Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Forgive me for introducing a religious note into the very secular politics of the Democratic Party, but I’m still recovering from the dramatic, almost unbelievable reversal for Bernie Sanders and the democratic Revolution many of us were hoping for, happening over a week but it seemed more like 72 hours, didn’t it? Somewhere between the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020.
I remember briefing the Our Revolution county chair from Howard County, MD, who had been out of the country, and telling him that Bernie was ahead in polls in Texas, California, Virginia and North Carolina. Well, we know what happened. In Virginia, for example, the swing was 30 points or more in the matter of 7-10 days, probably in a much shorter time span. Unless there was a grand swindle behind the scenes, and I’m not saying there was, these turnabouts just about demolishes any faith in polls beyond the results from days they were conducted on. No predictive power beyond that.
Now, in this matter of Martin Luther’s temperment, and Bernie’s, it’s amazing how comparisons between a world shattering religious figure so close to Bernie in Temperament - Sanders actually being much gentler in his public statements and reactions, disappears from a nation rife with the Religious Right, mostly Protestants, and conservative Catholics, who were on the receiving end of Luther’s vitriol and uncompromising stances against the Pope and key doctrines in the 1517-1648 years. Sanders actually, despite the high temperature and feelings which I think are suppressed if not repressed, not a bad thing most of the time, but not always in politics, is the much milder figure in his handling of rivals. And if you had forgotten, there was a not insignificant dose of anti-Semiticism in Luther.
Below, you will find a range of my responses, three of which were published in the NY Times and in one diary here since March 3rd, and in a letter to locals in Western Maryland, religiously obsessed Western MD, where I toss out the Luther analogy. No matter how tough my letters now, the Times has been publishing them now that the great Sanders threat has passed.
Since then, in those reflections that come after one writes, I realize I have my own answer as to why the long ago angry Luther does not shed any grace on the angry Bernie, never surfaces to put Bernie in a fair context with some of the other majestic reformers in history: the great author Gary Wills gave us the answer in his 1987 book Reagan’s America, and in the magisterial final chapter, No. 41, “Original Sinlessness.”
In it, the American Dream and the material abundance of post World War II American society have revised the terms of the old dire Protestant view, Luther’s view too, of fallen man, fallen always human nature. Luther trashed the Catholic system of buying one’s way out of Hell or Purgatory with either $$$ or good works, said your salvation came only through faith in an inscrutable Divine Will which you couldn’t know, but who had already picked the saved… of course, with a rising capitalism and all the prominent winners in America, that would be the Rockefellers, Gates, Waltons and Bloombergs, preceded by the 17th and 18th century New England Merchants, where the Cabots and the Lowells didn’t talk with you, they talked to themselves and God only.
You get the drift...it was leading towards the power of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, and away from the hard nosed “just the facts, Mame” school of science and the secular Enlightenment. Can you see the beginnings of Trump in this cheerful hopefullness; in Will’s Reagan, you can, inventing a baseball game he didn’t see except for the box score for radio audiences...and painting for GM a picture of capitalism which that company would turn inside out under the recently deceased Jack Welch.
In my sense then, Reagan was the smiling, “invent what you need” prelude to Trump, Trump’s temperment, though, the opposite of Reagan’s and much closer to Luther’s filleting of opponents.
Yet, lest I forget, when capitalism starting going bad, really badly in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2007-2008...it was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Market.” Secular Neoliberal Austerity here serves the purpose of original sin, the poor of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy...the Piigs nations (revealing term, no?) are the spendthrift undeserving poor, contrasted with the thrifty, investing, saving North, especially the Germans, Dutch and…
It is remarkable in this 21st century to see the old Protestant terms of sin and salvation reappear in a secular era, but if you’ve been keeping up with the writings from the Right about Appalachia, poor white trash, you’ll see quote after quote of indigenous people condemning their own fellow citizens in those terms, which plays exactly into the hands of the Republican Right. I’ve heard this with my own ears many, many times, as if the Clinton punishment of the poor via his Welfare Reforms of 1996 never happened. In that sense, the region must reject the Green New Deal and the promise of a new climate CCC...federal generosity is tainted, Big Government the enemy. That’s a view held, with no exaggeration, with fanatical religious intensity — but grants from the “ARC” (oops, almost wrote Ark) — the Appalachian Regional Commission, are accepted with all the implications stripped away in a region that knows no serious dissenting ideas.
Sorry, that’s an old American studies major writing here.
And now for the letter I sent out today, to the husband of a minister who has been the best so far to reformers in Western, Maryland, standing alone often, but as you can tell from my criticisms, forced by tradition to depoliticize all the most interesting facts of life in poor Appalachian country.
Deprived of any serious public forum or dissenting tradition, the region has no alternative paths in mind to offer as an alternative to the old extractive capitalism of coal and timber “harvesting.” The leaders here beg for the new chance to make plastics out of natural gas processing — and to poison the willing subjects, citizens who above all else distrust “outsiders” and most of all, any ideas that might carry in their nefarious briefcases.
That’s why I react the way I do below to the death of the Green New Deal chances in our region, watching up close and personal as my “colleagues” killed it in our forums, the prelude to the Democratic establishment’s attacks on Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
I have used the article which was sent to me in the wake of one of the most turbulent and unprecedented upheavals in American political history, this past week, sent without any commentary on anything I have just written about; it’s the image above, of the editorial text which triggered this diary. And for you, it helps explain my reactions below:
_____ and all:
I read the article after some fiddling with its orientation.
I would like to see all the pastors of our region, how many is that - 2,000 ? - lead an Easter Procession, with brightly draped crosses walking behind a large, larger than we've ever seen - GREEN NEW DEAL banner.. I have the book " Drawdown" containing the plan, and think it would have been one of the important proposals that should have been presented to that Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal that Speaker Pelosi squashed, good Catholic Nancy Pelosi.
The
Drawdown has lots of good ideas but also lots of good competition: the original 14 page resolution from AOC and Senator Markey, and then in August of 2019, Bernie's 35 pager that has a proposal for more than $2 billion dollars for the Appalachian Regional Commission...far above the annual appropriations that Congress now allots. Here's the link - I had forgotten how long and detailed it is:
https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/
I say this not to be smart aleckey, but in lamentation, that good Christian word for Lent, because climate and the Green New Deal seem to have fallen out of the national discussion in the Democratic Primary, out of the reporters vocabulary, but not out of Senator Sanders angry demeanor. I'm not sure I think it is very courageous at this point in time to talk around the great choice of Biden vs Sanders under a vague soothing title of Climate Care, avoiding the price tag entirely and how much sacrifice - and maybe payoff there will be under a World War II type mobilization. Sorry that scares people and ministers.
And I regret to say but will clearly, and looking every one of you in the eye: I have not forgotten the fate of the Green New Deal dished out, both furtively and directly in the proceedings of the Western Maryland Green New Deal Coalition. The memories came flashing back with the reaction of the Democratic Establishment towards Sanders in the remarkable party attempt to quash him over the past 72 hours. Flashbacks.
Personally, I'll never forget the treatment that the Green New Deal hopes received inside our coaltion and will take the anger over that treatment with me to the grave, which may not be far away. No apologies and no regrets over the way I feel.
I'm including some of my recent comments on the events of the day which I manged to get in the New York Times, not to take up your time and space but to directly take on everything that this article you sent out avoids. All I left out is my clear historical sense for the religiously inclined, consistent over everything I've ever read about the great Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther: he was an angry, vitriolic man, of no compromise in taking on the Catholic Church, scatological and worse in his similes, analogies and parables heaped up against the demon in Rome (forgive me Nancy.) How come I, a non-church goer, are the only one that thinks of this in all the calumny heaped upon angry, red faced Bernie? They don't teach history any more, do they? Into the trash bin of history. Do I really live next to a college, in a college town ?
"Upper middle class people like yourself Jennifer, do have a hard time understanding why anyone in the US could be unhappy much less angry. After all, if we all just worked harder, had better characters, went to church and prayed everyday we all could be at least middle class, even better, like you. After all, class does not exist, and Norman Vincent Peale had it right: just keep the attitude positive, like President Obama, and his Attorney General. They were so positive and upbeat that they didn't put, for example, Angelo Mozilla in Jail over there at Countrywide Morgage, despite me reading in your newspaper from a well known woman financial reporter who went where...who quoted Angelo as saying...roughly, pretty closely: "boy the quality of the loans we're making has sure deteriorated," as if it was happening via the tooth fairy, not his lack of oversight... You get the drift here: class and limitations for the American Dream do not exist, history is static and doesn't pile up horrendous flotsam like the beaches at Sandy Hook, revert to new Gilded Ages and Roaring Twenties (the 1990's, thanks to Bill, Bob, Larry and Alan: "and so say all of us, down with Brooksley Born." You have no idea, no idea how bad it is out here, as Jim Cramer was screaming at a former Goldman Sachs player now so happy at CNN... You have no idea of what the bottom 60% think. We'd be suspicious of a smiling, low key son of the upper middle class, like Buttigieg. No sweat on his brow: ever."
And here is my comment, also within the past 48 hours to Charles Blow's candid column asking the tough questions, posing the choices the article you sent out Tony, does not: Charles Blow is a black, African American columnist at the Times: here' the link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/opinion/2020-elections.html
The actual title was: "Reform, Restoration or Revolution?"
"Not an ecological thought here, Mr. Blow, nor of vast income inequality. Both have cost me dearly in my life of almost seven decades. I cite facts from UN conservative scientists who in October of 2018 said exactly what the current Democratic Centrists want to avoid, an "unprecedented" change in the way the economy operates, in "scope and speed" is to stop climate chaos. If I were to vote my direct economic self-interest I would be an Elizabeth Warren Supporter, for her $200 monthly increase in SS, which would be spent on auto repairs since I drive a 20 year old car.. I would spend every penny of that on what I need but cannot now buy...so I am part of deficit demand in the economy. But I support Bernie Sanders because he puts the Green New Deal first, the most sweeping change ever proposed to the Congress. In Bernie's 35 page version as opposed to the 14 page official resolution there is $2 billion or more for the Appalachian Regional Commission, way, way above what Congress usually appropriates. You never mention the Green New Deal, the UN report or the fact that some poor whites are to the left of a corporate leaning conservative Black Congressional leadership. Too bad too few of that leadership had the courage of Rep. Elijah Cummings, who did support the GND. Today, MLK would be considered just as radical as Sanders - by the black leadership. ... and Sanders is his heir, not Joe Biden. I think the stance of the black leadership is just tragic."
the title was: "Elizabeth Warren was the wrong kind of Radical." By Timothy Shenk.
“Thanks Mr. Shenk. I read your work at Dissent and also subscribe to Jacobin. I think this is about right in content, tone and emphasis. Bernie might do well to pander a bit to we retirees: I could use Elizabeth's 200 per month increase in Social Security and spend it all into the economy for necessities, like repairs for a 20 year old auto. Can't afford an electric car. And no fast trains to ride near me, might as well hop a freight like Woodie. But on the rest of the program, including Bernie's 35 page Green New Deal proposal, and housing: it is the fulfillment of FDR's Second Bill of Rights, plus the closest we've come to meeting the UN Scientists' appeals for a climate program of the scope and urgency to meet the reality of the problem. Elizabeth's is too small out of the gate. Maybe Bernie settles there but that's not where to start or to bargain from. It only goes down in the American system. Unless a new crisis is around the corner, and it may be. It is affordable, Bernie's Green New Deal, as L. Randall Wray has shown at the Levy Institute in May of 2019, but not easily, will require the sacrifice and then the payoffs of the World War II funding methods and programs - with more local participation. And planning, I must add. Can't do it without broad based planning input and various plan alternatives. Where's the AFL-CIO on this...nothing to say on that Tim? Many unions are with Bernie, but the leadership gives me the old Meanies.”
And last my own writing the early morning before the calamitous Super Tuesday for the Nation, and for Sanders:
Sorry to take up all your time.
Best to you all
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD
PS I thought this debate between Cornel West, a Sanders advocate and Rep. Bobby Rush from Chicago is very instructive...but left me in despair and disagreement with the stance of conservative black leadership who have left Sanders in the Cold. Rush, a former Black Panther, has...wait...wait...endorsed Michael Bloomberg here on Democracy Now. Rush sounds to be in life “all in” with entrepreneurial capitalism with special grants to the black community...in contrast, my contrast, to the universals in the Green New Deal:
And here is an article sent to me from a good source explaining, I think in clear terms why the black leadership has turned towards Biden and away from the deeply perceived risk of Sanders. Clear, but leaves no room for the sea change in economic events between Jesse Jackson and John Edwards and the Great Financial Crisis: www.thenation.com/…
The article is by Elie Mystal.