Reverend William Barber of Raleigh, North Carolina, is one of the great moral forces of our age. He launched the Moral Mondays movement in his state, which brings citizens to the state capitol throughout the legislative session to voice their protests against injustice. Rev. Barber is leader of the state NAACP and a powerful national voice.
Please read his historical analysis of what he calls the Third Reconstruction, which he believes is emerging in response to the rise of the angry Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump.
He begins:
“On election night I felt a great sadness for America — not a Democratic or Republican sadness, but a sadness for the heart and soul of the nation. It is impossible to react to the election of Donald Trump with anything less than moral outrage. Trump is, as David Remnick wrote for The New Yorker, “vulgarity unbounded,” and his election has not only struck fear in the hearts of the vulnerable but also given rise to hundreds of documented cases of harassment and intimidation….
“When Obama broke through in North Carolina in 2008, we witnessed firsthand the whitelash that America is reeling from right now. Some folks are saying we’ll have to wait and see what a Trump administration decides to do. But we’ve already seen it in North Carolina. The blueprint for what it looks like to “take back America” in the 21st century was laid out in the extremist makeover of North Carolina’s government during the 2013 legislative session. What’s the policy agenda of Make America Great Again? I can tell you because we’ve seen it:
Give tax breaks to corporations and to the wealthy, attack public education, deny people access to health care, attack immigrants, attack the LGBTQ community in the name of “religious liberty,” strip environmental protections, and, finally, make it easier to get a gun than it is to vote….
“What have we learned?
“First, we must recognize the need for indigenously led, state-based, state-government focused, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor, and transformative movement building. There’s no shortcut around this. We must build a movement from the bottom up. We must build relationships at the state level because that’s where most of the extremism of the current-day deconstructionists are happening. They see the possibility of a Third Reconstruction, which is why they’re working so hard this time to strangle it in its cradle — and we must know that. We have to recognize that helicopter leadership by so-called national leaders will not sustain a moral movement. What you need are local movements. The nation never changes from Washington, D.C. down. History teaches that it changes from Selma up, from Birmingham up, from Greensboro up.
“Secondly, we need to use moral language, like the devotees of the First and Second Reconstructions. Moral language can re-frame and critique public policy regardless of who’s in power. A moral movement claims higher ground than merely a partisan debate, something that’s bigger than left versus right, conservative versus liberal. We have to begin to re-frame the conversation not to talk about left policies and right policies, but let’s talk about violence. And as people who run for office, are you on the side of violence?
“Why did we allow extremists to say “welfare” is a bad word when welfare is found in the Constitution? It’s right there: “promoting the general welfare.” Why do we still use language like “left” and “right” when it comes from the 17th Century, the French Revolution, when the Right wanted the Monarchy and the Left didn’t. Why do we allow them to put us in boxes? And why, for God’s sake, do we call people “Right” who we think are so wrong?
“Moral language gives you new metaphors. You can say, I’m against this policy not because it’s a conservative policy or a liberal policy, I’m against this policy because it’s constitutionally inconsistent, it’s morally indefensible, and it’s economically insane.
“And then we have to challenge the moral hypocrisy of the so-called Religious Right, which we should not even say because they are so wrong. They are engaging in a form of theological heresy. The greatest sin in the Bible is the sin of idolatry. The second greatest sin that has ever existed whenever people worshiped themselves was injustice toward other people. There are more than 2,000 scriptures in the Bible that deal with the issue of injustice toward women, the stranger, the poor, the sick, the hurting, and the unacceptable. You might have three about homosexuality, and not one of them trumps this scripture: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
“We can’t succumb to those who bought Christianity. Nor can we yield the moral high ground because we’re angry with them. Deep religious and moral values have been the backbone of every great progressive movement; prophetic imagination must come before we see political implementation. When the social gospel looked at children dying from child labor and people dying without labor rights and people in slums and poverty and not having a minimum wage and they asked, “What would Jesus do?”
“There would have been no labor movement without a social gospel underpinning. There would have been no abolition movement without William Lloyd Garrison and other people of deep faith. Without strong voices from the social gospel movement, there may have never been a New Deal. There would have been no Civil Rights Movement without the moral framework underneath the Civil Rights Movement. There would not have been a critique on poverty and unchecked capitalism, labor rights, healthcare, criminal justice reform, climate change, and raising the minimum wage, without a moral premise underneath it. Moral framing allows us to change the language.
“Finally, we must insist on connecting economic issues with our racial history. Too many people are too easily blaming the rise of Trump on Democrats forgetting the “white working class.” Yes, Trump appealed to real economic fears among working people. But he lost every income bracket below $48,000 and won every group above it, blowing the dog whistles of race to divide poor and working people. Any resistance to Trump that doesn’t address his divide-and-conquer tactics from Wisconsin to Ohio to North Carolina and Alabama cannot offer a real political alternative.
“We need a moral movement to revive the heart of American democracy and build a Third Reconstruction for our time. This work is not easy, and it will not be completed quickly. But we know what is required to move forward together.
“I’ve traveled to 22 states this year to train local leadership in moral fusion organizing and conduct Moral Revival services. This network of state-based moral coalitions will host a National Watch Night Service on December 31st, with the event in Washington, D.C., livestreamed to local gatherings across the nation. As formerly enslaved people were invited to enlist in a struggle for freedom on January 1st, 1863, we will invite all people of conscience to enlist in a Moral Revival Poor People’s Campaign throughout 2017 and 2018.
“We face some difficult days ahead, but don’t let anybody tell you America hasn’t seen worse. Our foremothers and fathers faced far greater odds with far fewer resources. It’s our time now. Arm in arm, we’re moving forward together, not one step back.”
Wonderful Thank you for posting this.
I crossposted it at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Rev-Barber-We-are-witnes-in-Best_Web_OpEds-America_Backlash_Freedom_Reconstructionist-161227-780.html#comment636542
He said: “On election night I felt a great sadness for America”–“not a Democratic or Republican sadness, but a sadness for the heart and soul of the nation.
I felt this way, too.
We need lots of moral people to take a stand in the next four years. In order to have any impact against the anti-democratic oppression of the 1% and corporations, we must show united numbers of people that resist, protest and litigate, if necessary. In order for the message to be received, we need a movement very similar to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Morality seems to be confused with religion by many, just as justice and the law is different from each other and not the same.
Thank you for this post, Diane. Have a great day. I admire you and send you good wishes.
So true. Many people that are pro-life are really pro-birth. Some don’t want to help the poor that can’t feed the child that came into the world. Likewise, these same religious people have no problem with the death penalty. This seems hypocritical to me. Much of the New Testament is about helping those less fortunate. Some say Jesus was the first socialist.
All the believers were together and had everything in common.
–Acts 2:44
All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.
–Acts 4:32
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
Good article Joel!
“Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.”
“My kingdom is not of this world.”
The eugenics supporting preacher featured in this post is in and of this world.
Bless Reverend Barber with the strengh to shine the light for those who have been misled by old and effective propaganda tactics.
I think we need to invest in a 24-7 security detail for this man. (If you know history, you know why.)
But he says, instead of calling policy left or right, say “I’m against this policy because it’s constitutionally inconsistent, it’s morally indefensible, and it’s economically insane.”
Music to my ears.
I agree. Recently I saw a story about his lawsuit against American Airlines and the comments were incredibly racist, vicious and scary. I can’t think of a living American I admire more than Rev. Barber.
But the real issue here is that the right is the side dominating the “moral language” and have engaged in the moral long-game for decades now. Basically, Rev. Barber is arguing for a left-wing version of what the right has done. Obviously, the current right’s version of morality and moral language are insane, inhumane, merge with religious fundamentalism, anti-intellectual, and reflect a harsh feudalism, but nonetheless, the architecture of what the right has done is what Rev. Barber is arguing for.
Ok. That’s fine.
However, our side cannot rely on a moral high-ground as our chief vector towards winning…..no, wrong word: “surviving” is better.
The morality and moral language the left should and has always relied upon for political and social victory was implicit in the labor movement. It was an outgrowth of it. The left without a labor movement is a left without an engine, rudder, or buoyancy. As it stands now, the left is devastated and absolute wreckage, in spite of HRC’s popular vote victory. The left is a wasteland precisely because of the death of labor. Many democrats have contributed to this to be honest…..especially over the last 20 years or so.
Rev. Barber’s position and point would be much more workable and valid if we had the labor movement alive and on our side. The civil rights movement would have not been a thing were it not for the implicit and given organizing that the labor movement was a model for. American society in the 1950s and 1960s was also much more granularly inclined to the organizing of labor unions, which I would argue helped enable the civil rights movement. Most Americans today, to a person, lack any knowledge or experience with labor unions. This is the challenge of taking Rev. Barber’s vision of a moral awakening and making it a true force. Moral high ground and down-and-dirty organizing and fighting old school union-style are how things are actually won……or survived.
“The left without a labor movement is a left without an engine, rudder, or buoyancy. ”
I agree. It’s part of the reason Democratic politicians don’t really speak to the issues of work and wages, either. They had labor unions to do that for them. They don’t know the language. I’m amazed at how out of touch they sound sometimes, as if they don’t know that the work that people do is central to their lives, no matter WHAT that work is. It’s like they only value the work that people with college degrees do. Something like 60% of people don’t have college degrees. What about them? Their work doesn’t matter?
Labor unions have suffered from weak or nonexistent support from Democrats, but Democrats have also suffered from the decline of labor unions. They lost that connection.
EXCELLENT point.
Union membership was about 35% in the fifties, 22% under Clinton, and now unions membership is under 12%. This decline has contributed to the cheapening of all labor.
NYS
Seconded, third-ed, and forth-ed.
How ever let us understand that that labor movement was propelled forward by the very real internal and external threats to the oligarchy. In the 1920’s that labor movement was getting crushed.
So that labor movement has to reach out far beyond boundaries of its narrow constituency, All to many Unions have been complacent , They are happy to eek out small gains for their own members in order to maintain power at the top. They spend more time fighting each other in jurisdictional disputes than fighting an Oligarchy that has sought to crush them forever!!! . More time making private deals that are shortsighted and hurt other workers ,which enables their own destruction. That organizing has to be bottom up with educated and engaged members. Workers who understand, the only way for any worker to maintain gains is to fight for all workers to prosper.
And part of me says they “go low we go lower”. Salt must be rubbed into the wounds of that working class voter who voted for Trump upon every failure. .
The right has framed the narrative for far to long . Every failure has to be magnified a 100 times . As they effectively did with Benghazi they have an uncanny ability to rewrite history . Was it 300 marines killed in Benghazi.?????.
Joel,
Absolutely agree. Labor union leadership has forgotten the broader picture and labor history for sure. My union, NYSUT, is guilty if this and tons more. Completely ignorant of the broader history and the broader picture. Completely ignorant of how to effectively coalition-build. Completely ignorant of what creative, alive, and vibrant organizing and fighting is all about. All they are capable of is sitting at tables already made for them by politicians etc. Devastating.
And yes, our side has to learn how to fight propagandisticly just like the right does. People on the left hate the idea of propaganda. They see it as institutionalized, seedy, lying and misinformation.
Well no! There is propaganda for awful things…..like basically anything the right thinks about….and that looks like all the stuff people on the left hate.
BUT, there is such a thing as propaganda for GOOD things….progressive things. And lets be real, that’s not about lying and deceit. It’s about selling good ideas. Look at how FDR and his admin “sold” the New Deal. That was proper left wing propaganda, and it was old and virtuous.
We need to sharpen up and not be afraid of distinctions like that. Too often, us smarty-pants imagine a world where virtuous ideas are accepted fully on their virtue. That is ridiculous. We must not be afraid of propaganda.
NYSTEACHER: I think you are missing a distinction between “propaganda” (1) and (2).
Propaganda (1) is relatively innocuous, meaning: to expressing ideas or even doctrines, well and fully. It means to tell the truth well; and it assumes listeners can understand pretty-much what you are saying or persuading them to think, say or do. It doesn’t necessarily assume the propagandist is talking to idiots.
Whereas propaganda (2) means what self-serving sophists (or fascists) do–engage in cherry-picking, half-truths, negations, and outright lying; or attempting to fool people with the language you use. In this (2)-kind of propaganda, you use a word or phrase knowing what it already means in COMMON LANGUAGE, (welfare, public, government, etc.) to attempt to change it’s meaning (to give it a certain moral or spiritual hue so that your listeners think differently of it) and/or to persuade people towards inherently bad ideas (dressed in good language), or away from ideas and values with language that you already know they will like, at the service of what you also know they wouldn’t agree with if they knew what YOU are really up to.
That’s why Trump and his group are so good at using logical fallacies. They are experts at “propagating” the Big Lie. That’s why they have a slithering hate for truth. I don’t think Barber wants us to “copy that.”
Joel, Chiara, NYSTeacher,
Agree! Agree! Agree! When so-called progressive politicians ally themselves with the monopolistic titans of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, they abandon the labor and civil rights movements (which I, and perhaps Gandhi and MLK, would argue are one and the same). War hawks and fiscal conservatives cannot be fought with technocracy to blame the public for inequality, and international trade deals to enable cheap manufacturing of iPhones. Pardon me for shouting, but THERE CAN BE NO CENTER. We need to get rid of the superdelegates so we can stand with jobs, jobs, jobs — real jobs, not sci-fi fantasies about robot coding in some made-up “21st century economy”.
Catherine,
Sorry for failing to include your name in my reply. Oops. You too: Agree!
NYSTEACHER: I don’t think Barber means to “do like they do” with the language, in the way you have depicted. I think he means to recognize the smell of shifts of meaning that have been going on with the language for decades, and to see through the haze of excrement, smeared on the windows of morality that such double-speak is. I think he means to point to the language already embodied in the Constitution, and in the Bible (both in our secular and religious existences), to hold policy and actions to the plain meaning of that language, e.g., “welfare” means for all to “fare well.” It’s not a reference to one side of what constitutes tribalized class warfare. And to ACTUALLY strive towards a “more perfect union.” Both religious and secular texts come together on this language.
I don’t think Barber is calling for us to give up speaking honestly–just the recalcitrant naivete that seems to go along with honesty in too many cases.
And about LABOR UNIONS: unfortunately, the language-raping that has gone forward for years paints “labor unions” as evil, along with all those horrible teachers, welfare (queens and takers), public/ government schools, PC, and “the left.” And the “religious right” has its own problem with their branding as always ignorant and always “extreme.” My guess is that these changes of meaning are even written down somewhere in their “private” literature (emphasis: “litter”).
But (again and again) there seems nowadays to be a great difference between what and who is truly conservative, and what and who is Republican. I think Reverend Barber would say that we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking THEY mean what we mean by such terms, or to let errant neo-Republicans us that term to describe themselves. It’s another Trojan Horse at the gate, or it’s used to let the foxes into the hen-houses of government. “Conservative” maintains its sense of integrity–a sense that many who use it to self-describe do not deserve.
We can point to the blending of “Republican” with several threads that “conservative,” by any reasonable definition, does not embrace:
(1) rampant, rapacious, and crony capitalism;
(2) tribalized group biases of all kinds (calcified and covert insiders/outsiders, e.g., racism);
(3) the democracy-killing over-reach of business-mindedness into public services, e.g., education;
(4) and now with Trump, violence, and “vulgarity unbounded” (from Barber’s quote from David Remnick).
(5) even fiscal conservatism which we all can agree with generally as a watch on “waste and fraud,” has morphed away from what it sounds like, to mean now: “rob government coffers” and “more for me and my corporation.” <–that, instead of conservative use of governmental power, but still ruled by the Constitutional guidelines towards the general welfare of all of “the people.”
As Barber seems to understand, we cannot say with a straight face “neo-conservatism;” but we can say “neo-Republican” and mean what we say–as having broken with true conservatism.
I read a lot of frustrated anger in NYSTeacher’s remarks. Not sure that’s a roadmap we can use.
Rev. Barber’s words can be distilled, in my view, into an advocacy of ethics based on “Do unto others” and “Love thy neighbor.” If the left can’t build a consistent strategy around those ideas, then we are lost.
GregB
Not sure, the high road is the answer or if it ever was..
From the Manga-Carta through the Wagner act and beyond to the civil rights movement . Social change has not been fought with pleasantries.. In fact most social change was met with out right repression. Our labor history is surrounded by the most violent repression in the first world. Labor responded in kind right through the 1970s . I’ll be happy if we escape the Trump era with the trappings of democracy preserved.
Joel Herman–about taking the high road: I know, and with repressed people, silence doesn’t necessarily mean consent. But generally the high road is always the answer–it’s just that, in any one particular event, what actually IS the high road is never completely predefined. Or as someone here said quoting Mark Twain: History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.
It’s not merely my opinion but a truth larger than all of us: if you want an intelligent and good person to trust you, don’t try to fool them. And It doesn’t wash off easily.
Joel, I believe strongly that anger can be a motivating force, but it cannot be the foundation of a constructive political strategy of governing. And I believe that is what Rev. Barber is saying. I learned in poli sci 101 that the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative is, deep down, liberals believe man is fundamentally good and conservatives believe that man is fundamentally evil. From there sprouts a worldview.
Being a modern American liberal should be rooted in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which is, for me, another way of saying “Do unto others…” Democrats who forget or deny that are not worthy of being called Democrats. We should be able to distill our ideas for politics and policies to that essence. That doesn’t mean being soft or naive. It means finding a message that can stand up to reactionary anger. The education policies we support are a perfect example of this. Opposition to charters, privatization, a testing mania, etc. and support of robust public education that values every child fits perfectly into a “Do unto others…” mindset. So does universal access to health care, a foreign policy that respects alliances and multilateralism, an agriculture policy that values and support family farms and opposes factory farms, an economic policy that fights Walmart-izing, and so on.
Our disappointment in President Obama is based on the discrepancy of how he campaigned in 2008, by appealing to our ideals, and then discarding and compromising throughout his term.
We have to stand for something. The reason so many have abandoned the Democratic Party is because they are perceived as standing for too little. I think that is what Rev. Barber is saying and I’m ready to be a part of a movement that he is advocating. We can be tough in doing so. But power for power’s sake is not what we stand for. Republicans have been doing that long enough.
I took my youngest to hear Barber speak in Detroit. Barber is genuinely interesting- he explained this whole Third Reconstruction theory. The speech was long but my son didn’t seem bored or impatient.
I think I love Rev. Barber. Xoxoxo
Sent from my iPad
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Rev. Barber speaks the truth. The collective, richest 400 families, created the national, neoliberal Democratic party to serve, as weak opposition to the Republican Party. The latest ploy from insiders of the Clinton campaign, is to blame Hillary. The scheme, is in evidence, in a Huffpo article, that purports to explain the Hillary loss, by talking to “last minute deciding” voters. The voter, quoted at length,weaved, the same outlandish excuse, as the losing campaign’s staff, recently did. Paraphrasing, “Hillary attacked Trump, when she should have continued to sell herself.” The shaky excuse is grounded with the preposterous story that voters began to feel sorry for Trump and indiscriminately, turned on Hillary. It’s a bigger reach than Comey, Russian hacking and Bernie, as reasons for the loss! What the weakened party of neoliberals, refuses to do is change from the agenda of the richest 0.1%, e.g. privatization of the most important common good.
If Bill Gates, the Walton-funded CAP, DFER and tech moguls remain, at the right hand of the hijacked Democratic party, the Frankenstein creation will continue to lose and, I predict the aforementioned will cheer. In history, Podesto will go down as one of the greatest Machiavellian characters or, one of the best-used by Machiavellians.