Poor, Disenfranchised, Clergy to Launch New Movement For Moral Revival of America: Leaders to Announce Historic Wave of Direct Action, Non-Violent Civil Disobedience
Washington – On Monday, 50 years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others called for the original Poor People’s Campaign, organizers will announce a new moral movement to challenge the enmeshed evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and America’s distorted national morality.
The Monday launch of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival by co-chairs Rev. Dr. William Barber II, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and other leaders will include the unveiling of details around six weeks of direct action next spring at statehouses and the U.S. Capitol, including plans for one of the largest waves of civil disobedience in U.S. history.
Conservatism Fails to Act Responsibly
His critiques of right-wing elites land beautifully (admittedly, their intellectual and moral stagnation make such a task easier every day), but he goes further to reveal an equal or greater disdain for the “white underclass.”
As Williamson discusses the ugly world of poverty that he grew up in, he gets to a line that feels the most true and is thus the most insidious: “The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it.”
He intends this to skewer the chattering classes of liberals who are overflowing with sympathy for the abstract “poor” but squirm at the thought of sharing a school or subdivision with actual poor people.
Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin — that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors — is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message — that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer
.. These ideologues have been shocked to see their principles abandoned in favor of vulgar might-makes-right tribalism and you can find any number of well-written essays from this past year reckoning with this disappointment and cursing the alliance of fools, cowards, crazies, and racists that have come to dominate right-wing institutions.
.. If all conservatism has to offer is a stern message about personal responsibility and a repetition of something conservative-sounding you heard from that one black friend of yours, it’s no wonder nobody wants it. It’s simply not a political philosophy you can govern with, win votes with, or even communicate with.
.. If personal responsibility and tax cuts were the path to prosperity and virtue, then Kansas and Alabama ought to be shining exemplars of governance.
- .. The first way he’s wrong relates to common tropes about welfare: the more poor people you know, the more you realize how little they get from the government and how few of them actually get anything. The most shocking anecdotes get our attention – a cousin or a friend of a friend who is a lazy drug addict and gets a disability payment – but these examples are far from representative. You can only know that, though, if you are actually spending time with poor people.
- .. it actively discourages friendship with the poor and praises the sort of ignorance his statement is meant to lambast liberals for.
- our obsession with meritocracy. When we are constantly encouraging people who are born with or acquire the virtues necessary to live a stable life to shake the dust off their feet and abandon their dysfunctional friends, those left behind stagnate in ever-more-toxic dysfunction.
- Conservatism rejects the deterministic economics that denies people their agency, but the modern conservative movement has preached an atomizing freedom that eviscerates the structures and relationships that help people to exercise agency. This is why the eloquent ideas of politicians like Mike Lee or Ben Sasse ring hollow:
- The most prominent right-wing writers at various outlets .. are always suggesting the old wineskins of 20th-century conservatism, which is part of why their reformocon ideas have never taken off.
- .. conservatism needs to decide what it is we’re trying to conserve and rewrite everything else around that.
- Conserving the institutions that help people to flourish – churches and families most prominent among them – is more fundamental than “liberty” or “small government”.
- .. Williamson’s formulation is backwards: the more that one chooses to love and share in the pain of the poor, the more intimately you will want to know them and be friends with them.
Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This
But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.
.. Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.
.. From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.
.. The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, for example, the structure of government balanced lords and commoners. In ancient Rome, there was the patrician Senate for the wealthy, and the Tribune of the Plebeians for everyone else. We can think of these as class-warfare constitutions: Each class has a share in governing, and a check on the other. Those checks prevent oligarchy on the one hand and a tyranny founded on populist demagogy on the other.
.. Our founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of constitutional government.
And it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated such proposals during the summer of 1787. But they ultimately chose a framework for government that didn’t pit class against class.
.. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.
.. Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it.
.. Equality of property, he believed, was crucial for sustaining a republic. During the Constitutional Convention, South Carolinan Charles Pinckney said America had “a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country.” As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers.
.. Starting more than a century ago, amid the first Gilded Age, Americans confronted rising inequality, rapid industrial change, a communications and transportation revolution and the emergence of monopolies. Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.
On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”
Richard Rohr Meditation: Field Hospital on the Edge of the Battlefield
I can’t hate the person on welfare when I realize I’m on God’s welfare.
.. As compassion and sympathy flow out of us to any marginalized person for whatever reason, wounds are bandaged—both theirs and ours.
.. Thomas, the doubting apostle, wanted to figure things out in his head. He had done too much inner work, too much analyzing and explaining. He always needed more data before he could make a move. Then Jesus told Thomas he must put his finger inside the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side (John 20:27). Then and only then did Thomas begin to understand what faith is all about.