Essays
Presidents, Revolution, and Organizing
By Wade Lee Hudson
Leadership is commonly defined as the ability to mobilize followers. This definition prevails throughout society — with grassroots activism, private businesses, foreign policy, and elsewhere. But President Franklin Roosevelt adopted a different perspective. He told activists, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”
Many activists want a revolutionary President, Bernie Sanders, though most Americans don’t support many of the policies he advocates. These revolutionaries envision President Sanders using the “bully pulpit” to change hearts and minds.
But if radicals move too quickly, without popular support, they can provoke a counter-revolutionary backlash that sets back the revolution indefinitely — as we Sixties radicals, with our arrogance, contributed to the emergence of Reaganism.
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Guaranteed Public Service Employment
By Wade Lee Hudson
Growing interest in a federally funded public-service job guarantee — as reflected in the Job Guarantee Manifesto — challenges the assumption that avoiding poverty is primarily an individual responsibility. In fact, a personal deficiency is not the main reason workers can’t find a living-wage job.
According to conventional wisdom, the cause for poverty is lack of skill, lack of discipline, or emotional instability. The solution therefore is assumed to be more education and training, better habits, or mental health treatment — so poor people can get a job, gain experience, and find jobs that pay a non-poverty wage.
Based on these assumptions, society only provides minor, stigmatizing relief, claims its apparent lack of compassion is justifiable tough love, and denies any responsibility to prevent poverty. People say to the poor, Get your act together. Climb the ladder
If you focus only on the individual, there can be some logic to this argument. Any one individual may be able to do more to improve their situation. But if you look at society as a whole, the flaw in the argument is clear. There aren’t enough living-wage jobs for everyone. If one individual finds a living-wage job, countless others can’t get that job. It’s a game of musical chairs.
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The Democrats: Technocrats Rule
By Wade Lee Hudson
The Democratic Presidential candidates agree. What matters most is Congress and the President; ordinary people merely vote and get others to vote. The government is primary; the people are secondary. The focus is on public policy: How can the government fix a problem?
At their debates, the Democratic candidates have contrasted their technocratic solutions. Their fine-point distinctions bore most Americans.
What’s missing is a positive, inspiring vision for the nation as a whole. What kind of community do we seek? What kind of people do we want to be? How do we want to treat each other?
Donald Trump has exposed many of the worst aspects of American culture. This open wound provides an opportunity to highlight, by way of contrast, the best aspects of American culture. Doing so can deepen America’s affirmation of these values.
The Democratic candidates for President could help with this project.
Read MorePoliticians, Movements, and Democracy
By Wade Lee Hudson
These days Democratic politicians often talk about building “movements,” but they rarely talk about how they want to help build those movements. Most of them only talk about gaining supporters for their campaigns and then mobilizing those supporters from time to time, as did Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. But to a considerable degree, Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, a member of “the Squad,” is an exception.
During a recent Pod Save America podcast, “Our lawless, wall-less president," at the 42:10 mark, Pressley reported:
I want to be in coalition…. Evicting this President...is all about movement building. It’s about organizing and mobilizing.… These times demand unprecedented activism and unprecedented legislating. And that’s not work we do alone…. When our democracy is working again on behalf of the American people [we will need] pressure on the outside that activists and agitators continue to exert….
The way I’ve been getting at the issue of housing, which is my number-one constituent concern, is that I’ve been convening, since well before I was in office or elected, the Equity Agenda roundtable discussion where we engage the community. They’re not a traditional town hall. We have breakout sessions. It’s a two-way dialog. I’ve always maintained that those closest to the pain should be closest to the power, driving and informing the policy making. So I take my cue from the community…. I’m cooperatively governing….
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After posting Religion, Spirituality, and the 2020 Election, which includes praise for Senator Cory Booker, I watched “The Family,” a five-part Netflix documentary about The Family — the authoritarian, evangelical organization that owns luxurious residences in D.C. where elected officials are invited to live communally at bargain rents and convenes the National Prayer Breakfast, which has been addressed by every U.S. President since Dwight Eisenhower. After viewing that film, I discovered that Booker participates in a Bible study group led by Senator James Inhofe, a leader in The Family.
Given these discoveries, later today at a gathering for his Presidential campaign, I hope to ask Booker: How do you evaluate Senator’s Inhofe’s theology?…
Read MoreRestructuring Democracy
By Wade Lee Hudson
A powerful tyranny of the majority might sustain itself over time, but pluralistic democracy requires perpetual reform. No constitution, set of institutions, legislation, or electoral victory can rigidly translate popular views into public policy while at the same time protecting the rule of law and guaranteeing individual rights. Preserving and improving pluralistic democracy requires steadily dissolving selfish power and updating outmoded institutions.
Established political actors tend to isolate themselves from their constituents. They act in their own self-interest and the self-interest of wealthy benefactors. Political institutions are inherently based on power imbalances. Certain individuals play roles that others do not, which gives them greater power. Bureaucracies emerge. Experts and elites rule. Institutions become captured by powerful interests. Constitutions, with their focus on elections, limit how people can have a voice in the shaping of public policy. This dynamic calls for popular action not limited to elections.
These realities lead some uncompromising populists to argue that democracy is not possible within any institutionalized system. They say democracy is possible only when the disenfranchised rise up, transgress the system, bring down established forms, and exercise power directly, if only temporarily….
Read MoreOld Brain, New Brain, Cross-Partisan Dialog
By Penn Garvin, Lois Passi, Wade Lee Hudson
Penn Garvin, an activist and organizer living in rural PA recently wrote the following:
How to Listen:
(1) Put aside your own beliefs and enter into new territory as an anthropologist
(2) Watch your reactions to what you hear – when do you get angry, defensive, scared, etc. – try to understand how you are being triggered
(3) Try to listen for what is the anger, fear, etc. underneath what the other person is saying – don't just listen to the ideas, policies, “what we should do” that they are saying
(4) Validate with the other person anything that you can – don't be fake because people sense that – but are there things being said that make sense to you even if you don't agree and maybe there are things being said that you agree with in part
(5) Don't try to work anything out or agree on anything at first – just be able to feed back to the person accurately what they have said to you so that you both know that they have been understood.
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Lois Passi, a Unitarian Universalist living in PA who works with her local United Way to end poverty, recently included in one of her sermons the following:
•Old and New Brain:
The old brain’s job is to detect threats to survival, and to respond to those threats either by fighting the enemy, fleeing from the enemy, or if neither of those is possible, hunkering down and enduring (fight, flight or freeze responses)….
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Religion, Spirituality, and the 2020 Election
By Wade Lee Hudson
Several Democratic candidates and some pundits have injected promising spiritual commentary into the 2020 presidential primary campaign. Some have even gone beyond discussion of public policy to address how ordinary Americans conduct their daily lives. Trump’s example has certainly opened the door for this conversation. However, to the best of my knowledge, none of those candidates and pundits have thus far affirmed the need for an explicit, intentional commitment to mutual support for self-improvement.
The most popular Google search term during the second round of debates was “Marianne Williamson.” This surge of interest in the New Age author was prompted by her statement:
This is part of the dark underbelly of American society: the racism, the bigotry and the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight. If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.
We’ve never dealt with a figure like this in American history before. This man, our president, is not just a politician; he’s a phenomenon. And an insider political game will not be able to defeat it.… The only thing that will defeat him is if we have a phenomenon of equal force, and that phenomenon is a moral uprising of the American people.
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By Wade Lee Hudson
In a New Yorker essay, “Who Belongs in Prison?”, Adam Gopnik comments on several recent books that address key criminal justice issues, including scapegoating and the desire for revenge. Those concerns apply throughout society.
Locked In by John Pfaff argues that prosecutors have been given freedom to imprison whomever they wish for as long as they like without going to trial…. Gopnik reports that Charged by Emily Bazelon "puts flesh and faces to Pfaff’s statistical and largely abstract proposition." …Revenge is an issue Gopnik examines in some detail.
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Backed by the Aspen Institute, David Brooks launched Weave: The Social Fabric Project to nurture what he considers to be a growing social movement. In his New York Times column, “A Nation of Weavers,” Brooks argues that this grassroots movement addresses “our lack of healthy connection to each other, our inability to see the full dignity of each other, and the resulting culture of fear, distrust, tribalism, shaming and strife.” He believes this movement will “usher in a social transformation by reweaving the fabric of reciprocity and trust.” Through these Weavers, he says, “renewal is building, relationship by relationship, community by community. It will spread and spread as the sparks fly upward.”
Brooks moves in the right direction, but stops short. He aims to go below the surface, but neglects root causes. He wants to address the “whole person,” but fragments the individual.
Brooks rightly argues that “America’s social fabric is being ripped to shreds.” And he’s right to lament the recent emergence of “hyperindividualism” and affirm “radical mutuality” -- that is, the belief “we are all completely equal, regardless of where society ranks us,” which leads us to “love across boundaries, listen patiently, see deeply and make someone feel known.”
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