In this country—where more than half of the voters in November 2024 were filled with such fear and hatred of what they imagined as “the left” that they voted for a would-be dictator—we need a United Front against the menace which that fear and hate has unleashed—a United Front led by a progressive movement capable of mobilizing those who already agree with us on good grounds and capable of persuading the American people of exactly where we need to stand as a country and why.
The three fundamental social democratic commitments of this campaign are intended to win solid majority support by appealing to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and—by so doing—to show how a grounding in natural spiritual truth can help redeem our nation. These three commitments are:
- Justice for the Native Nations
- A Twenty-first Century version of A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget” to Abolish Poverty for All Americans, and
- Abundant Care for All (Medicare for All with an emphasis on home health, “proximal health,” and wellness).
I joined the Young People’s Socialist League in the late 1970s when the great civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin was the National Chairman of the adult organization, the Social Democrats, USA, and became active in politics again in 2016 knocking on doors for Bernie Sanders in Iowa and Wisconsin. I am a former director of undergraduate studies for international studies at Yale University and the author of Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal.
I first ran for Congress in 2018 and received 4% of the vote! Justice for the peoples of the Native Nations is the issue closest to my heart. I think this justice must begin by rejecting the fraudulent claims of the United States to a “right” to dominate these peoples and their lands and ultimately lead to our recognition and acceptance of the principles of the international laws and usages of Turtle Island (this continent)—before the eurochristian invaders arrived—as the foundation for our living together on and with this land in a good way.
In 2018, I called for a twenty-first century version of A. Philip Randolph's “Freedom Budget” to abolish poverty. Such a budget would not only guarantee employment for all those able and willing to work, it would help to restore natural waterways and wetlands in both rural and urban settings, to increase and rewild our forests and restore mangroves and mangrove islands along our coasts, to fix our shipping locks and roads and bridges, and our railways and mass transit systems, to transform our agricultural and educational and housing and childcare practices with wise public investments, and to fundamentally revise our whole healthcare system so that insurance bureaucrats and “squeeze” artists concerned with “efficiency” rather than medicine are removed from the provision of what I call Abundant Care for All (M4A+).
Rather than pursue tax cuts for the rich, we will pay for what we need with a restoration of American top tax rates as they existed during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s and also by pooling our resources and borrowing in order to invest. If the investments are prudent, they will in time earn enough to pay for themselves many times over. Pooling our resources will enable us to do what we could not do separately.
The approach here is the exact opposite of what has been tried—and what has been found wanting since Ronald Reagan—what has been tried and failed for two whole generations in which average real wages have stagnated. The approach here is to water the tree of our economy at its roots rather than its branches or top leaves; and to support union organizing and collective bargaining. Any other approach—such as one focused on tariffs (even if not pursued with a bullying incivility)—is, at best, just a smokescreen for a continued concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%. So-called “fair-trade” is worth pursuing whereas so-called “free trade” is not. But it has been bad public policy, and not the mere existence of trade, that has hollowed out the ability of the American working class to earn a decent livelihood—a bad public policy of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
A similarly bad public policy has hollowed out American foreign relations to the point of tolerance for the genocide in Gaza and, more recently, tolerance for the genocide in Ukraine as well. Far from the “soft peace” towards Japan with which the United States—after the war crimes of the fire bombings of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—sought to take into account something of the interests of the Japanese people as a path to a lasting peace, the United States has pursued its foreign policy with ever greater incivility. The days of the Marshall Plan and the foundation of NATO—the days when we sought a common well-being and a common security with a measure of civility, at least with regard to Europe—are gone.
Only if we begin our public policy from a position of natural spiritual truth—a position of respect, love, and gratitude towards all life—will recovery for our society, and right relations with all our relations, be possible.
