Why we shouldn’t challenge Obama from the Left –and what we should do instead.

Anthony Mansueto

President and Senior Scholar, Seeking Wisdom

Michael Lerner recently published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in which he argues that the best way to “save” Barack Obama’s presidency is to mount a 2012 Democratic Primary challenge from the left, centered around a well defined “spiritual progressive” political agenda and led by either a major figure from the left wing of the Democratic Party or a high profile public intellectual or religious leader. This would be a grave error.

I share, to be sure, Rabbi Lerner’s frustration with the current political situation. Indeed, it enrages me. I absolutely hate the health care reform package, not because I believe it is globally bad public policy, but because the very real imperative to reduce health care expenditures as percentage of GDP was our one chance to also socialize the cost of health care, making the rich pay for essentially free care for everyone else. With the cost issues addressed, it will be almost impossible to expand free access to health care, probably for generations. I think that the stimulus was anemic, with too many tax cuts and not enough investment in infrastructure, and the financial system reform just a small step towards the kind of regulation we need in order to ensure that Capital flows serve the common good. While I think we have probably drawn down about as far as we can in Iraq given the political imbalances created by the ill conceived invasion, I think that our policy in Afghanistan is doomed to failure and that we would do better to create a network of save havens in the cities and leave the countryside to sort itself out. (Though I do not share the view that the Afghan war qualifies as one of the United States’ many imperial adventures. Not everything an empire does is imperialist.) And the extension of tax cuts for the top 2% of the population is tragic. While we undoubtedly need to wait until the economy begins to recover before we implement them, the only progressive solution to the public debt crisis is massively higher taxes not only on the “rich” but also on the broad upper middle classes.

And this does not even begin to address the thoroughgoing civilizational and structural transformation which alone can once again unleash the full development of human capacities.

I also have some serious concerns about the way President Obama understands his role as President. A complete analysis of the question will have to wait for another article. For now it is enough to say that having a trained organizer as President (something which, as someone who has also been initiated into this discipline, I welcomed) turns out to present some unforeseen problems. It is not enough for the President to craft a coalition for the most progressive legislation the current Congress can be realistically expected to pass. That is the job of the Majority Leader and the Majority Whip. The President is Head of State and Head of Government and must have his own well defined agenda, both in the sense of a clear vision of what the country stands for and in the sense of a coherent program which defines the political narrative. Obama has done a good job of redefining what it means to be an American globally but he has not helped Americans to redefine their own identity during this critical passage. And he has carefully avoided putting forward a well defined program, so that what is actually an outstandingly impressive series of legislative victories somehow fails to look like a win for him.

This said, challenging Obama from the left would be a serious mistake. Rabbi Lerner misunderstands both the current political situation and the task of those who profess to understand the trajectory of the human civilizational project.

Like much of the Left in the United States Rabbi Lerner seems to be convinced that there is, in effect, a latent, permanent social democratic majority in the United States which, because of the peculiarities of the electoral system, it has been difficult to organize and mobilize electorally. To his credit he nuances this analysis with a criticism of the secularism of much of the Left which, he acknowledges, has at once alienated a deeply religious people and made it impossible for the Left to connect with the very values which might incline the people towards a social democratic agenda.

This nuancing, however, does not compensate for the fact that Rabbi Lerner’s underlying analysis is fundamentally incorrect and is so on two very different counts. First, social democracy has never been the first step in a global structural or civilizational transformation. On the contrary, on the part of the working classes it represented a turn away from such global aims in favor of improved material circumstances within the context of a capitalist system which was never really questioned. Second, it was a largely victorious and successful project for the thirty years after the Second World War because it also met the needs of broad sectors of Capital for a prosperous base of consumers who could afford to buy the products of the then-leading consumer durables industries. This is not to say that social democracy, or even the modest social liberalism of the Democratic Party in the United States, did not accomplish anything good or even visionary. On the contrary it lifted millions –the vast majority, in fact, in the United States, Europe, and Japan-- out of poverty, made university education accessible, at least in principle, to all who want it, and invested in research and development which has opened up a whole new technological era. But it was never a first step in transcending the market order, much less the modern civilizational project of technopolitical divinization. And more importantly it was time bound, the product of a specific constellation of social forces at one of those moments in history when people across social classes reach through and a bit beyond their narrow self-interest to accomplish something extraordinary, without ever fully intending to or understanding why or how they did it.

That moment has passed. It passed thirty years ago. All around the planet the social democratic project –or what remains of it— is under attack, its achievements being dismantled as often by governments of the Left as by those of the Right. This is not because either Capital or the people have suddenly lost their moral compass. Social democracy, as we have suggested, was never primarily the product of moral compass. It is because of the conditions which produced social democracy no longer exist. The mass prosperity which social democracy created depended on industrial technologies which have threatened the very integrity of the ecosystem. That prosperity, together with the social safety nets social democracy created, have produced a demographic inversion which threatens our ability to support an aging population. The United States, Europe, and Japan no longer enjoy an enormous comparative advantage in high skill, high technology, high value added economic activity. As people have become more prosperous they have also become more privatized and the network of trade unions and community organizations on which Social Democratic and Social Christian parties depended for their base have disintegrated. Workers are more, rather than less likely to imagine they might become rich than they were 100 years ago, and thus less likely to challenge the structures on which concentrated wealth depends.

This means that the kind for reforms that Rabbi Lerner and other spiritual progressives, myself included, would like to see are simply not on the agenda and won’t be for some time. An electoral campaign centered around such a social democratic program would be no more grounded in reality than one advocating the abolition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (another aspect of reality which often enrages me!).

Our situation and our tasks today are very different than they were in 1932. Then capitalism was in crisis, but by no means in that final crisis which Marx had expected, which could be resolved only by a socialist transformation. Rather, capitalism had entered a phase of mass production which in turn required mass consumption. Social democracy met this need, enchaining the working classes and their political parties to discipline Capital to be more visionary than it would otherwise have been. Today, on the other hand, we face a civilizational crisis which cuts much deeper than just the underlying economic structure of the society. At base this is a crisis of the modern project which sought divinization by means of scientific and technological progress and the creation of collective political subjects (the modern democratic state, the Communist Party) which could make humanity once and for all the master of its own destiny. The ability of the planet to support human civilization and the ability of humanity to continue its civilizational project are themselves being called into question.

No organized political force of any size or scope on the planet currently has either the vision or the capacity to address this crisis. But there are political forces, including progressive elements in Capital, especially in the information and technology sectors, which understand at least elements of the crisis (climate change, demographic strain, the difficulty in centralizing resources for investment in research, development, infrastructure and education). And there are broad popular movements which, perhaps, understand the crisis more deeply, but lack the political capacity to govern at this time.

Under these circumstances, those who understand the current situation and the trajectory of the human civilizational project have two basic strategic options (however much these options might in turn be nuanced and varied in their implementation). They can adopt a stance of permanent, principled opposition to every government and every party which advances a program which falls short of their moral ideals, or they can collaborate constructively albeit critically with the progressive sectors of Capital and other progressive social forces to address the most exacerbated aspects of the crisis and prevent a total civilizational collapse, while working to build both a political-theological leadership organization and a network of popular organizations capable of carrying out the more profound civilizational transformation that we need.

It is not entirely fair to put Rabbi Lerner in the first camp. I know that he honestly believes that his strategy for saving the Obama presidency is just that and that he honestly wants President Obama to succeed. But the effect will be to reinforce the Left’s long history of permanently oppositional politics and to redirect energy away from constructive, critical engagement with the Obama administration, and the even more important tasks of cultivating leadership and organizing the people and channel them into a quixotic, unsuccessful primary challenge which will discredit those associated with it and harm the Democratic Party’s prospects in 2012.

We need, instead, to offer careful, thoughtful advice to the administration which takes seriously its actual base –the progressive sectors of Capital and not, primarily, labor, community organizations, or other organizations of the working classes-- as well as the enduring power of the Right. This power has a real basis –the growing weight of the extractive and especially the energy sector as global demand for energy and raw materials rises and demographic strains which have catalyzed, as they have so often in the past, a resurgence of pro-natalist, patriarchal ideologies. We need to help the Obama administration and the progressive sectors of Capital respond to the energy and demographic challenges in ways that conserve rather than undermining the integrity of the ecosystem and which create the conditions for full and free development of human capacities rather than restoring patriarchal structures which confine women to the tasks of childrearing and nurture. This is the only way to undercut the real social basis of the Right, whether in Tehran or Texas, and reverse the political tides which, over the course of the past thirty years, have swept away decades of civilizational progress and which now threaten the human civilizational project itself.

At the same time, we need to build a political-theological leadership organization which is capable of leading what will be a protracted, centuries long process of civilizational transformation. This means cultivating leaders with prophetic vision and spiritual depth, acute capacities for political theological analysis and outstanding skills as pastors, teachers, and organizers. And we need to do it without recreating the authoritarian nightmares or silly “follow the leader” games which characterized so many such efforts, whether on the Left or in religious movements, in the past. This leadership organization will have as its primary task defining a new civilizational ideal which conserves the authentic achievements of modernity --the value it placed on innerworldly civilizational progress and its commitment to cultivating rational autonomy and democratic participation—but which situates these achievements in the context of a broader commitment to cultivating spiritual excellence which engages and respects the achievements of all of humanity’s great spiritual traditions. But it must define this ideal in the trenches, reorganizing and rebuilding the institutions of civil society which carry out the actual work of spiritual development and civilizational progress.

It will be a long, hard road. We may face a protracted period of darkness. But then Dark Ages have often been moments of extraordinary innovation and creativity. And we know that, for the simple reason that Being is, darkness will not prevail forever. Let others mount their campaigns for Pure Truth. I am too busy working here in the shadowed trenches, forging the future, my hands wet with the clay which is somehow already Spirit.