Michael Lerner, a progressive rabbi, has written a book called The Left Hand of God that every person concerned about the sorry state of the Democrats and the left in the U.S. could benefit from reading.
As a deeply spiritual and extremely liberal intellectual, Lerner's words resonate very strongly for me. The Dems need to articulate a progressive spirituality that the average person can relate to. As Lerner reminds us, both Gandhi's and MLK's radical and effective politics were rooted in their spirituality.
"By its tone-deafness to the spiritual suffering of the American people, the Left continues to miss the fundamental crisis that demands a social transformation, and in so missing this reality, it clears the path for reactionary forces to enter the spiritual arena and manipulate that crisis in destructive and potentially fascistic directions."
Read the Alternet interview here: http://www.alternet.org/...
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Lerner's book is an appeal to progressives to reflect on why the Right has been able to garner votes from people who would clearly be better off materially if they supported progressive candidates. Rather than ridicule them (as many liberal intellectuals are wont to do), Lerner suggests that we consider issues of meaning and morality through a progressive lens.
"What I'm suggesting in this paragraph is that many of the millions of people who get attracted to the Religious Right are not motivated by excitement for their political program, but by the experience of community, caring for others, and its ability to recognize and address the deep distortions in life that are caused by a societal ethos of materialism and selfishness."
"The Left Hand of God means looking at the universe through the perception that love, kindness, generosity and caring for others are the central ontological realities of life, and that when they do not manifest in the world in which we live, the world is distorted and needs to be healed. The Right Hand of God, conversely, means looking at the universe through the perception that life is a struggle of all against all, and that the only path to security is through domination of others."
Lerner does more than spout lovely sounding platitudes. He suggests strategy. Consider his analysis of the Alito fiasco:
"First, we would have cut through the pretense that the issue was about discovering whether the candidate was fit to serve on the Supreme Court. Instead, we would have said from the start: We oppose any candidate who would seek to undermine gay rights, women's rights, the rights of African Americans, the rights of workers and the separation of church and state.
Since there was never any doubt that that is precisely what Bush was seeking to achieve in nominating Alito, we would have advocated that Democrats not take part in the charade and legitimate it in any way, so we would have called upon them to absent themselves totally from the Senate when the vote to confirm took place to give a clear message that they do not accept the packing of the judiciary with right-wing extremists as a legitimate move.
Instead of participating in that charade, they should have nominated a set of alternative justices, and held public hearings on their alternative justices, and in that process articulated a view of justice that was fundamentally different than that of the current justice system -- a view that talked about restorative justice, treating crimes as destructive of the social fabric of trust, and how to restore that social fabric. This would have been a great moment for Dems to present an alternative worldview. But you can't do that if you don't have one."
Read the interview here: http://www.alternet.org/...