I have been waiting for someone to provide validation for the irritation I experienced when watching the recent Democratic convention. My wait is over. A prominent Democrat has come forward to corroborate my suspicions about the con-job being carried out by the likes of John Kerry, John Edwards and the Clintons.
For a while, I thought I might be over-reacting, maybe becoming overly skeptical and peevish in my old age. Not so. (At least in this matter.) Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and a rabbi at Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco and a long-time advisor to Hillary Clinton, spilled the beans.
It is not easy to describe Lerner’s worldview succinctly, but I do not think he would object if someone were to say that he is attempting to meld the values of the 1960s counterculture with traditional religious beliefs. Lerner would have us believe that a commitment to the end of the national sovereignty, a more expansive welfare state and the non-judgmental values of the sexual revolution is the proper application to the modern world of the biblical values at the heart of Judaism and Christianity. A Tikkun bumper sticker might read: “Globalism, Egalitarianism and Doing Your Own Thing.”
Lerner saw the same thing that I saw at the recent Democratic convention. He knows that the Democrats are covering up who they are, selling themselves as middle-Americans with traditional values, as if the none of them played a part in the rise of the counterculture and the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Listening to the speakers at the Democratic Convention, one would think that no one ever marched under the Viet Cong flag, chanting “Ho-ho-Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”; that no one ever called our military “baby killers” and the police “pigs”; that there was no one at the teach-ins where the ideas of Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon were promoted as valid insights into the moral sickness endemic to a place called “Amerika.” We know that is not the case. Indeed, if you listened to the rhetoric at this year’s Democratic fundraisers where Susan Sarandon and Barbra Streisand were key players, venues where Democrats talked only to Democrats, you would think those were the proudest moments of a generation of Americans.
No one would deny that the left-wing protestors of the 1960s are now active in the Democratic Party. Where else would they be? They did not turn into Republicans, certainly not in large numbers. That is obvious. And yet, the Democratic Convention in July tried to sell the country on the notion that the key to John Kerry’s candidacy is his background as a “warrior” and “war hero.” That is what made him a man of character, a leader. I kept wondering, as I watched the goings-on in Boston, what the people who marched to San Francisco with flowers in their hair were thinking about this trashing of their anti-war identity. Were they willing to stomach all this in their determination to get rid of George Bush?
Michael Lerner gave me my answer: Not all of them. In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on July 31, he called the “rhetorical thrust of the convention” “overwhelmingly militaristic.” He sees the exaltation of Kerry’s war exploits as a failure “to give any serious respect to the majority of Democrats who have served their country not by fighting” but “by demonstrating against the war. Instead of educating the country also to honor the patriotism of dissenters, the conventioneers, in the name of ‘unity’ and ‘beating Bush’ are cheerleading the very militarism that most Democrats oppose.”
Precisely. And Lerner will have no part of the deal. He does not want the Democrats to act as if the counterculture never took place. He remains convinced that the protests of the 1960s brought about “great advances in consciousness in the past 60 years. Many Americans no longer give priority to material success, domination over others, or the need to keep American ‘No. 1.’ Their worldview derives less from the football field or from war games than from a growing religious and spiritual revival and new urgency about the global environmental crisis. These Americans, sometimes described as ‘cultural creatives,’ talk of a world of mutual interdependency and interconnectedness in which the egotistical nationalisms are transcended for a more ecological, more holistic vision.”
Lerner insists that it is this vision for the future that inspires most modern Democrats, who “realize that the rhetoric of American superiority, exceptionalism, and our-needs-above-the-needs-of-everyone-else-on-the-planet — a rhetoric repeated at the convention even by those thought to be most progressive in the Democratic Party — is precisely what undermines our capacity to envision a world of mutual interdependency.”
It is a revealing and pivotal moment. To achieve victory at the polls, Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary and Bill Clinton — who cut their ideological teeth in the 1960s anti-war movements — are willing to cover up who they are. (Or were. More on this shortly.) They want people like Michael Lerner to do the same. But Lerner is not willing to play along. He wants the Democrats to be honest about their beliefs, to be Democrats, because if “militarism and toughness are all that either party can offer the country as a vision for the future, and if the Democrats’ social program is carefully crafted to not offend fiscal conservatives, many voters may simply not be inspired to vote at all.”
Of course, this leaves open a question: Might it be that the Kerry, the Clintons and the other Democrats now championing traditional values, fiscal responsibility and a strong military have changed; that they no longer subscribe to the one-worldism, socialistic impulses and moral relativism that inspired them in their days as protestors? Maybe they are not disguising their true beliefs just to win the election. Maybe they no longer say the things Michael Lerner wants said because they no longer believe them.
I guess that could be. It could be that people like the Clintons were 1960s radicals for the same reason that they now profess to be mainstream: opportunism. (That is not an over-the-top charge. The 1960s radical Bill Clinton was pro-life when he ran for election in Arkansas. And flipped in an instant when he set his sights on the national stage.) If so, that could be a good thing. It would mark the defeat of the counterculture and the triumph of Reaganism. There is one thing that the Clintons are good at: they know where the votes are.
One thing should be clear: Americans deserve an explanation for what is behind this new image being pushed by the Democrats. Why are they wrapping themselves in the flag and traditional values these days, in spite of all the years they spent giving people like Michael Lerner the impression that they were on his side? Who is being conned? Him or us?
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
