Why the Moral Justice Movement Rejects People Like Me

Because its most prominent leader thinks that only religious people have morals.

I admire Rev. William Barber.  What he's started in North Carolina and is spreading across the country is already a huge achievement and may turn out to be, indeed, the Third Reconstruction.

So I was eager to read his book of that name, to learn about the years-long organizing that led to Moral Mondays and how he drew hundreds of thousands of people to it in what Charlie Pierce calls "the consistently insane state of North Carolina."

Unfortunately, his own words in this book put the lie to his claims of having a truly "fusion" coalition that welcomes and values everyone.

The book jacket's summary describes the movement as uniting "black, white and brown, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, religious and secular." (my emphasis.)

But that's not how Barber himself describes it.  Rather, he writes that his coalition "welcomes people of all faiths, as well as those who struggle with faith."

He repeats that sentiment several times in the book, but never once uses the word "secular." Or "humanist." Or "agnostic." And of course never "atheist."

Is he really under the impression that seculars, humanists, agnostics and atheists "struggle with faith?"  Of course not.  He is an intelligent, educated, cosmopolitan man.  He uses "struggle with faith" deliberately and advisedly, to belittle and exclude those of us who do not share his baseless belief in an invisible sky wizard who runs the world.

He even used a prominent atheist to tell a monstrous lie on national television.  In an attempt to "fit in" on Bill Maher's show, he claimed he himself was an atheist because he didn't believe in the "god" of hating poor people, immigrants and "gay folks."

As atheists like to point out, "people of faith" disbelieve in tens of thousands of gods.  We just disbelieve in one more than they do. Barber adding the god of hate to his disbelief list of tens of thousands while keeping babby jeebus doesn't make him an atheist.

Of course there are seculars, humanists, agnostics and atheists in the moral justice movement, even the religious-only one Barber has established in North Carolina.

That's because we of no faith have always been the worker bees of every movement for justice - racial, economic, social, political, sexual, environmental and especially moral.

Because morality is not, never has been and never will be the exclusive province of the religious.

Not that the religious will ever admit that.

So we the moral godless toil anonymously in the movement, unacknowledged at best, disrespected and despised at worst.

Shame on you, Rev. Barber.  Without the moral godless, your movement would have died in the cradle.

"Hillbilly" Betrays Family to Push Repug Lies

Shame on you, J.D. Vance.  All that powerful prose about family loyalty and beating people bloody for the slightest insult, thrown away as a defense of repug, conservatard racism.

"Hillbilly Elegy" purports to be a revelation of the real reason white working-class people are suffering in this country.

It's even written by an actual working-class white person!  A self-proclaimed "hillbilly!"  With statistics to back up his bullshit!

I'm sure his accounts of family violence, struggles with substance abuse and poverty are true; it's the lessons he draws from them that are lifted straight from the elitist conservative pages of the National Review.

T-bone steaks bought on food stamps?  That canard is older than you, son.

Poor people don't need welfare; they just need to get off their lazy asses? Um, didn't you just disprove that very lie in the previous chapter?

Poor whites aren't racist; they just hate "Obama" (never "President Obama") for unknown reasons.

Vance deplores the economic and social collapse of the Ohio town where he grew up without ever recognizing, much less acknowledging, that it was repug tax and deregulation policy that encouraged corporations to abandon places like Middletown.

And that it is repug austerity budgets that deny impoverished residents the decent jobs, housing, education and treatment they need to recover.

No, no, it's all the fault of "liberal" welfare.

For shame, J.D. Vance.  You may have a Yale Law degree and a six-figure job for a biotech company, but the uneducated, jobless "failures" you despise back in Breathitt County know the truth better than you do.

Matt Bai Doesn't Get It

The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics

It's a bad sign when, after you finish reading a book you're going to review, and you flip back through the pages, you find that on every fifth page you've written in the margin:

Bullshit!

Bai writes for the New York Times Magazine, so you won't be surprised that this book gave me flashbacks to the Clarence Thomas hearings.

Yeah, Bai hung out with Jerome and Markos, and he attended the first Yearly Kos, and he has one or two not-nasty things to say about Howard Dean, but basically these 308 pages boil down to this:

The Democratic Party has been hijacked by a bunch of clueless billionaires and crazy losers from the blogosphere who don't have the kind of well-designed party platform that will gain them the trust and endorsement of real Democrats like Joe Lieberman and the Editorial Board of the New York Times.

One typical snide snark:

"The blogs ... were, in fact, the voices of the new public square, but it was more like the Parisian public square in the days of the Bastille - not a place where tonwspeople came to carefully consider what their leaders had to say, but where the mob gathered to make its demands and mete out its own kind of justice."

OK, first up for the Internet guillotine: Patronizing MSM Broderists like Matt Bai.

And the section on a Move On house party to come up with five-word progressive agenda items was just about the most condescending thing I've ever read. The "tiny apartment" (Bai couldn't find a place to sit) in "a mostly-black, mixed-income neighborhood" (poor people and minorities - borrrrrring) filled with people who struggled with ideas and weren't poised and eloquent like his Georgetown friends. Good grief, even the snacks were home-made and brought by attendees - haven't these people ever heard of caterers?

FSM give me strength.

But the real crime Bai commits is that in the service of his Beltway MSM agenda he wastes a ton of pretty decent reporting. Bai's premise is that despite a historic political victory last November, the Democrats still don't have a winning platform. And he'll twist any fact, any quote to prove that premise.

One minute he's sneering at dems for phrasing their beliefs in broad, philosophical language - "help working families," "universal health care" - lacking specific policy prescriptions, and the next he's complaining that their beliefs are just a bunch of detailed policy prescriptions, without a broad, overarching philosophy.

And they have the gall to hate Bush and the Republicans! Just because Bush and the Republicans are doing every thing they can to destroy the last semblance of democracy, freedom and the rule of law in this country. How naive. How unserious. How inappropriate. They probably wear white after Labor Day, too.

Then he accuses Democrats of the worst crime of all: working to win elections!

Boy, it's a good thing FDR, Truman and JFK never had to campaign for office - they never would have had time to actually lead the country.

He even trots out that old canard that Democrats have no "new ideas." Gives it pseudo-legitimacy by quoting actual Democrats saying it.

Matty boy. you're about four curves behind. The Liberals and Progressives of the Democratic Party have spent the last 12 years developing exactly the broad philosopies and detailed policy proposals that are not only good for the country but have the approval of the majority of Americans.

No, we don't all agree on the specifics, but that's how ideas and policies get honed to perfection - in the fire of political debate.

What we're just starting to get - in the persons of Jim Webb, Jon Tester and John Yarmuth - are Democratic politicians who are willing to stand up proudly and proclaim those liberal values and policies. And by doing so, win elections.

If you're curious about how we got from the suicidal depression of November 2004 to where we are today, there's some good stuff here - especially about the secretive Democracy Alliance of progressive billionaires.

But The Argument is best read as a warning: that even after the genuine miracles liberals and progressives have achieved in the past two years, the twin stereotypes of "feckless Democrats" and "crazy, nihilistic bloggers" aren't going away any time soon.