One of the side effects of The Netroots Nation convention was a blizzard of buttons, pocket-sized cards, pamphlets, 8.5×11 paper manifestos, leaflets, and broadsides, and a few magazines. One of those magazines was Tikkun’s July/August 2010 issue, featuring a cover story proclaiming "Queer Spirituality and Politics: Why Gay Rights is a Religious Issue," by Jay Michaelson. The feature article was, no doubt, the motivation for distributing dozens of free copies of this issue. But hidden inside are two other important articles that need our attention: The Second American Revolution, A review of Ralph Nader’s new book, Only the Super-Rich can Save Us!, by Charles Derber, and Barry Schwartz’s review, Prophetic Courage in an Imperial Age, of a book on Jeremiah.

Derber observed that

For most Americans, including most on the Left, system change has become a pipe dream. The truth is that we have become cynical and no longer believe we can transform the capitalist U.S. hegemon. System change is now considered a utopian conceit. Leftist intellectuals have become complicit in this new fatalism, writing endless books and articles critiquing current policies but offering (with some exceptions, as in this magazine) almost nothing about how to imagine and create a revolutionary transformation.

I have noticed this same descent into cynicism here at FDL, particularly in Emptywheel’s corner, where cynicism in the comments has become fashionable, and optimists are mocked. Visionaries are tolerated and occasionally applauded for their idealism, much as one might take comfort in a house pet, but otherwise these visionaries are not taken seriously.

Derber, however, notes the importance of these visionaries, and links Nader’s new book to Edwdard Bellamy’s Looking Backwards,

…a visionary socialist novel that sold one million hardcover books to the mass public. … Bellamy’s utopian best seller spawned a new breed of leftist intellectuals who did not find it silly to paint pictures of a world beyond greed, predatory finance, and robber-baron capitalism. And Bellamy spurred cooperativist, socialist, and radical labor movements that promoted previously unimaginable progressive reform.

It is uncanny how resonant "greed, predatory finance, and robber-baron capitalism" seem today. Derber also makes much of historian Russell Jacoby, who "has described the intelligentsia’s capitulation as one of the great tragic chapters in intellectual history."

In books such as The Last Intellectuals and The End of Utopia, Jacoby ferociously attacks leftist intelligentsia for abandoning the radical imagination. Radical imagination, after all, is not a path toward tenure. The professionalization of the leftist intelligentsia in the university has undercut the temperament and intellectual capacity to even conceive a different world.

Derber also cites Noam Chomsky on the same point:

The fading of the radical, utopian U.S. Left in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has gone largely without notice. Established intellectuals in the Beltway and New York highbrow literary circles live happily in this new world of hegemonic pragmatism, and leftist intellectuals, mainly ensconced in comfortable academic positions, have, for the most part, reconciled themselves to it. In his blistering 1960s critique—titled American Power and the New Mandarins—Noam Chomsky was one of the first to headline the extreme seriousness of this collapse of intellectual vision and courage.

Nader is praised, not so much for the correctness of his vision, as for being a progressive visionary.

Nader breaks completely with the prevailing pessimistic pragmatism, writing of the revolution that might not seem so out of reach if only we believed in its possibility.

Most reviews have focused on Nader’s apparent faith in billionaires. But Derber focuses on another aspect of Nader’s novel:

Nader knows that civic activism by ordinary Americans is the only force that will change the world—and such grassroots activism gets vast attention in the book. Second, the agents of change are secondary to his real message: the urgency of collectively cultivating a visionary consciousness and gut-level belief in transformative change, and then committing ourselves to making radical system change in the real world.

This brings me to step beyond Derber’s review to bring into this discussion Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. With this book, Obama seemed to position himself as the prophet of a new Progressive optimism, which helped sweep him into power in 2008 with the slogan, "Change you can believe in." But alas, our prophet has proved to have feet of clay. This has prompted our descent into cynicism and despair.

But the real story of Nader’s book Derber writes, is "the insistence on leftist utopianism and transcendence of pragmatic pessimism…. How many leftist books leave you feeling hopeful, even optimistic? How many offer you a picture of a new world that inspires you to act?" To return to his earlier point,

…the urgency of collectively cultivating a visionary consciousness and gut-level belief in transformative change, and then committing ourselves to making radical system change in the real world.

Is the vision of The Audacity of Hope nullified just because the prophet is proven to have feet of clay? No– we must pick up the fallen standard and move it forward, with or without the prophet who articulated the vision. The ancient roles of prophet and priest are irreconcilable: the prophet is inevitably an outsider, while the priest is the quintessential insider. It is important to remember FDR’s exhortation to one of his progressive supporters: "Make me do it."

Barry Schwartz, in his review of Mordecai Schreiber’s new book, The Man Who Knew God: Decoding Jeremiah, quotes Abraham Joshua Heschel on the essence of the prophetic persona:

prophets [are] those who combine "a very deep love, a very powerful dissent, painful rebuke, with unwavering hope"

Heschel went on to lament that the books of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the "Old Testament,") are little known today. Most people, if they remember anything about Jeremiah, remember him as a sourpuss, a constant complainer whose very name (in the form "Jeremiad") has become an erudite synonym for "rant." Schwartz wrote,

Jeremiah’s life story is compelling, and his powerful challenge to domestic hubris and colonial imperialism resonates in our age: "See, you are relying on illusions that are of no avail. Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely … and then come and stand before Me in this House, which bears my name and say, we are safe?" (7:8-10)

…when all is said and done, what strikes us most deeply in our kishkas about Jeremiah is his resolve in the face of suffering and his true embodiment of prophetic courage. Jeremiah would have none of the pseudo-religious revivals sweeping his country. He decried hypocrisy at every level and paid for it in years of emotional torment, scorn, imprisonment, and exile. The personal cost is hard to fathom; Schreiber even posits that Jeremiah broke with his own father and never married due to his relentless pursuit of the truth. Through it all, he did have his loyal disciple and scribe Baruch ben Neriah by his side. He told Baruch to keep writing. And that is why Jeremiah, a pariah in his own day, lives for the ages.

We need our Progressive prophets, and we need to honor their vision, even when they seem to have feet of clay.

Bob in AZ