What Really Has Powered Liberal Change In America What Has Disempowered It

One of the most important things I've learned in the last twenty years has been how truly hard it is to change peoples' minds for the better.  How hard it is to overcome self-interest - a fancy word for selfishness - the inertia of comfort, self-satisfaction, habit, laziness, etc.  to get people to even save their own lives.   Contented snobbery and self-image and fashion are probably as important, especially among the credentialed and affluent.

Part of that was through watching two of my siblings drink themselves to death while otherwise not mentally ill, both of them atheists hostile to religion.

Part of it was watching my country go from the depravity of the illegitimate president, Bush II to the moderate correction of that in Obama and then, through the media appeal to racists, primarily, but also through other weaknesses, misogyny in no small part, to the utter depravity of the illegitimate regime of Trump.  A large part of it was in watching the elite media, the New York Times as good an example as any, normalize Trump and Republican-fascism, even normalizing what brought him to the presidency by a conspiracy to use the media by billionaires, domestic and foreign.  

And a big part of it was by being a close-up witness to the idiocy on the supposed left, the secular left, that claimed to champion equality, democracy, the salvaging of the environment and protection of the basis of life but who couldn't even face the reality that a lot of this came about through its ideological holdings that were put into place by the Supreme Court during the Warren Period, prepared by some earlier and often ill suited heroes of liberals and peddled by lawyers with a financial and professional interest through their paid representation of media companies, the entertainment industry and who worked on behalf of neo-Nazis, fascists, Klansmen, etc.  The pious holdings of 1950s and 1960s liberalism helped pave the way for what came later, the successful use of freely spread poison appealing to the worst in us which has successfully thwarted the other, stated intentions of the secular left but whose loss through the campaign their theories of libertarian free speech and free press is clearly a secondary matter to them.  That most of that came from fairly affluent to truly affluent, white liberals, most of them males,  is certainly relevant to how and why they have been willing to allow corporate fascists a chance to destroy any progress made in the agenda of equality for those who are oppressed,  self-government by an adequately and honestly informed public and not even the environment on which even their own rich white, most often male lives depend on.  

----------------------------------

I have come to the conclusion that it takes a hell of a lot to change even individuals for the better, it takes a choice to believe in what will be effective in changing ourselves, not to mention society and a country.  I have come to see that education and science and reason alone won't do that.   The belief they will is a foundational folly of current liberalism.  I have come to see that even having adequate information available to a country won't do it.  Having a well-informed, well-educated, competent formation can only get you a more competent, more capable gangster such as William Barr, such as Trump's more competent or merely wily staffers.   

Without the right kind of moral foundation, firmly held, you just get more ruthless gangster governance such as we have under Trump, foisted on us by the clean-handed, well educated elite of Ivy League law schools and their equivalents using Constitutional casuistry which their fellows in the elite media will sell, no matter how depraved the results are.  

----------------------------------

Hans Kung's book I'm posting excerpts from,  Why I Am Still A Christian, is not primarily a book about saving egalitarian democracy, freedom, and all the rest of what I'm talking about, including whether or not we destroy ourselves by destroying the biosphere for the profit of billionaires.  It is a book of why someone should make the choice for Christianity - though he is more than generous in regard to other religions in that regard, few contemporary writers are more generous in that regard than Kung has been.  

But I do think there is much in it that does, in fact, provide the moral foundation on which egalitarian democracy, a sustainable life can rest on.  And that could begin in what it provides individuals if they make that choice.  Taking up where I left off yesterday:

It is only now, and with the utmost caution, that I introduced the idea that has been misused by so many in order to enslave humanity and to deceive with false consolation:  the cross, or, rather, the One crucified, enables us to cope even with the negative element.  Who can deny that human existence - under whatever social and economic system, and even after all reforms and revolutions - is and remains an existence shot through with pain, anxiety, guilt, suffering, sickness, and death and is in this sense a thwarted and unsatisfactory thing?   But this frustrated existence of ours acquires an indisputable meaning in the light of the resurrection of Jesus.  For no suffering in the world can dismiss the offer of meaning - it is no more than an offer - presented in the suffering and death of the One who was raised to life.  For the person who trusts in God, even the negative, even the greatest danger, the utmost loneliness, futility, nullity, guilt and emptiness are encompassed by a God who identifies himself with humanity, even if we do not perceive this at the time.  We are not under any illusions here:  there is no way of ignoring the negative things.  What we are given is the ability to endure without self-pity, a way through, a future to which our own live and suffering leads.  This does not mean seeking out the negative, but enduring it;  not merely enduring it, but fighting against it. 

I will stop here and say that this passage reminds me, first and foremost of James Cone's last great sermon, The Cross And The Lynching Tree and the part that the Black Churches have played in the resistance to exactly what in the American system what has to be fought.  It is remarkable that both of these great Christian theologians begin this theme confessing the abuse of the cross and Jesus.  And the rest of what Kung said in this book also parallels Cone's observations on how that use of it is wrong and how the exact opposite is the true meaning of it. And, most significantly for my commentary on it, it's productivity in terms of American politics and the politics of egalitarian democracy and, I am convinced, the wider results that are obtainable only through government of, by and for a People convinced of the moral foundations found in such religion.

In the Spirit of the One Crucified, a struggle against all the negative aspects of the condition of human life and their causes is possible at a very much deeper level by both individuals and society.  That is:

- a struggle to ensure respect for human dignity against all animosity toward humanity - and even to the point of love for one's enemies;

- a struggle for freedom against all oppression - and even to the point of selfless service; 

- a struggle for justice against all injustice and even to the the point of voluntarily surrendering one's rights;

- a struggle against all selfishness - and even to the point of giving up things we own;

- a struggle for peace against all strife - and even to the point of infinite reconciliation. 

Why, then am I committed to the essential Christian values?  Here is a third answer, which gives a last clarification:  I know what I can rely on, what I can hold on to, because I believe in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is alive today, who is the Spirit of God himself, who is the Holy Spirit.  This living Spirit enables me and countless others to be truly human:  not only to act in a truly human way, but also to suffer;  not only live, but also to die - because in everything, both positive and negative, in all happiness and unhappiness, we are sustained by God and can sense our fellow human beings.  And in this sense we as Christians represent not just any kind of humanism but a truly radical humanism:  a humanism that goes to the roots, since it is able to embody not merely the true, the good and the beautiful, whatever is human and humane, but also the untrue, the bad, and the ugly., whatever is all-too-human and even inhuman.  These things too it is able, suffering and struggling to embrace positively. 

This list includes exactly those things which self-satisfied, content, lazy liberals as much as conservatives are willing to sacrifice equality, decency, democracy, even the environment for.  

In the case of liberals nothing has been more of a temptation than the assertion of depravities misidentified as "rights" such as an asserted right to lie, a right to lie for self-profit, a right to lie to harness racism, misogyny for profit and self-satisfaction, etc.  The fetish of "rights" even when those are clearly evils misidentified as rights, is strong enough that the ACLU has championed the "right" of Nazis to try to reproduce the rule of the Nazis here, of Stalinists to, more ineffectively, try to reproduce Stalinism here, of the "rights" of American terrorists and murderers to promote their depravity, of corporations to lie and destroy the environment and the rights of workers to a decent life and decent working condition.   That such "liberals" end up championing the rights of fascists and enemies of liberalism, witnessed for more than half a century of ever worsening conditions, lead me to conclude that their devotion to the traditional American liberal agenda is less than sincere.  

Witnessing the secular left of the past fifty years of ever worsening result of secularism under their theories of rights has left me to be entirely unimpressed with the results of secularism and the secularization of the left.  I am unimpressed with the devotion of secular humanism to the values they claim to hold onto with the weak and ineffective library paste of preference and the kind of contentedness that is so characteristic of passive, lazy, satisfied people.   And a lot of them were hardly what they claimed to be.  A lot of them were atheists who wanted a cover story that was more acceptable to people who had no stake in what they really wanted, the trust-fund millionaire who bought out the original Humanists, Corliss Lamont primarily wanted to promote the atheism he wrote about in his doctoral dissertation, his devotion to atheism led to him supporting the Hitler equivalent of Stalin probably longer than almost any other communist on North America - a few of those still exist.   I think promoting his own, cherished, claim to intellectual distinction was his primary motivation in that.  I don't think it sold very well, though it was much promoted in lefty circles.  His devotion to Stalinism provides material to meditate on Kung's point about the ultimate failure of revolutions and even reforms.

In the meantime I am far more impressed with the accomplishments of the American religious left, a short list of some of them are contained in James Cone's sermon.  They provided the real power behind the last great period of American liberalism, during the Johnson administration.  Nothing in the meantime, provided by "enlightened self-interest" and scientistic materialism has had that record of success.  Secular leftism is and has been a near total failure and I think that is because secularism can fuel self interest, it can't effectively provide the power to do what we need to do.  I think that possibility of success in the religious left, such as The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr embodied, constitutes actual evidence of the truth of their beliefs.

As James Cone said:

We should not turn away from the Cross because people use it for evil.  The Cross is the most empowering symbol of God's loving solidarity with the least of these, the unwanted in society who suffer daily from the great injustices.