Creative Commons / Adrian Kinloch

This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.

The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”

• We want to replace a society based on selfishness and materialism with a society based on caring for each other and caring for the planet.

• We want a new bottom line so that institutions, corporations, government policies, and even personal behavior are judged rational or productive or efficient not only by how much money or power gets generated, but also by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, environmental and ethical behavior, and how much we are able to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement the grandeur and mystery of all Being.

• To take the first steps, we want to ban all money from elections except that supplied by government on an equal basis to all major candidates, require free and equal time for the candidates and prohibit buying other time or space, and require corporations to get a new corporate charter once every five years which they can only get if they can prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. We call this the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution (ESRA).

• We want to replace the mistaken notion that homeland security can be achieve through a strategy of world domination by our corporations suppoted by the US military and intelligence services with a strategy of generosity and caring for others in the world that will start by launching a Global Marshall Plan that dedicates 1-2% of our GMP ever year for the next twenty to once and for all eliminate global poverty homelessnes, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care — knowing that this, not an expanded militarr, is what will give us security.

• And we want a NEW New Deal that provides a job for everyone who wants to work, jobs that rebuild our environment and our infrastructre, and jobs that allow us to take better care of educating our youth and caring for the aged. That’s what we are for! And you can read more about them at www.spiritualprogressives.org

Ok, it was two minutes instead of 20 seconds, but we deserve that amount of time.

truthout.org

Subscribers to Tikkun and Members of NSP are mostly united in strong criticism of Obama’s failures–failures due NOT solely to the obstruction of Republicans and his own conservatives in the Democratic Party, but to his failure to articulate and fight for a larger vision. Had he done so, a growing number of liberals and progressives agree, the American people might have responded enthusiastically. They don’t blame him for failing to produce, they blame him for failing to fight for what he claimed to believe in. Last week, for example, with the nation hoping to hear a visionary economic plan, instead heard a wimpy and ineffective one–instead of the New New Deal for a Caring Society that we and many others have been advocating. Of course it would be blocked by the Republicans, but imagine how different people in the US would have felt if they felt that there was someone championing a New New Deal that would among other things spend enough money to put everyone back to work who wants to work!!! Just having that alternative as something to fight for would have electrified the country and finally defined Obama in a winnable way.

Started some 15 years ago after the first conference on The Politics of Meaning in Washington DC, The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics (PISLAP) is a nationwide group of lawyers, law professors, and law students who seek to shift the focus of American law and legal institutions away from the individualism, self-interest, and materialism that undergirds all of American law and toward seeing law as a central cultural arena for fostering empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding.

We have taken to heart Martin Luther King Jr.’s definition of Justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love” and are seeking to build a new movement in law that makes restoring community through understanding and social healing our highest value. Sometimes out-and-out adversarial battles are necessary, but the principal shift that needs to take place in legal culture is toward the new bottom line articulated by the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) — that institutions be valued according to how much love and generosity they generate rather than only focusing on a material war of all against all in a socially separated, self-interested world. That’s why PISLAP is glad to be the “legal arm” of the NSP, serving as its task force in this important professional and cultural arena.

Below is the welcoming letter and agenda for our upcoming gathering in New York, an agenda-building gathering for the coming year among the organization’s leadership group. I’ll post follow-ups in Tikkun Daily, including the final plan we decide upon as we move forward toward fundamentally transforming law and legal culture. You out there in other professions: Why not do the same?

Protest in Wisconsin photo by A. Renner

Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin

In Jordan, teachers protested this week for the right to form unions. In Wisconsin, they fought to keep that right. The stakes and the dangers in Jordan are enormously higher, but it’s a sad irony that we find ourselves sliding down to the status of a country that doesn’t even pretend to be a democracy. I wish with all my heart for these dangerous struggles in the Mideast and North Africa to bear real and lasting fruit, that in each of these cases, justice will prevail.

And I’m proud of my home state. I’ve been proud all week. Newly-elected Tea Party Governor Walker proposes to remove collective bargaining rights on workplace rules, safety, pensions, benefits, overtime, and, for salary, more than a cost of living adjustment would require a state referendum! This drastic curtailment of a voice for workers in their working conditions affects teachers, custodians, game wardens, university employees, librarians, health service workers, everyone except firefighters, police, and state troopers.

“Hogwash, Mr. President,” Robert Scheer’s critique of President Obama’s State of the Union talk last night, is worth reading. Both that and my own analysis of the State of the Spirit in the Winter 2011 issue of Tikkun, written over a month ago, have important elements of truth. My approach, if applied to Obama’s talk last night, would agree with many of Scheer’s points, yet take a more compassionate approach, balancing Scheer’s correct righteous indignation with a larger view of the crisis facing the human race.

Our NSP point of view would address what was even worse about the Obama talk: the reiteration of the dominant values of the capitalist order — such as that the real goal of society should be to enhance our capacities to compete with each other, that what we need is a return to economic nationalism in which the U.S. is number one, that education should be primarily in science and technology in order to make sure that we can beat the other countries of the world and retain our previous position as the most powerful force in the world, and that to do that we must build our military might and make our education focused on getting more power. As the writers of Tikkun magazine have repeatedly stressed, these ideas generate a world in which there is a struggle of all against all to “make it,” and a world of endless warfare in which our resources are aimed not at satisfying human needs but at achieving dominance.

No wonder, then, that ideas like “caring for each other” or “caring for the planet” or words like love, generosity, compassion, solidarity, and environmental sanity were absent from the Obama talk. Please read both pieces linked to below and compare them with the trivialities and distortions of most of the media. And then, please join our Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) at www.spiritualprogressives.org and help us bring our perspective into the public arena. And yes, please send these two articles to everyone on your email lists to help them go viral. And you have my permission to post my article on your websites or reproduce it in your web magazines or wherever else you wish to have it printed.

Hogwash, Mr. President

by Robert Scheer

What is the state of the union? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out Tuesday evening. I had expected Barack Obama to be his eloquent self, appealing to our better nature, but instead he was mealy-mouthed in avoiding the tough choices that a leader should delineate in a time of trouble. He embraced clean air and a faster Internet while ignoring the depth of our economic pain and the Wall Street scoundrels who were responsible – understandably so, since they so prominently populate the highest reaches of his administration. He had the effrontery to condemn “a parade of lobbyists” for rigging government after he appointed the top Washington representative of JPMorgan Chase to be his new chief of staff.

The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole.

Read the rest here.

The State of the Spirit, 2011

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

The bad news is that global warming will soon be irreversible and, by the end of the twenty-first century, large parts of the earth will be under water. China is emerging as the world’s greatest superpower while continuing to regiment its people and repress democratic civil liberties and human rights. Just as today the West spends its energies fighting an elusive “war on terror” generated by its fantasy that its survival depends on dominating other countries to gain their fossil fuels, in the future Western elites of wealth and power may seek to create medieval-style enclaves surrounded by private Blackwater-style armies to prevent ordinary citizens from getting at their dwindling supplies of food and other goods. Most people will be encouraged to blame each other and fight each other for the decreasing sustenance left to the majority of the planet’s residents.

The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of so many others in Arizona has elicited a number of policy suggestions, from gun control to private protection for elected officials, to banning incitement to violence on websites either directly or more subtly (e.g., Sarah Palin’s putting a bull’s-eye target on Giffords’ congressional district to indicate how important it would be to remove her from the Congress).

On the other hand, we hear endless pleas to recognize that the assassin was a lonely and disturbed person whose choice of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his favorite books reflects his own troubled soul, not his affinity to the “hatred of the Other” that has manifested in anti-immigrant movements that have spread from Arizona to many other states and in the United States and has taken the form of anti-Islam, discrimination against Latinos, and the more extreme right-wing groups that preach hatred toward Jews.

The problem with this debate is that the explanatory frame is too superficial and seeks to discredit rather than to analyze. I fell into this myself in the immediate aftermath of the murders and attempted assassination. I wrote an op-ed pointing to the right wing’s tendency to use violent language and demean liberals and progressives, and its historical tie to anti-Semitism and anti-feminism. Once I heard that the arrested assassin had a connection to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I reacted from my own childhood pain at realizing that most of my extended family had been murdered by the Nazis. So I pointed to the current violent language used by the right-wing radio hosts and some of the leaders and activists of the Tea Party, and how their discourse helps shape the consciousness of those in pain and provides them with a target.

But the problem really is much deeper, so I’m sorry I put forward an analysis that was so dominated by my own righteous indignation that it may have obscured a deeper analysis, and mistakenly insinuated that all Arizonans were responsible for the racism in the current policies toward immigrants and that all people on the Right embrace the hate rhetoric of some of their most extremely popular hate addicts like Glenn Beck, or the ignorance of history that led Sarah Palin to label as “blood libel” the criticisms directed at her. Some people even thought that in mentioning that Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish that I was somehow suggesting that I would care less if she were not — so I also apologize for being sloppy enough to allow that interpretation — very far from my intent, since I believe that all people are equally created in God’s image, and for that reason I’ve been an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians (though also a critic of Hamas’ violence against Israeli civilians).

We are beginning to put videos of some of the speeches from our conference in June up online. To get you started we’ve got some great speeches by Rep. Keith Ellison, Lester Brown, Sister Joan Chittister, Gary Dorrien, John Dear, Rev. Dr. James Forbes, and a Q&A with Rabbi Lerner, Peter Gabel, and Sister Joan Chittister. More to come after the new year . . .

Check out the videos here! Happy holidays and new year; stay warm.

Crossposted from Huffington Post.

While making a deal to protect billionaires from $145 billion in taxes that they might otherwise have used to solve pressing domestic problems or to create over 3 million jobs at $30,000/yr., some Democrats and their advisers pointed out that the progressives who dissented from the deal Obama had worked out with the Republican leadership — and which, despite the non-binding vote in the Democratic caucus on Thursday to oppose the deal, is likely to retain most of its giveaways to the rich — had really no place to go in 2012 but to blindly support Obama, so why take seriously all their huffing and puffing about Obama’s list of betrayals?

Sure, they said, Obama had led peace and justice-oriented liberal and progressive movement people to believe he would end rather than escalate middle east wars, punish rather than ignore those who had lied us into the Iraq war and those who had ordered or carried out torture, end discrimination against gays in the military and elsewhere, secure rather than undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights, fight for rather than duck serious changes in immigration and in environmental protection, and insist on at least a public option in health care and lowered prices for pharmaceuticals. But, hey — those people who paid attention to these details were only a small minority, and they would rally around Obama no matter what, giving him no incentive to listen to them. After all, Obama was just being “realistic” about the limitations of his power.

The Maccabees by Wojciech Stattler (1800-1875)

Christmas and Chanukah share a spiritual message: that it is possible to bring light and hope in a world of darkness, oppression and despair. But whereas Christmas focuses on the birth of a single individual whose life and mission was itself supposed to bring liberation, Chanukah is about a national liberation struggle involving an entire people who seek to remake the world through struggle with an oppressive political and social order: the Greek conquerors (who ruled Judea from the time of Alexander in 325 B.C.E.) and the Hellenistic culture that they sought to impose.

The holiday celebrated by lighting candles for eight nights (the first night is tonight) recalls the victory of the guerrilla struggle led by the Maccabees against the Syrian branch of the Greek empire, and the subsequent rededication (Chanukah in Hebrew) of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 B.C.E. However, there was a more difficult struggle that took place (and in some dimensions still rages) within the Jewish people between those who hoped for a triumph of a spiritual vision of the world embedded (as it turned out, quite imperfectly) in the Maccabees and a cynical realism that had become the common sense of the merchants and priests who dominated the more cosmopolitan arena of Jerusalem.

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!

… 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?

A tribute to John Lennon, in the wake of these turbulent political times

I hope you like this little web short tribute from the BBC to one of my favorite musicians — John Lennon, z’l (“z’l” stands for zichrono livracha, which is Hebrew for “may his or her memory be a blessing.”) The video is cute and uplifting. Have you heard Lennon’s last few albums, when it was just him, or him and Yoko? They are really amazing.

2010 Elections

Some key words taken from Obama's inaugural address.

Get ready for a massive two-year indoctrination from mass media and the “realists” in both major political parties as they confidently proclaim that the Dems lost badly because Obama proved “too radical” for the American public. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a different perspective, please read our analysis of the election dynamic.

In the past few weeks the president took two more actions that support our analysis: (1) he refused the plea of Senator Reid and other congressional Democrats to establish a freeze on mortgage foreclosures pending an investigation of the illegal activities of many of the banks and companies involved in throwing people out of their homes and (2) the Obama administration is developing a bill that would allow the government to wiretap emails and other electronic communications, which would extend the Bush-era expansion of government spying. Click here to read more about the Obama administration and wiretapping. Also refer to this New York Times editorial, published on Monday, October 25, which comments on the shabby human rights record the Obama administration has developed. According to the editorialist, “It can be hard to distinguish between the Bush administration and the Obama administration when it comes to detainee policy.” This is not an administration that is too left or too radical or even too liberal.

AAIM Meeting

As I discussed in a previous post, I recently moved to Austin Texas and started sampling some of the local community events here. This past week I attended my second meeting of the Austin Area Interreligious Ministries (AAIM). The meeting was organized as a collection of small table discussion groups. The topics for the evening were the Cordoba Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero in NY City, and how to respond to the fear of Islam surfacing in our society.

First, some general observations about the people I talked to there. Many of them were not presently part of any religious church or organization. They attended this interfaith dialogue because they felt a longing for the warmth and sharing that took place at an event like this. Several people mentioned that they viewed participating in this type of respectful interfaith dialogue as a very meaningful spiritual practice for them.

Many people felt that the emotional controversy over the Islamic Cultural Center is starting to wane. Any news story has a natural lifetime for remaining on the front pages before starting to fade from the public interest. This story, however, seemed fade away faster than one would expect given the strong emotions surrounding it. Why might that be happening?

by John Dear

“Fourteen anti-war activists may have made history today in a Las Vegas courtroom when they turned a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America’s newfound taste for remote-controlled warfare.” That’s how one Las Vegas newspaper summed up our stunning day in court last Tuesday, when fourteen of us stood trial for walking on to Creech Air Force Base last year on April 9, 2009 to protest the U.S. drones.

We went in hoping for the best and prepared for the worst. As soon as we started, the judge announced that he would not allow any testimony on international law, the necessity defense or the drones, only what pertained to the charge of “criminal trespassing.”

With that, the prosecutors called forth a base commander and a local police chief to testify that we had entered the base, that they had given us warnings to leave, and that they arrested us. They testified that they remembered each one of us. Then they rested their case.

We called three expert witnesses, what the newspaper called “some of the biggest names in the modern anti-war movement:” Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and one of three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and Bill Quigley, legal director for the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights. We presumed they would not be allowed to speak.
All fourteen of us acted as our own lawyers, and were not allowed any legal assistance, so members of our group took turns questioning our witnesses, and trying not to draw the judge’s wrath. Lo and behold, the judge let them speak, and they spoke for hours.

Sarah Palin has been drawing attention to herself again lately, this time by calling herself a feminist. Although I think it’s usually best to ignore her, in this case, I have to respond. Writing a dissertation on Nazi propaganda, I discovered — to my utter surprise and horror — that there were women in the National Socialist party who by the standards of their day would have been considered feminist. Seeing Palin in the light of their history ushers us into a better understanding of this controversial figure.

My dissertation, was entitled “Motherhood for the Fatherland,” and it concerned propaganda about women and their place in society written by Nazis of many stripes. In my research, I unearthed Die deutsche Kämpferin — best translated as The German Woman Warrior — a magazine published by a group of Nazi women. These writers were conservative, racist, anti-Semitic, and had bought into the Social Darwinist understanding prevalent among the Nazis, but they disagreed with their bosses about women. They believed that women like themselves should have a piece of the Aryan pie. According to the articles in this publication, the Nordic “race” had a tradition of equality between the sexes, something this group wanted to re-establish as the basis of Nazi society. Without women’s contribution to the fatherland, these female militants believed that the German people wouldn’t flourish.

Here’s our official Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) report, followed by ideas for attendees and those who wished they could have been there about how to do pursue the ideas and work. If you would like to buy recordings of the conference or parts of it, please go to this page at ConferenceRecording.com.

Rev. Ama Zenya and Rabbi David Schneyer at the conference

The NSP/Tikkun conference was a terrific success.

500 people gathered at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation in Washington, D.C. and heard some of the most amazing speakers address the question of what is the nature of the political and spiritual crisis that we are facing in the world today, and what to do about it.

NSP co-chair (and Catholic Benedictine Sister) Joan Chittister led off with a powerful appeal for compassion as a central theme and NSP chair Rabbi Michael Lerner explained how the Global Marshall Plan and the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment were ways of giving substance to the central theme of the conference: Creating the Caring Society–Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth.

Edwin Rutsch just sent me this link to a video he took of Michael Lerner at a recent event. If you want the one minute version of what the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is about — the elevator pitch — go to minute 3:15 below, and go to around 5:50 for Michael’s take on moving social energy towards hope and love. Later in the piece he outlines the ESRA (Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the constitution) and the Global Marshall Plan, the two key proposals of the NSP that are a focus of our DC conference this weekend.

Leadership Conference at Ella Baker Center – Michael Lerner – 3of5 from Edwin Rutsch on Vimeo.

Michael’s work — and this video is a good example — constantly challenges me to think about the differences between personal spiritual transformation and collective activism for creating a caring world. They are related but distinct, and exactly how they relate is not easy to understand.

When you ask “spiritual” or religious people how the world will change, the most common answer is some version of “one person at a time.”

We had much to celebrate at “Earth Day at 40.” But, of course, we had much to concern us as well. The good news is that whenever we touched on “global weirding,” water rights, or any number of other environmental issues, someone at the conference offered ideas or solutions. These ranged from the most massive — a new electric grid across the United States — to the smallest and most local — digging up your lawn and planting raised beds with vegetables.

And there was even better news — we all left the conference fired up to make a difference! I’m just sorry we didn’t use that new-found energy to walk the few blocks to the capitol and demonstrate for the “Clean Energy Jobs” bill, which the Wiscsonsin legislature didn’t pass the next day!!!!

Author Margaret Atwood, Activist Robert Kennedy, Jr., Wilderness Society President William Meadows, UW-Madison History Professor William Cronon, and Gaylord Nelson’s daughter Tia Nelson, who is the executive secretary of the Wisconsin Board of Commisioners of Public Lands, all spoke, giving rousing speeches and words of warning (or were those words of “warming,” as I originally typed?). Almost all of these talks will be online at the Nelson Institute website in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when. But until then, here are some highlights.

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.