Looking Back, Looking Forward (Page 4)

The defeat of John Kerry, combined with the Republican advances in the House and Senate, has unleashed waves of dismay and perplexity within liberal and progressive circles. What happened? Why did so many voters embrace a President whose Iraq policy was paved with lies and deceptions, who has shown contempt for science, the rule of law and many of the principles of the Enlightenment, and whose economic policies favor the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans? What lessons do we draw from Kerry's failure to win over the electorate in spite of the Bush Administration's conspicuous failures? Are the Democrats crippled, or merely wounded, and is the party really out of touch with "mainstream" values? Finally, what should the priorities of the progressive movement be in this era of Republican dominance, and what is the best formula for future electoral success? The Nation asked some of the country's leading political activists and intellectuals for their thoughts on one or more of these questions. Their brief essays follow.   --The Editors

SUSANNAH HESCHEL

DEMOCRATS ARE BEING ADVISED to respond to their election losses by enhancing their rhetoric of religion. What we need to do instead is revive the prophetic tradition, especially its critique of religion.

Major movements of social advancement in this country have spoken in the name of the prophets, not in the name of churches or religion. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, spoke as a prophet, not a priest or theologian, and in fact was regarded with suspicion by many religious leaders, including in the black church. "Let justice roll down like water, and righteouness as a mighty stream," the anthem of the civil rights movement, were the words of Amos (5:24). Central to the prophetic tradition is its critique of religious rituals, beliefs and those who enforce them. In words applicable to today, Jeremiah declares, "An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?" (Jeremiah 5:30-31)

Rather than debate theological interpretations, the prophets denounce hypocrisy and insist on justice as the tool of God and the manifestation of God. Neither religious ritual nor belief holds meaning for the prophets as ends in themselves; what God wants, Amos insists, is not worship but an end to war crimes and exploitation in the marketplace. For the prophets, justice is the means of redemption, including our redemption of God from the constraints of religion, human mendacity and complacency in the face of evil. They also are adamant that evil is never the climax of history.

Democrats have to challenge the legitimacy of the Christian right in the name of the prophets. We have to unmask the unholy passions that inspire the apocalyptic zeal of so many Christians, Muslims and Jews: the ressentiment that has been fostered by the right wing since the days of Governor George Wallace, and the loneliness that makes apocalyptic fantasies so appealing. Today, the prophets would once again see truth and justice shackled with chains, enslaved by selfishness and the lust for power and empire.

We need a new civil rights movement, a mobilization against the Bush regime, against its nascent totalitarianism, with marches on Washington that will stir the dormant American conscience. A movement can become powerful in America if it speaks in the voice of the prophets, insisting on our duty as citizens to resist a government that is subverting justice with its deadly policies.

In the Bible God asks, "Who will speak for me, who will remember the covenant of peace and compassion?" We must abandon despair and find the inner resources to respond with the prophet Isaiah: "Here I am, send me" (6:8).

Susannah Heschel is professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College and co-chair of the Tikkun Community.

MARY GORDON

I DON'T KNOW WHAT WE CAN DO to regain our lost ground, but I think the key is fear. Fear of the other, broadly defined. I sometimes think the entire species is suffering post-traumatic shock; as a species, we have had to absorb an enormous amount of change in a very short time. Perhaps the most dramatic change in the past thirty years is the mainstreaming of the idea--even only as an idea, I wouldn't suggest it's come to practice--that men and women are equal. This is quite radical, and rather new in the history of the species.

What all fundamentalists share is a determination to repress the freedoms and rights of women. When this is coupled with a sexual anxiety about homosexuals--who after all take the place of women in the imagination, or assert that the definition of the female is more malleable than had formerly been thought--you get a potent substance that feeds the toxin of anxiety. This is what we mean by culture wars.

On top of that: The notion that people we once thought of as our inferiors have us by the throat--because we are dependent upon them for oil and because they can drive planes into our buildings--has shaken many people to their roots. This fear freezes their minds from flexible and imaginative thinking and freezes religious postures into crippling and perverse versions of what they might be.

We should remember that the chances of unseating a President in wartime were small and that we did much better than we might have predicted. What upsets me more: a Democratic Senate minority leader who is antichoice.

Mary Gordon will be publishing a novel, Pearl (Pantheon), in January. She teaches at Barnard College in New York.

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