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common good
'Even When Things Look Dark, Way Down, in the Human Heart—There’s a Light'
A reflection on a 'Christmas Song'—our family's favorite—and one that speaks solemnly and soulfully to the deep drive that fuels our common dreams.
Dec 24, 2024
It’s true I have a favorite Christmas song, but as it turns out, it’s not one that many people know—at least I assume most people don’t know it.
Funny enough, the title is simply “Christmas Song,” and it was performed—at least the version I know—by songwriter Greg Brown during a live show back in 2001.
Though an atheist, my fondness for Christmas—perhaps like it is for many—is wrapped in the nostalgia of the holiday of my upbringing as well as the ongoing joys I find during this “season of giving.” Like religious celebrations across many faiths, Christmas has the ability to open the human heart and reminds us (if we let it) of that spirit that enriches us and challenges us to understand what it means to share, not material gifts, but time and warmth with one another.
In Brown’s song—which I encourage you to listen to here or below—the story of Jesus is subtly inverted.
Rather than a story of miraculous birth—”It was the night before Christmas,” the song begins, “but nobody was really noticing that”—it is a story about the routine of birth (“something women do” and that “men kinda, sorta, a little bit… help”) in which the only miracle is the gift of life that we’ve all been granted.
Just getting born is such an amazing thing
You'd think we'd all just be nice forever after—
Just to get to be a part of it.
You'd think that anybody that ever held a little baby in their arms
Would be so careful not to ever do any damage
To another human being—or to the creation
Of which we are so obviously a part.
The song presents a story of Jesus that escapes Christianity, which is perhaps why I find it so lovely and piercing, and opens the door to thinking about the hidden promise of a holiday that too often asks us “what we want” as opposed to reflecting on the joys of what we’ve been given.
Sometimes when I get distraught
About our world and what we're doing to it
I remind myself that little children like that are being born every day.
The story in the song is not about a boy who grew up to “found any big religions, with shiny churches,” but rather a story “about a world so much better than this one.” In this story, the unnamed boy “was just a child full of love, who went around and talked about love.”
And so it follows that the lesson of such a child is not that he was exemplary (though perhaps he was), but that we too often fail to recognize the potent and profound goodness of so many people among us, past and present—not children of God, but examples of humility and decency.
Sometimes when I get distraught
About our world and what we're doing to it
I remind myself that little children like that are being born every day.
They may not make a lot of big news
But in their life, they’re kind;
They take care of people;
They don’t blow things all out of proportion.
They spread the news that this life,
So mysterious and hard, is a wonderful enterprise
That should be cherished.
And Brown, led all along by the slow strum of guitar, speaks sorrowfully but clearly as he tells his listener:
So Christmas, if it’s anything at all,
It’s every day. It’s every night.
And even when things look dark, way down…
In the human heart,
That we all share...
There’s a light.
And, only to the song’s credit, it makes me think that’s true. I don’t call it religion, but that idea has shaped my understanding of what the promise of human goodness really is. We know it exists, not because we read about it or were told to believe in it—but because we’ve seen it. We’ve witnessed it.
So Christmas, if it’s anything at all, it’s every day. It’s every night.
Even amidst all the horror and violence and injustice, we know in our life, the good people—young and old and those neither young nor old—and they don’t ask us to believe, but show us the way.
When I listen to this song—as I often will at this time of year—it does something solemn to my heart, the hearts of my family, and those we share it with.
Since I first heard it, the song has always been to me a magnificent expression, though that was not its intent, of what Common Dreams seeks to represent—a world full of people who embody that spirit of loving one another and defending the common good while challenging “the political leadership of the day,” as the song puts it.
We don’t often use that kind of language, but that’s what this project we call Common Dreams is about: love. The news we report and the opinions and analysis we share are all grounded in a deep love for people, community, life of all kinds, and the planet that sustains us all.
I know very well how dark it feels right now for so many. We are right to be frightened and angry and frustrated. And at the same time, we must remember that the light “we all share, in the human heart” is the beginning of our path forward. We are going to have to fight like hell, but that fight will be built on love and solidarity or nothing at all.
With endless gratitude for all you do in the world, dear reader, and the example you set for the rest of us.
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Bernie Sanders Says Defeating Oligarchy Now Most Urgent Issue
"My friends, you don’t have to be a PhD in political science to understand that this is not democracy. This is not one person, one vote. This is not all of us coming together to decide our future. This is oligarchy."
Dec 14, 2024
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is escalating his fight against the U.S. oligarchy with a new campaign directed at the nation's wealthiest individuals—including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—who he says are key culprits in a global race to the bottom that is stripping people worldwide of political agency while impoverishing billions so that the rich can amass increasingly obscene levels of wealth.
Announcing a new series that will detail how "billionaire oligarchs" in the U.S. "manipulate the global economy, purchase our elections, avoid paying taxes, and increasingly control our government," Sanders said in a Friday night video address that it makes him laugh when mainstream pundits talk openly about the nefarious oligarchic structures in other places, but refuse to acknowledge the issue in domestic terms.
"Strangely enough, the term 'oligarchy' is very rarely used to describe what's happening in the United States or in fact, what's happening around the world," said Sanders. "But guess what? Oligarchy is a global phenomenon, and it is headquartered right here in the United States."
Bernie Sanders talks about the oligarchy
While rarely discussed in the corporate press or by most elected officials, argues Sanders, the reality is that a "small number of incredibly wealthy billionaires own and control much of the global economy. Period. End of discussion. And increasingly they own and control our government through a corrupt campaign finance system."
Since the the victory of President-elect Donald Trump in November, Sanders has been increasingly outspoken about his frustrations over the failure of the Democratic Party to adequately confront the contradictions presented by a party that purports to represent the interests of the working class yet remains so beholden to corporate interests and the wealthy that lavish it with campaign contributions.
In a missive to supporters last month, Sanders bemoaned how "just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to get their candidates elected" in this year's elections, which included giving to both major political parties. Such a reality, he said, must be challenged.
As part of his new effort announced Friday, Sanders' office said the two-time Democratic presidential candidate would be hosting a series of discussions with the leading experts on various topics related to the form and function of U.S. oligarchy and expose the incoming Trump administration's "ties to the billionaire class," including their efforts to further erode democracy, gut regulations, enrich themselves, and undermine the common good.
"In my view," said Sanders, "this issue of oligarchy is the most important issue facing our country and world because it touches on everything else." He said the climate crisis, healthcare, worker protections, and the fight against poverty are all adversely effected by the power of the wealthy elites who control the economy and the political sphere.
"My friends, you don’t have to be a PhD in political science to understand that this is not democracy," he said. "This is not one person, one vote. This is not all of us coming together to decide our future. This is oligarchy."
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Postliberals Against the Common Good: An Urgent Warning
Sep 06, 2023
“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems like a ridiculous statement. “Has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of.”
But Chomsky has a point. Even the Nazis didn’t want to destroy civilization itself; they wanted to kill millions of people and dominate civilization, not bring it to an end. The Republican Party is much more ambitious, and more nihilistic: it is the capitalist id, or rather the capitalist death instinct, adopted as the organizing principle of a vast political force: Profit over people at all costs, including acceleration of global warming—not to mention demolition of organized labor, the welfare state, the regulatory state, progressive taxation, public resources like education and transportation, and the whole legacy of the New Deal. For Republicans even more than Democrats, enslavement to the business oligarchy is the highest good.
This being the case, one might be perplexed that so-called “postliberals” and other conservatives who pride themselves on their concern for “the common good” do not devote all their energy to defeating Republicans and organizing a popular movement for social democracy. In fact, they tend to do the opposite: they praise and endorse Republicans (especially pseudo-populists like Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and J. D. Vance) while denouncing the “progressives” or “democratic socialists” who are struggling to build movements that will defend the common good and repair the social fabric rent by hyper-capitalism. On issue after issue—from protection of the environment to the resurrection of labor unions to the dismantling of psychopathic mass incarceration—it is organizers on the left, not the right, who are actually trying to conserve society. In this sense, it is leftists—materialist leftists, not identitarian liberals—who are the true conservatives.
"Republicans and business reactionaries love to keep the political focus on things like the decline of religion, the ostensible immigrant invasion, and the excesses of liberal identity politics, so that they can go on smashing the working class, appropriating most of the world’s wealth, privatizing and atomizing society, and destroying the prospects for human survival."
The political attitudes of most postliberals are approximately those manifested in Patrick Deneen’s new book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. It’s a very flawed book, as I explain in a forthcoming review. Here, I want only to note the incoherence of its political stance, which is that of right-wing postliberalism in general (as opposed to left-wing postliberalism, such as Adrian Pabst’s). As in his earlier book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen deplores the atomization of modern society and the decline of community, stability, family, and traditional norms of social obligation. But he blames this social crisis on “liberalism,” a constellation of ideologies (some of which, historically, are mutually contradictory), rather than the material social relations of capitalism, as Marxists have done since the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In Marx’s famous words, “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” Since capitalist class structures are the real basis for a way of life—an atomized, profit-obsessed, consumerist, hedonistic way of life—postliberals have gotten the very name of their philosophy wrong. It should be called postcapitalism, assuming the goal really is to create a cohesive, communal society.
What a postcapitalist world would look like is hard to imagine, but it would at least do away with the antagonistic and exploitative production relations that are ultimately responsible for the atomization postliberals lament. Ordinary people would control their work, in the form of worker cooperatives and democratic government coordination of large industry (possibly still in a market-oriented economy). The 1912 platform of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party isn’t a bad place to start. If the notion of some degree of “government planning” seems unrealistic or tyrannical, we should remember that even today, the U.S. government engages in economic planning on a colossal scale, for instance through its subsidies to high-tech industry, its trade and tariff policies, its military procurement programs, and its regulation of all sectors of the economy. During World War II, in fact, government planning was remarkably successful, leading to full employment and setting the stage for the prosperous 1950s and 1960s. Let's remember, we don’t live in a true market economy.
Instead of taking their “communitarian” values to their logical, anti-capitalist conclusion, however, most postliberals remain on the level of culture, identity politics, and other half-measures. Deneen, like his co-thinkers Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, Adrian Vermeule, Yoram Hazony, and others, advocates restrictions on immigration in the hope that this will somehow shore up the national community and protect wages. (He disregards the fact that the presence of undocumented immigrants and refugees stimulates the economy and creates jobs.) He argues that we have to renew the “Christian roots of our civilization” by making politics “a place for prayer” and reinfusing religion into public and private activities. Broadly, “an ennobling of our elite,” such that it is selflessly concerned with the well-being of “the people” and “work[s] to improve the[ir] lives, prospects, and fate,” will revitalize society and community. He fails to explain how such an ennobling of the ruling class can ever occur in the context of advanced capitalism, characterized by the global hegemony of unfettered greed.
"Postliberals are in danger of being useful idiots for the most insatiable sociopaths on the planet."
In fact, Deneen even deprecates social democracy and its “progressive liberalism,” claiming without evidence that redistribution of wealth to workers has “led to extensive damage to the broader economic order.” He seems unaware that postwar social democracy, created through overwhelming pressure by unions, socialists, and communists, was the closest modern society has ever come to protecting families, communities, and social stability.
It isn’t hard to criticize the idealism, political naïveté (as if class conflict isn’t endemic to capitalism!), and historical ignorance of conservative postliberalism. But the basic incoherence of the ideology is that its attacks on liberalism and the left, and its defense of conservatism, only serve to empower the forces most dedicated to sabotaging the very values postliberals claim to uphold, values like “national resilience,” “common purposes,” and the “social covenant.” Republicans and business reactionaries love to keep the political focus on things like the decline of religion, the ostensible immigrant invasion, and the excesses of liberal identity politics, so that they can go on smashing the working class, appropriating most of the world’s wealth, privatizing and atomizing society, and destroying the prospects for human survival. Postliberals are in danger of being useful idiots for the most insatiable sociopaths on the planet.
Will it be denied that the Republican Party is as bad as all this? Consider the evidence. Donald Trump is supposedly a populist, someone trying to turn Republicans into the party of the working class. It turns out that his administration, like all Republican administrations since Reagan’s, was utterly slavish to the most misanthropic sectors of business. His NLRB waged an “unprecedented” attack on workers’ rights. He weakened or eliminated over 125 policies that protected the country’s air, water, and land. His budgets savagely slashed benefits for low-income Americans, continuing a longstanding Republican practice. All this is the exact opposite of protecting the “common good” that postliberals say they value so much.
What about the great “populist” senators Hawley and Vance? They give, at best, tokenistic and rhetorical support to the working class: neither has even cosponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and Hawley, according to the AFL-CIO, has almost always voted against the interests of workers. Vance, a venture capitalist, finds it much more congenial to spew racist “great replacement” nonsense—an identity politics of the right—and blame those with a low income for their own failures than to actually do anything to help the latter. If this is the record of Republicans who present themselves as pro-worker, it isn’t hard to imagine how bad establishment Republicans are.
Perhaps the greatest crime of the Republican Party is that it is almost rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth. The sweltering summer the world has just experienced—the hottest consecutive three months since records began—will likely be seen as a gloriously mild one thirty years from now, when wildfires are raging everywhere, ocean levels are much higher, and whole continents are descending into chaos.
"Perhaps the greatest crime of the Republican Party is that it is almost rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth."
The Republican plan to address the coming cataclysms is…to make them worse. Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the next Republican president, calls for “shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.” The inadequate Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $370 billion for investment in clean energy, would be repealed. Allied nations would be encouraged to use more fossil fuels, and the National Security Council would be forbidden to consider climate change worthy of discussion.
Nihilism on this scale, an explicit embrace of something close to species-suicide by a major political party, is unheard-of in history. It is collective criminal lunacy, worse than Nazism, as Chomsky rightly notes. And yet how many postliberals, how many conservative proponents of the traditional values of family, community, and morality, are strongly speaking out against it, against this brazen threat to all families, communities, and morality itself? Their priority, rather, is to denounce “critical race theory” and keep out immigrants, as if that will heal the country.
Postliberals claim to favor policies that support marriage and family, singling out for praise Hungary’s initiatives to offer paid leave for parents and financial incentives for three or more children. They also support government spending on large infrastructure projects. So why didn’t they aggressively lobby Congress to pass Biden’s original Build Back Better bill in 2021? This bill, which couldn’t pass because of Republican opposition, would have been an immense boon to working families through its investments in childcare and preschool, paid family and medical leave, community college, child tax credits, physical infrastructure, affordable housing, health care, and environmental protection. It was the most ambitious measure in generations to repair the social compact and encourage family formation. Not a single Republican supported it.
"[The 2021 Build Back Better bill] was the most ambitious measure in generations to repair the social compact and encourage family formation. Not a single Republican supported it."
It is hard to imagine that any party has ever been more committed to destroying families than the Republican, yet the self-proclaimed defenders of family values aim their ire at Democrats. However bad Democrats are, they are the party responsible for the New Deal, for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, for the almost-passed Build Back Better bill, for Biden’s NLRB that is as supportive of unions as Trump’s was hostile towards them. We should recognize, then, a perhaps unpalatable truth: since Republicans will never do a single thing opposed to the interests of the billionaire class, the only hope for the United States is to keep them out of power at the same time as popular movements are pushing Democrats to the left. Had the Democratic Party won a few more seats in the Senate in 2020, transformative laws on voting rights, union organizing, family welfare, and environmental protection that were passed in the House might have been enacted. It was a tragic missed opportunity, but, with the defeat of Republicans and the election of leftists, such opportunities can appear again.
Postliberals can contribute positively to politics, but only if they follow the recent example of one of their own: Sohrab Ahmari, who has written an impressive book on corporate America’s plunder of the working class, entitled Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It. Ahmari still seems to have some illusory hope regarding the likes of Hawley, Vance, and Marco Rubio, who wouldn’t be in the Republican Party if they really wanted to help people. (Token populist moves shore up their voting base.) But at least Ahmari has apparently realized that the battle against liberal identity politics is less important than the battle for a left-wing economic agenda—and in fact that the right-wing crusade against wokeness sabotages the struggle for workers’ rights and a livable future, since it empowers Republicans.
One hopes that more postliberals will, similarly, come to their senses.
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