The Disappearing Of The Religious Left As A Symptom Of A Left That Has Failed

Something came up.  Just when you figure you know how bad things can get, you find out it can get worse.  But, whatever.

In listening to more of Walter Brueggemann, being struck with how really radical his Bible based political thinking is, I wondered why in my decades and decades of reading radical literature and magazines, I wasn't familiar with him.  I did a little experiment this morning of plugging his name into the search engines of various leftish magazines I have subscribed to and read, the Progressive, In These Times, The Nation....  and found that other than one quotation from him in The Nation, those searches came up empty.  Considering the frequency with which other names, such as Christopher Hitchens come up in the same kind of searches, considering that, unlike so many of the big names and frequently found lefties active during the same period, Brueggemann is more radical and more enduring in his radicalism, his absence and their presence is an indictment of their commitment to real radical change.  And not only him but a range of truly radical Christian thinkers who I have to conclude are black balled by the anti-religious owners and managers of those magazines and sources.
As I've noted any number of times, the "left" for most of the period after the martyrdom of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. has been secular, if not actively anti-religious.  You can consider the past half-century as an experiment run on that model of leftism and the results are decisively disastrous for the left.  We have been in political exile for about a decade longer than Moses had the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness.  The record of Exodus and the other books shows they were learning something while they were wandering, apparently our leaders don't intend for us to learn anything from our experience of exile because they're still pushing the same failed lines and ideologies and con jobs that have so notably failed, miserably, with little to no sign of success likely in our lifetimes.

It is time for a new leadership of the left, it's time for new journalistic venues of the left.  A leadership and journalism that isn't wedded to failed ideologies and ideologues of the past, one that isn't so obviously stuck on itself and its presumed superiority.   I don't see any sign that the old ones work, I don't see much evidence that they ever did.  It was the religious left that won the victories of the past, or at least a left that wasn't allergic to religion.  I don't see any evidence that the secular left will ever get us anywhere.  It's better to dump it, now. They are the pharaonic establishment we've got to free ourselves from.

One of the pieces of hate mail I got over my postings on Brueggemann note his accent.  They called it a "bible belt" accent, it sounds distinctly mid-western to me.  They don't address what he said, personally, I doubt they listened to more than a few minutes of him, they don't go into any substance. I don't doubt there are people with north-eastern accents who might be saying the same things, but I do know there are lots of people in the north-east, alleged leftists, liberals, for whom the accent something is said in makes all the difference.  Just to highlight my point about what snobs so many on the pseudo-left are.   The real left, the real leadership of the left, won't be so stuck up in that kind of stuff.