of the good use of power, then we are lost as a social species.

He said at one point that there could never be a moral institution in the same sense that there could be a moral individual. That rang purity warning bells in my head. I don’t think there can ever be an entirely moral institution OR individual: we are humans–clever, conscious, selfish, cooperative animals–neither perfect nor perfectible. Nonetheless some individuals are kinder than others, and some institutions are more accountable than others. Hedges talked a lot about kindness at the start, but this emphasis on some kind of purity of moral individuality that is spoiled by trying to gain power, that to me is all about purity and has nothing to do with kindness. Purity and kindness can and often are opposites, enemies.

I fear that his speech could be taken to be so apocalyptically doom laden about America, about our world, about all our institutions and about the very concept of trying to gain power to promote a kinder world, that kind-hearted idealists would wonder why on earth it would be worth taking part in public life, except to make symbolic stands that preserve their purity. That was not how habeas corpus, slavery abolition or functioning democracies were created, nor any of a thousand reforms that make life in some countries and institutions better than life in others.

So I was thoroughly confused. Did I misunderstand him? I’ll send him this blog, and ask for clarification.