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  • Overcoming Trump-ismA New Strategy for Progressives
  • Rabbi Michael Lerner

We are deeply concerned about the path our country is going to take under Donald Trump’s leadership. The racist, sexist, and xenophobic signals given during the 2016 campaign led to an escalation of acts of public hate against Latinos, Muslims, and Jews. Much of what liberal and progressive social change movements have worked for these past decades is about to be substantially reversed and dismantled. We cannot expect that militant demonstrations or protests by themselves are going to help much until we understand more deeply why a larger majority of Americans have not been willing to give liberals and progressives the kind of electoral victories necessary to actually implement the Left’s policies and programs.

We have a strategy, one part of which is to split the Trump forces, challenging the policies of the truly dyed-in-the-wool racists, sexists, homophobes and Islamophobes, while responding with empathy, caring, and respect to those who are not. Many of these latter have been in deep pain not only because of economic insecurity, but also because they’ve felt disrespected, first by the Democratic Party which raised their hopes for a very different world but then capitulated to the elites of wealth and power (remember the Obama of “yes we can”?), and then dissed by a Left that sees them as haters or stupid when many of them are not. Trump offered them the opportunity to express their anger and rage at the societal selfishness and materialism that surrounds them—and for many, not having the love, caring, respect, economic security, and meaningful work they need. Their pain at witnessing family breakdown, and disrespect toward the national and religious institutions that they’ve turned to for a sense of security and community, found expression in the Trump rhetoric, even though many who voted for him deplored his own personal distortions. The Left must become a love army, first for each other, then also for those with whom we disagree.

For thirty years Tikkun magazine has been trying to alert the liberal and progressive world to the deep psychological and spiritual crisis that leads many people to the Right, whose economic and political interests are better served by the Left. Instead, we’ve been told that it’s more realistic to fight for narrow “achievable” goals than to address the psychodynamics of American society and develop a vision of the world we seek. But as much of what was achieved in that supposedly more pragmatic way gets dismantled, it’s time for the large array of social change movements to rethink this, and address the psychological and spiritual crisis in people’s lives that has finally led them to move far away from what the Left has pieced together.

Many leftists, stuck in a narrow materialist view of human beings, have believed that if we could just offer more economic programs and political rights to Americans, they would satisfy and win the allegiance of the American people. They were wrong.

Despite having the best political and economic program by far, Bernie Sanders’ message did not prevail. Bernie recognized the pain in people’s lives, yet attributed it mostly to economic insecurity, not recognizing the spiritual and psychological needs that are systematically thwarted by the internalization of capitalist values and the ethos of the competitive marketplace. So he was unable to help people understand the connection between the pain in their lives and how our social system and its ideology, drummed into our heads in schools, through mass media, and through our daily experience in the capitalist workplaces and marketplaces, make us unwilling accomplices to the pain many people have been feeling for several decades.

We at Tikkun have mostly backed the economic and political rights programs of the Left, while simultaneously insisting that when the Left speaks to people with a condescending tone, creates a culture of suspicion toward men and whites, and projects an intense religiophobia and contempt for a large swath of the American public, it ensures that it will never have the political power to implement a progressive agenda. It needs to radically reconstitute itself.

Yes, it...

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