Neglected Progressive Communities

People don’t think about it much today, but Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth were nearly contemporaries. Roman Senators stabbed Caesar to death 44 years before the year of Jesus’ birth. At that time, those 44 years were roughly one human lifespan.

Like a certain ex-president, Julius Caesar was a highly successful demagogue. Unlike his modern counterpart, Caesar was also a victorious conquering general and a noted author of history. Historians and students of Latin still read his Gallic Commentaries today.

But Caesar’s assassination didn’t stop the disastrous decline on which his creative demagoguery had set Rome. The Pompeiian Civil Wars he set in motion, plus lead in the pipes from which the Roman emperors and elite drank, sealed ancient Rome’s fate. Rome stumbled on—as a brutal Empire, not a democracy—for another few centuries. Then it fell to persistent internal division and assault from “barbarians” to the North and East.

You might say that Jesus of Nazareth was the first “progressive” of the ancient world. His thinking was revolutionary. “Love thy enemy,” he reportedly said. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Two millennia later, the nations that strove to follow those revolutionary ideas—principally the US and EU—are among the most successful and best places to live on the planet. The US’ Marshall Plan and relatively gentle occupation of Japan may be the widest-scale and most successful examples of “loving thy enemy” in human history. Now Japan and Germany, once fearsome enemies, are our strongest allies and the world’s third and fourth biggest economies.

Yet Christianity in today’s America has gone corrupt, much like our politics and ancient Rome’s. American “Christians” have grafted Jesus’ revolutionary progressive teachings onto a musculature of hate, grievance, and sociopolitical domination. They focus more on the Old Testament’s myth of the destruction of Sodom than on Jesus’ revolutionary progressive ideas. And in their quest to dominate socially and politically, they have marginalized and undermined science, a four-century-young linchpin of human understanding and progress that not even Jesus could foresee.

So, just as the time of Caesar and Jesus ultimately foretold ancient Rome’s fate, so might today’s political turmoil foretell the United States’. Will the “shining city on a hill” degenerate into anti-science dogma of intolerance and domination, or will democracy and progress here survive? We won’t know until we have passed through today’s crunch time, not unlike what Rome went through after Caesar.

Two recent must-read New Yorker reports suggest that our fate might well be similar: internal division and a steep decline. This one reports how the State of Ohio, once a bastion of moderation and the birthplace of presidents, has degenerated into a hell-hole of extremism wrought by gerrymandering and an intolerant, hate-and-fear-based “Christianity” nothing like Jesus’. This one reports how the great generals of our age managed to keep our own Demagogue from subverting democracy two years ago, how much effort and perseverance it took, and how close we came to losing our Republic. (The New Yorker has a pay wall, with only one free article, so choose which to read if you don’t subscribe.)

We still have a chance to preserve our humanity and our greatness. But it will take more concentration, focus and perseverance than progressive and moderate forces have shown to date. We must organize those forces among us stronger, quicker, better, and longer than ever before. And we must re-teach his followers that Jesus was history’s greatest progressive.

One way to do that is by organizing two neglected progressive communities. The first is the diaspora of Puerto Ricans—refugees from Hurricane Maria and the Demagogue’s towel-tossing response to it. The other is a huge and rapidly growing community of (East) Indians in the US.

Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico in fall 2017. The Demagogue’s first response to this natural disaster was to stage a photo-op in which he tossed rolls of paper towels to the disaster’s victims. Then he denied all but the barest emergency federal relief, holding back massive federal rebuilding aid on the pretext of the Island’s fiscal imprudence. (Talk about blaming the victims!) In the aftermath of the disaster, an estimated 270,000 Puerto Ricans moved to Florida, and lesser numbers moved to other states. (Click on “How many Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida?”)

One notable thing about Puerto Rican “immigrants” to the Mainland is that they are already US citizens. All they have to do is register to vote where they reside, and they can influence elections. Think maybe a quarter of a million Puerto Rican voters might have some influence in the crucial (and closely divided) battleground state of Florida?

In spring 2018, Tom Perez was head of the DNC. He ran a nationwide webcast, which I heard. I submitted a written question online, in advance, asking what the Dems would do to organize those Puerto Rican climate refugees. When Perez got around to mentioning Hispanic voters, he talked only about Mexico, Venezuela, and Central America. Not a word about Puerto Ricans. We must do better now.

East Indians are, in my judgment, another neglected group. Some dozen years ago, when I visited Houston, there were half a million people of Indian descent living there. Indian friends took us to a part of town where there was more Sanskrit on street signs than English. We visited a marvelous, modern Indian cultural center for a delightful concert of traditional sitar-tabla music.

I don’t know how many of those Indians were resident aliens, and thus not voters. But I do know that Indians I have met over the years are well educated, superbly fluent in English, and prone to take a keen interest in public affairs. Who or what is organizing them? Couldn’t the big Indian community in Houston help put Beto O’Rourke over the top in Texas and turn our second most populous state blue? Indians can’t all be Republicans like Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, can they, especially as the party becomes a cult?

Of course the common term “Indians” obscures the fact that they are an incredibly diverse group. They come from every part of a huge subcontinent, as well as from places like Malaysia, where ethnic (East) Indians have settled. But as cognoscenti of (and possibly refugees from) the Hindu/Muslim divisions in India and Pakistan and Narendra Modi’s disastrous Hindu-first policies, they are unlikely to be supporters of the kind of muscular, political “Christian” dogmatism that is busy destroying our democracy.

Today East Indians are among our most successful and visible minorities. Just off the top of my head, I can name Ashish Jha (the new Anthony Fauci), Amna Nawaz (the PBS anchor), and Vinod Khosla (the legendary Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist). Why not recruit some people of similar caliber and visibility to get this group to the polls? Who is organizing them?

I’m not an organizer myself. I’m just a writer and idea guy. But I think our future is clear. Either we are going to exploit our marvelous and growing ethnic diversity by getting everyone who might be progressive or moderate out to vote and save our democracy, or are we going to suffer the fate of ancient Rome. In the latter case, the barbarians will come from within our gates, not without, in the form of the militant white Christian Taliban. And our fall will come much, much faster, at Warp Speed.

Don’t be fooled by noise and propaganda. The GOP has no program but nihilism, enriching the already rich, and white-Christian supremacy, plus the Demagogue’s personal aggrandizement and enrichment. In the coming two elections, every progressive and moderate, of whatever ethnicity of preference, must take a stand.

Black people have been doing a marvelous job, punching way above their weight in numbers as they organize, run for office and provide much-needed historical and political perspective. (I’ve learned more about the dismal history of our post-Civil-War institutionalized racism from Jamelle Bouie, Charles Blow, Jonathan Capehart and Eugene Robinson than I ever learned in high school or even Cal Berkeley. Far from suppressing these stories out of shame or guilt, we should make them mandatory parts of our high-school curricula. They are real history.)

But the Black community is not alone in supporting better education, better candidates and progressive and moderate policies. If we are to overcome this menace to our nation and our species’ survival, we are going to need every minority with the slightest progressive or moderate tendencies on board. What about Filipino-Americans? Surely they can see the dismal resemblance between Rodrigo Duterte and our ex-President.

We can’t afford to neglect or marginalize anyone as we get out the vote like never before. In the lifetimes of children born this year, we’ll be on the road back to an egalitarian, multi-ethnic democracy; or we’ll be an authoritarian society on the road to fascism. This is crunch time, and every vote matters.


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