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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Systmic/Essay
Reflections on Elizabeth Anderson
By Wade Lee Hudson
NOTE: Following is the text used in my January 12, 2020 “Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog” PowerPoint presentation at the Humanists and Non-Theists committee of the San Francisco Unitarian church.
The article that had the biggest impact on me last year was “The Philosopher Redefining Equality” in The New Yorker. The subtitle reads: “Elizabeth Anderson thinks we’ve misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society.” That profile of Anderson begins: [play audio]
She ended up studying political and moral philosophy at Harvard under John Rawls and teaching at the University of Michigan, where she stayed, despite being heavily recruited by other universities.
In 1999 the esteemed journal Ethics published her path-breaking, widely reprinted article "What is the Point of Equality?" She’s also written three books, including Value in Ethics and Economics, which argues that some goods like love and respect should not be sold on the market or otherwise treated as commodities, and The Imperative of Integration, which examines how racial integration can lead to a more robust democracy. Her many podcast interviews include a great one with Vox.com founder Ezra Klein.
Last year Anderson received the no-strings-attached $625,000 MacArthur “Genius” award. Included in their announcement was this [play video].
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Racial Healing: Rhonda Magee
By Wade Lee Hudson
Racism continues to inflict enormous suffering. Rhonda V. Magee, an African-American law professor, reports, “I often notice a lingering feeling that I might be in danger—that I could, at any time, be discounted, rejected, disrespected, injured, or even killed for no reason other than my perceived ‘blackness.’” This reality provokes heated resistance from oppressed people, while relatively advantaged people experience guilt and denial (a majority of white people claim to be color-blind). Tensions are high. Discussing these issues is often difficult.
This dynamic applies to all people of color, but I focus on black-white relations, which are most problematic in the United States. When white people fail to fully understand black anger, they often respond with calm, paternalistic advice. When black people find this paternalism offensive, they sometimes end their relationship with the offender. When white people sense what’s happening, they often “shut up and listen” as a way to increase their understanding. Many white people feel they should censor themselves when they talk with black people about race-related issues. As a result of these and other factors, many white people end up unsure about whether, when, and how to speak about racism and race relations. Friendships fade. Unity dissolves. The potential for joint action is undermined.
Within this context, Magee’s work is helpful. Magee teaches meditation to her law students and conducts racial-healing workshops based on her ColorInsight methodology. Her wide-ranging, challenging, and insightful magnum opus, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, includes many compelling personal narratives and useful self-help exercises, such as “Mindful Speaking and Listening Practice.” She argues that mindfulness practice can help us acknowledge bias and choose how we respond to conflict and division.
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Face-to-face Democracy
By Wade Lee Hudson
A fully democratic society relies on empowerment — self-empowerment and collective empowerment — and respect — self-respect, respect for others, respect for everyone’s essential equal value, respect for individual rights and liberty, and respect for everyone’s right to make ends meet and fully participate in society without being subjected to discrimination or oppression based on race, class, gender, or some other arbitrary characteristic.
Practicing how to be democratic — how to relate to others as equals with compassion — nurtures a more democratic society — a society with self-confident, assertive, respectful, empowered members. A democratic society, in turn, nurtures grassroots movements that promote ever more respect and empowerment — an upward, virtuous circle.
At the same time, however, self-centeredness and hyper-competition promote a lack of self-confidence and passivity among the general population, and, among activists, fragmentation and asymmetrical polarization — a downward, vicious circle that sucks ever more people into its vortex and may eventually hit bottom, unless we, the people, mobilize massive, grassroots movements to transform our nation into a compassionate community.
Book clubs, church groups, and activist committees often cultivate democratic equality. These groups are democracy laboratories that cultivate respect and empowerment.
Face-to-face, horizontal, self-regulating, self-perpetuating, peer-to-peer open-ended “democracy circles” explicitly committed to advancing “face-to-face democracy” could build on these examples. Organizations could incorporate such circles into their current work. Existing groups could supplement their activities with such open-ended dialog. And new circles could emerge independently, perhaps with two individuals inviting one or two others to form a circle, which would increase its numbers organically.
Many methods could be used to structure this face-to-face democracy. Systemopedia associates are engaged in brainstorming and evaluating some such options. Following is one possibility.
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Systemic/Essays
Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog
By Wade Lee Hudson
Equality is the goal; dialog, the method. These two forms of democracy are interwoven. When we engage in democratic dialog and form democratic relationships, we democratize society and help establish freedom from oppression and the freedom to the means required for all to live a good life. We build popular movements with supermajority support that sustain meaningful change. Our means are consistent with our end. We achieve our goal, in part, as we pursue it. Democratic equality involves democratic dialog, and democratic dialog nurtures democratic equality. Face-to-face, democratic communities active year-round counter disinformation, help save the planet, and help steadily transform our world — one person, family, community, workplace, institution, nation at a time.
Individuals are not identical; we differ in many ways. Nevertheless, individuals are essentially equal. Democracy affirms this equality. Democrats practice what they preach.
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Colleagues have called Elizabeth S. Anderson’s 50-page 1999 tour de force “What is the Point of Equality?” “path breaking” and The New Yorker described her as “The Philosopher Redefining Equality.”
Anderson wants to end oppression by creating communities “in which people stand in relations of equality” to one another. Her thinking is rooted in numerous grassroots egalitarian movements, such as the civil rights, womens’, and disability rights movements.
Unfortunately, however, most grassroots political movements today don’t clearly reflect those social values.
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About/Wade Lee Hudson
My Story: Peer-to-Peer Community (Part One)
By Wade Lee Hudson
My first organizing was on sandlot softball fields. Boys would show up and two “captains” took turns selecting teammates, assigned positions, and set the batting order. Two of the better players, which usually included me, served as captain, but anyone could do it, and many often did. There were no arguments about this decision. Each captain was dispensable. The players weren’t dependent on a leader. Little did I realize that this simple, horizontal, self-regulating, self-perpetuating, peer-to-peer structure would become a community organizing model for the rest of my life — though, alas, I followed it imperfectly.
My second project was the high school chess club, which I initiated. After advertising, some fifteen students joined and met weekly. At the first meeting, we randomly determined each student’s initial position on a vertical ladder. Players moved up and down the ladder as they won or lost. Another peer-to-peer structure, this one within a larger, democratic hierarchy: the school administration.
During high school, as is common, I participated in a clique. Mine was a group of five boys who read and discussed iconoclastic literature such as H.L. Mencken and Bertrand Russell and frequently gathered at night to smoke pipes and play poker. That informal structure also nurtured a rewarding sense of peer-to-peer community. As Bob Dylan sings, “I wish, I wish, I wish in vain / That we could sit simply in that room again.”
When I entered the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, I joined a student co-op as a boarder.
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Building a “Full-Stack Society” with “New Power”
By Wade Lee Hudson
Process is important. So is product. Advocates for democracy who focus on mobilizing popular power can forget that the tyranny of the majority is a real threat. New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World -- and How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms acknowledges this reality, and offers a solution. …
They make a strong case for dynamics that are “open, participatory, and peer driven.” Yet they also write: ”As we see with ISIS and the growing hordes of white supremacists,... the tools that bring us closer together can also drive us further apart.” Heimans and Timms argue we can avoid this danger by creating “a world in which all major social and economic institutions are designed so that [all] people can more meaningfully shape every aspect of their lives.”
According to their vision:
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An important recent Ezra Klein Show podcast is the interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which traces the origins of the term “identity politics.” In the podcast, Taylor argues that the weakening of social movements in the 1980s contributed to a distortion of the term’s original meaning.
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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….
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A review
How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning
George Lakey
Melville House Publishing, 2018, 221 pages
George Lakey and How We Win
By Wade Lee Hudson
George Lakey understands internalized oppression. If anyone would support mutual support for self-improvement, you’d think he would. But his new book, How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning, primarily relies on top-down training.
Though the book presents many valuable recommendations concerning tactical nonviolence, as well as a compelling overview of Lakey’s rich, long history as an activist and nonviolence trainer, it does not propose intentional, open-ended, peer-to-peer support as a way to unlearn negative conditioning and become more fully human.
How We Win includes some material about personal issues. It affirms the need to “avoid competition” between activist groups and to “establish productive relationships” between activists. …
Read MoreSupportive, joy-filled communities that provide safety help us rise above our negative emotions. Families, extended families, close friendships, neighborhoods, churches, synagogues, mosques, sanghas, community-based organizations, and workplaces nurture growth. We can use fear and anger to stop injustice, spread positive emotions, and help each other become better human beings.
Intentional commitments strengthen self-improvement efforts. Wedding vows and mission statements illustrate the value of placing commitments in writing. These affirmations remind people of their commitment, help them hold each other accountable, and spread their values to others. By adopting clear, written policies, organizations can encourage their members to support each other with their self-improvement…
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Wade Lee Hudson
Donald Trump is another Joe McCarthy. So says Alan Wolfe in The Politics of Immaturity: America in an Age of Immaturity. Wolfe’s passionate, eloquent affirmation of “mature liberalism” is not uncritical of post-war liberals who challenged McCarthyism. But Wolfe urges us to remember “what they got right.”
Trump loved McCarthy’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was “notoriously malicious” and practised “the dark arts of American politics.” They became close friends and Cohn greatly influenced Trump. When James Comey and Jeff Sessions frustrated Trump, he famously declared, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” His link to Cohn was more than personal. They shared the same worldview: demagoguery. Trumpism parallels McCarthyism .
Concerning many of the liberals who criticized McCarthyism and the radical right that emerged from it, Wolfe acknowledges:
Their rightful hostility toward the Soviet Union translated itself into a rigid anti-communism that became, for some, an ideology unto itself. Seeing fascism in unexpected places, they exaggerated the dangers posed by both the student movements and the black protest of the 1960s. Equality for women was the furthest thing from their minds…. Indeed, most of them, with the exception of Richard Wright and Reinhold Niebuhr, seemed to have not all that much interest in the question of race at all…. There may have been an antidemocratic tinge….
Nevertheless, Wolfe insists
for all their flaws, these thinkers stand redeemed today because they brought both the classical and the Enlightenment understandings of politics back to life and thereby offered a starting point for trying to understand why Americans, who profess to love democracy and freedom, elected as their president in 2016 a man and a party that seemed to respect neither….
One could dismiss or even attack their positions so long as American politics showed some signs of stability. Alas, such complacency, given the right-wing demagoguery shaking both the world and this country, is no longer affordable…. That is why, despite their occasional blind spots, it makes sense to return to what these intellectuals had to say…. If Trump's accession to the presidency does not cause intense introspection, nothing can. It is, furthermore, not an explanation of one rogue election we need. It is a discussion of what kind of nation we have become.
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By Wade Lee Hudson
Hillary Clinton might be President today if she’d read articles Katherine J. Cramer wrote prior to 2016. A Wisconsin native, Cramer has studied political attitudes in rural Wisconsin since 2007. She’s informally visited with residents, engaged in extensive conversations, and listened closely. What she’s learned is revealing. Now that the University of Chicago Press has published her book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Democrats have no excuse if they don’t pay attention to her discoveries in the 2020 elections.
Cramer’s book echoes Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide our Politics (see “Irrational Populism”), which calls for “an overarching theory beyond the idea that all elites and outsiders are bad and the people are good.” In a similar vein, Cramer argues that ordinary people should understand their circumstances “as the product of broad social, economic, and political forces,” rather than the “fault of guilty and less deserving social groups.” She says, “The purpose of this book is...to illuminate how we blame each other.”
[You’re invited to help develop an overarching theory that explains those broad forces by participating in the Transform the System Dialog.]
According to Cramer, her term “rural consciousness”
signals an identification with rural people and rural places and denotes a multifaceted resentment against cities…. I heard them complaining that government and public employees are the product of anti-rural forces and should obviously be scaled back as much as possible…. It informed their frequently negative perceptions of public employees.
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Irrational Populism
By Wade Lee Hudson
Intuitions provide insight, but “gut feelings” can lead to irrational dogmatism if they aren’t subjected to scientific logic and deliberative thinking. Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide our Politics concludes that the rising global populist threat calls for “an overarching theory beyond the idea that all elites and outsiders are bad and the people are good.” TransformTheSystem.org offers such a theory. Its aim is to counter scapegoating, demonizing, and counter-productive, misplaced anger.
Our primary problem is not the elite. Our primary problem is not how our economy and government are structured. Those problems are symptoms. Our primary problem is the System---our domination-based social system that weaves together all of our major institutions, our culture, and ourselves as individuals, who reinforce the System with selfish daily actions.
Enchanted America, by J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, documents how “Intuitionists” are gaining ground against “Rationalists.” They write:
The Intuitionist/Rationalist split is not like other political divisions in the United States. Intuitionism poses an threat to democracy. It is neither benign nor temperate. It bristles against open inquiry, is intolerant of opposition, and chafes at the pluralism and compromise modern democracy requires. It is prone to conspiracy theory, drawn to simple generalizations, and quick to vilify the other.
Intuitionists reflect an “absence of conscious purposeful thought [and] rely on their internal feelings.” They just “know” that some things are right. One form of Intuitionism is “magical thinking,” which contradicts ideas “that are validated by testing and observation.”
Rationalists, on the other hand, “utilize abstract theories, philosophical deductions, and observable facts.” They view problems “in a dispassionate manner, seeking pragmatic, technical solutions.”
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