Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun proclaims one of the deepest and most challenging analyses of the election: that in the recent campaign and its aftermath, liberals have shown "contempt" for the religious and moral concerns of those who supported Bush. And they have failed to set forth authentic values of their own - including the "compassionate attitude toward The Other" that they want, but have not shown to "those people" who are on the other side.

November 8, 2004

Greetings!

One of the most frequent responses I've seen on the internet in the past few days has been variants of the following theme: Those who voted for Bush are either Stupid or Evil (authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic, wishing to impose their religion on everyone, wishing to dominate the world, etc.)

In my view, this kind of thinking is deeply troubling--and is a major part of the reason why many Americans can't hear any of the good things that liberals and progressives have to say. Not everyone is an intellectual genius, but most Americans know when they are being condescended to, treated with contempt, facing arrogance and anger.

In my previous article, Democrats Needed and Need a Spiritual/Religious Left I tried to present to you why I believe that there really is a spiritual crisis in American society, and why the knee-jerk antagonism of the Left to religious and spiritual concerns allows the Right to become the major articulator of the pain that people feel living in a society dominated by consumerism, materialism, selfishness, narcissism, and a utilitarian/instrumental way of looking at other human beings and at nature. I argued that this legitimate concern about the VALUES that dominate this society is rarely articulated in liberal/progressive public discourse--and until it is, the liberal and progressive program, no matter how rational, will not win majority support, because it seems to be so out of touch with the desires and needs of an important section of the public. I do not mean to suggest, as some readers misinterpreted, that therefore we should try to reach and change the hard-core of Christian fundamentalists. I am talking not about the 20-30% of the American population who have become firmly rooted in a politics that feels comfortable with authoritarian ideas, actually believes that gays and lesbians undermine family life, or would like to see abortion criminalized. I don't think it is likely that we are going to make a big impact on them. But, there are tens of millions of Americans who care about the spiritual quality of their lives, who hunger for a framework of meaning to their lives, and hear those issues being ridiculed or ignored on the Left and so respond the Right's politics of meaning. It is these people that can be addressed through the kind of progressive politics of meaning that we articulate in our Core Vision at www.Tikkun.org and that I've addressed in far greater detail in my book Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul. If you want to do one act that would help prepare us as a movement to build a progressive spiritual politics in the U.S., please get some friends together and create a study group around that book Spirit Matters--or create a local Tikkun Community and make that study group its first project!

But even if we create a spiritual/religious Left, we would still be ignored and disdained by the American majority--until we can overcome the legacy of distrust created by a liberal world which has been so contemptuous of the American public for such a long time.

The Kerry Campaign was the Height of Liberal Contemptuousness of the American Electorate

When I was a psychotherapist studying the psychodynamics of American society and why middle income Americans were moving to the Right, even when doing so conflicted with their economic interests, I found that the people we were studying, people who had previously supported liberal candidates, were experiencing the impact of the ethos of selfishness in their lives and wanted a spiritual discourse that could address that. But when I tried to explain that to the Labor Movement, Women's movement, Liberal Democrats, etc. they all said: Nonsense. It was far more common, when explaining the upsurge of the Right, to say, "people have been manipulated by the media." Yet the people I was encountering were not manipulated at all--they knew that they didn't agree with parts of what the Right stood for, but still preferred the Right to the arrogant tones of the Left. In particular, they were offended by the covert and sometimes overt message of the liberals that anyone who voted for Reagan must be either stupid or racist or homophobic or sexist. They felt misunderstood and felt the liberals were so far out of touch with their life experience that it confirmed them in thinking that they had more of a home on the Right!

That feeling of being condescended to, or thought of as stupid, became all the more intense in this election. And the reason? Because in fact liberals and progressives showed massive contempt for the American public in the reasons why they backed Kerry. (I don't mean to suggest that there were no good reasons to like Kerry--only that the main reasoning that people selected Kerry had to do with their desire to "trick" the American public).

The vast majority of liberals and progressives had the choice of who to select to run for President. They could have selected a Kucinich or Dean, or they could have found and drafted another candidate. They could have selected a candidate who actually reflected their own worldview. But instead they didn't--they selected someone who had voted for the war and still maintained that the war was the right thing to do, only that Bush had not run it correctly.

Polls indicated that over 68% of Democrats thought the war was fundamentally wrong. Yet they selected a candidate who didn't hold that position. Why?

The reason they selected Kerry, they quite openly proclaimed, is that they imagined that "the other," those Americans who were not smart enough or good enough to share our moral opposition to the war in Iraq, would vote for Kerry because he could be presented as a tough military man with a strong background in fighting the war in Vietnam. So they made a convention totally dedicated to showing how much their candidate reflected the very militarism that they themselves abhorred--on the grounds that this would win over to the Democrats those people who supported the war.

Privately, they told themselves and each other the following: Kerry is really not for this war. Once he is elected he will, we hope, feel less pressure to be opportunistic, and then the real John Kerry, the one who testified against the war in Vietnam once he came home from that war, will re-emerge and save us from this war.

In short, what liberals were saying was: "This guy is an opportunist, and that's why we are for him. Once elected, he will flip-flop away from his stated positions. He won't be a militarist, as he tries to present himself now; he won't be 100% behind Ariel Sharon's policy of building the Wall through the West Bank and incorporating that land into Israel; he won't really be trying to send US forces to kill every living terrorist around the world as he proclaims now during the campaign. He's just saying all this stuff to fool the American majority, but once in office, he'll (we pray and fervently hope) flip-flop and do the opposite of what he is saying now, because if he really would stick with what he is saying it would be terrible."

Please understand the contempt for the American public conveyed in this. Liberals were saying: we can trick these others into voting for someone who we ourselves don't believe stands for what he says he stands for. And the response of the Republicans was very effective: "This guy is a flip-flopper and you don't ever know where he really stands, and our proof is that his own supporters actually think there is a good chance he will flip-flop once in office. Our side has the integrity of really meaning what it is saying, but the liberals don't have that integrity."

So why did liberals follow this path? Because they deeply deeply deeply believe that if they were to ever present their own highest vision of a good world and a good society, the American public would reject it and then they'd be out of power. So they have to lie to the American public, based on the assumption that they are too stupid or too evil (racist, sexist, homophobic, militarist, or authoritarian) to ever respond to a really visionary progressive perspective.

And in the short run, they might be right that they wouldn't win with a more visionary perspective, because for so long the American public has heard only mush from them that it will take some time to convince them of a different vision. The Right was in this situation in the 1960s, and yet it chose a different path. Instead of having a group like the Democratic Leadership Council to pull their party further and further to the center, the Right said: "we will stick with our ideological position, make it clearer and more easy to understand, but in some ways make it more intellectually coherent and more clearly based on some key principles, and we will be prepared to lose elections but will use those to educate the public to our perspective." And within 16 years it worked. But the liberals have never had the backbone to do that, to articulate and stick with their own most visionary perspective--and that lack of backbone is precisely why so many Americans don't respect liberals. And then, when they hear liberals and progressives saying that articulating the most visionary perspective is "unrealistic" because after all the vast majority of Americans will never never be able to respond to that vision, they hear the following: you Americans are too stupid or evil to ever respond to our vision of The Good, so in order to win you over we have to hide from you (and even from ourselves) our own highest vision of what a good society would be like, and instead offer you only those ideas we think will appeal to you even though those ideas don't appeal to us.

And that is what I mean when I say that liberals and progressives reflect contempt for the American people. The liberal and progressive camp is so sure that Americans will never respond to our vision that we never give them a chance to do so--instead we feed them what we think that they want to hear, and imagine that we can get away with that. But they see that that is what we are doing, and that quite reasonably makes them feel that we have little respect for them.

Then, add on to that the contempt for religion that gets so frequently expressed (watch Bill Maher's t.v. show), and funny as it is, you get a sense of how frequently there are put-down references to anyone who is a believer in God, and this is just a mirror of what happens in most other corners of the liberal world--though not all, yes I know there are exceptions and some people who have been laboring in the fields of a spiritual or religious left for some time, but they are largely marginalized in the mainstream of the Left. Yet so very many people in liberal or progressive movements feel that they have to keep their spirituality to themselves, lest they be ridiculed or otherwise made uncomfortable by their colleagues in liberal and progressive social change movements.

Compassion is the key. We have to develop compassion for the American public if we are to ever hope that we can successfully encourage them to develop a compassionate attitude toward others.

And now a word of self-criticism. In making my points here, I have not been adequately compassionate toward many in the liberal and progressive world. After all, the anger that they feel toward religious or spiritual people is at least in part based on their own experience growing up in religious communities that lacked empathy or compassion for others. And some of their anger at people who voted for Bush may be based on righteous indignation at the terrible pain being inflicted by the US on people around the world. I want to acknowledge that and say that for the sake of making my perspective clearer, I underplayed that aspect of the situation, and as a result this piece may lack the compassionate attitude it is encouraging toward others. Compassion for ourselves, for each other, and for those with whom we disagree--this is the path of tikkun, the path of healing and transformation that is the central message of The Tikkun Community. Join us!

With many blessings,

Rabbi Michael Lerner
Tikkun