Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
I caught up with Bernie Sanders’ speech at George Washington University on Wednesday, June 12, 2019, caught up to it last night on You Tube. Here it is:
I liked it and shared my thoughts last night and this morning at a Green New Deal/Sunrise Group online session. Most of the comments on what I said, and the speech, were positive. This may be one of the most important political speeches of our time, linking our times, and troubles, to those of the Greatest Generation, of the Depression World War II era, not along military lines, although a national mobilization to fight climate chaos draws upon that in part; however, it would focus more heavily on what America did on the civilian side to win that monumental two front war against the infamous dictatorships of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
I spent the most time this morning answering a responder who had these criticisms of Senator Sanders’ speech, which are not new, and which he probably did not satisfactorily answer in that speech. The criticism was posed this way: “I wish he'd been more deliberate in his identification of systemic identity-based oppressions as well as the economic ones. He's got opportunities for significant growth there.”
Here is how I answered:
You raise an "old" problem for Bernie, right? This goes back to the campaign of 2016, "too white, too male, too Vermont-New England." Bernie did address some words to the problem, some policies for his camp, but not enough for some of the causes who have objected most vehemently in the past. I'm sensitive to it as a public speaker (on and off) and a writer, because it constantly presents the problem of the very fragmented nature of the progressive spectrum - "the audience" - the public. On good days we might call it the progressive "coalition" which I see as consisting of the following major camps/points of view...or if you prefer, "systemic identity-based oppressions": greens who stand for oppressed nature (and how) even if many of the institutional greens are not financially oppressed, are middle class and upper middle class - "elitists" in the eyes of the Right. The young are changing this makeup, and I'm sure a professor somewhere is working on the class, racial and gender make-up of the green youth movements. Also rural/urban/suburban distinctions.
Black Americans: some pushed their way onto the stage to dramatize Bernie's remoteness; a few prominent black intellectuals supported him; some of the prominent Black Lives Matter very decisively rejected the importance of economics, saying it was deeply ingrained racial bias that has led to mass incarceration and fear of “driving while black,” and is the source of the sanctioned killings the whole nation has witnessed. And where the legal system seems to have failed.
From personal experience, the feminist supporters of Hillary Clinton were dismissive of the Clinton crimes against working people, on trade, financial de-regulation, the rise of China and so on...very, very different world views than my own, which I will say place me in the old socialist-social democratic rationalist/Enlightenment camp, along with David Harvey, the late Michael Harrington, Christopher Lasch...Karl Polanyi... Robert Kuttner...I have read Nancy Fraser's work and like it...she is in the minority though, trying to build "intersectionality" between the economic left and some branches of feminism — and other causes. It's an academic term, intersectionality is, and I just don't know whether that word can tame the depths of passion I experience as I encounter the different camps on the left. My own passions included.
So what am I driving at? Each of the very distinct camps of the progressive left which make up the fighting edge of the Democratic Party, but don't by any means dominate it, not yet, the center is under pressure but still rules as Joe Biden's polling shows - I've left out the Hispanic-immigrant camp, the LGBTQ camp (I keep worrying I've fallen behind and left out a new Initial - and I have, here they are: LGBTQIA)...but here's the larger point: each of these major camps has a world view which comes up with a different diagnosis on what the major cause of the nation's problems are and therefore the remedies.
I saw, and still see the Green New Deal as creating the broadest possible categories of outreach, appeal, by offering two almost "universals,” problems which must be solved: saving the ecological "commons" which all of humanity is dependent upon, and Bernie's new Bill of Rights for the 21st century, rights which are mostly material ones, easily traced back to FDR's Second Bill of Rights, by intent, the ecological one since added...it is bound to leave many of the most passionate advocates of the contemporary camps disappointed...
One way to address this, for Blacks, Feminists, the LGBTQIA community, is to follow the curve of attempted legal justice in the course of American history: Equal Justice Under the Law...of course, the categories the law uses, and the court interpretations, shift over time, are affected by the broader political and economic currents...see the definition of "property"...and free labor contracts...usury anyone? (I left out the outrageous attempts to protect the fetus above all other considerations, boiling up now in some of the most conservative states in the country...)
I just caught a few moments of Chris Cumo interviewing Bill Maher on CNN the other night, and Maher’s warning of the perils of "political correctness" I think have considerable merit. If one adds up the codes of conduct emanating from the full spectrum of left-progressive causes, one has a list of what to eat, what to think, what to say, and, at times... what to imagine (turn that male gaze down to one’s shoes, please) that begins to resemble the worst Reformation Days of Calvin's Geneva. Well, not there yet in terms of formal punishments, but informally getting there in terms of “codes of conduct.” This is asking, I think, too much too fast of humanity, a course correction in every aspect of life...Centrist Democrats choke on the sweep of what is in the Green New Deal Resolution, which has two main focuses, and, a bit clumsily, tries to address the inclusiveness you are asking for.
Which is why I come back to the very broad, and doubtlessly unsatisfactory, to a portion of each camp at least, of the ideal, which we are far from yet achieving, of "equal treatment under the law."
I'll close by noting I haven't even gotten to that huge chasm, which most of the dialogue on the left never broaches, between the secular humanist world of our side of the spectrum and the religious Right, broadly defined, perhaps too broadly, to include fundamentalists, evangelicals and Catholic conservatives. This is still on my mind after watching the concluding season of Game of Thrones, and reading the critical reviews of that show, especially that of Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times -"Game of Thrones is an Epic for our Times." And that of conservative Ross Douthat's NY Times article which strongly suggest that humans cannot live with too much Enlightenment Rationality, still long for the magic and mystery of pagan times (!), and the supernatural powers offered by the West's oldest religious traditions. Think about that gap: we on the left watching the most radical political implications of the voice of Science on climate disruption, and the heavily religious Right backing Trump basking in his rejection of Science, and focusing the Right's morality not on life after birth, but before arrival in the "outer world" — in the material world of our societal institutions. After birth, it's as O'Toole so eloquently stated it: a Hobbesian universe of a war of all against all, and wolfish man, especially man against woman. Here it is: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/fintan-o-toole-game-of-thrones-is-an-epic-for-our-times-1.3835156 and here is the link to Douthat's column:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/opinion/game-of-thrones-finale.html
I hope to write more about Game of Thrones and the related question: just what time are we living in, what do we call our "age?" And why are epics carrying us back too frequently to some vague Middle Ages...wasn’t the Weimar Republic’s descent to barbarism, in a society famous for its educational system and scientists, a clearer, more relevant warning? Cabaret, anyone?
If there is a better answer than Daniel T. Rodger's Bancroft Prize winning "Age of Fracture," I haven't found it yet. But that is the diagnosis which appeared in 2011. Now we must come up with the remedies. My vote is still with Sanders, and I would like to see a Sanders-Warren ticket, an untenable proposition, of course, for some of the reasons stated by the objector I’m answering here, but until something more satisfactorily universal appears, I'm with Bernie's 21st Century Bill of Rights and, of course, the outlines of the Green New Deal as stated in the Resolution from Senator Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Best to you all in our hard to name “age...”
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD