Throw a rock down a busy street and chances are you won’t hit a single American who feels good about the state of American political dialogue.
Those of us on the left can choose to take comfort in a sense of relative innocence, as the demagoguery and divisiveness on the right rise to a fever pitch. But scratch the surface and you will find that nearly everyone, of whatever party, feels an emptiness—a soullessness—to our shared political life.
As we brace ourselves for an election season that threatens to be even more fractious, bombastic, and incoherent than our last one, the left cannot, and should not, simply count on the continued meltdown of the right.
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The deep truth is that American life needs a radical reframe, one that will require more than smart policy proposals, vague promises of growth, or even thundering denunciations of our opponents. If we’re going to pull out of this national nosedive, left politics needs a spiritual renaissance.
For approximately 40 years, Americans across the spectrum have been working within a picture of society that is broadly known as neoliberalism. In its simplest formulation, neoliberalism defines the good society as a level playing field where everyone is invited to compete for the scarce commodities of status and wealth, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
“The market”— fetishized by neoliberals as the just and ethical arbiter of all things—decides the outcomes, meaning the winners fully deserve their winnings, and the losers their losses.
In the interest of basic decency and stability, society may be willing to subsidize the lives of the poor, but only grudgingly, and with plenty of strings attached. Near blind faith is vested in innovators and technocrats, who we desperately hope can engineer us into a better reality. But it is becoming undeniable, in 2023, that a great deal of this clever engineering is only serving to sow division, isolation, and anxiety.
The emptiness so many Americans feel is related to a public life stubbornly grounded in this failed neoliberal consensus, which tacitly instructs us that consumerism, wealth accumulation, and individual achievement are the main paths to happiness.
It is impossible to be happy and fulfilled without a certain degree of financial security. Economic inequality is a plague that undermines our social bonds and damages our national psyche. Prosperity can allow us to be more generous and creative, social goods that are difficult to contemplate when you’re struggling for basic survival. But pursuit of material gain simply for the sake of material gain rarely brings fulfillment.
Americans do want a firm economic floor that guarantees everyone access to the basic necessities of life, but they also want our politics to be organized around the question of what actually makes a society good. This is why we need spirituality; at its core, it is an attempt to ask and answer deep, fundamental questions about the world, the self, and society.
Most versions of spirituality, of whatever tradition, tell us that what really matters is goodness, compassion, harmony with nature, self-discipline, mindfulness, holiness, the virtues, etc.—rather than just money and power. Importantly, these spiritual values are not zero-sum objects of competition. They are common goods—the compassion of my neighbor will tend to make me more compassionate, too.
A spiritual vision can show us that we are not enemies, but indispensable coworkers in this life.
Civil Rights Ldr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking into mic after being released from prison for leading a boycott.
Don Uhrbrock/Getty ImagesNot coincidentally, some of the most revered progressive leaders of the last century—the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Robert F. Kennedy— all embraced a mode of politics that was deeply rooted in explicit spirituality: the pursuit of something more than individual material reward.
King rooted all of his advocacy from his perspective as a Baptist preacher; Kennedy and Chavez grounded their passionate campaigns for justice in their Catholicism, and, of course, there is no way to separate Gandhi’s liberation politics from his Hinduism. Theirs was a politics imbued with an innate and insatiable hunger for universal justice and solidarity, grounded in a deep spiritual vision—the kind of thing that one might be willing to live for, or even die for.
New visions of this kind will be key to our success, as we live through the painful denouement of neoliberalism. A transition of this magnitude requires the ability to step outside of conventional assumptions, to risk catastrophic failure, to weather wide disapproval and hostility, and to assemble new coalitions of solidarity that transcend our ossified factions.
These abilities are uniquely facilitated by the possession of a spiritual vision.
This is what allowed MLK and Chavez to call not for inter-tribal warfare, but the creation of a universal, trans-racial “beloved community.” It allowed Gandhi to forsake the trappings of wealth and power, and set an example of non-violent “soul-power” that compelled the British to withdraw from their vast, lucrative holdings in India. It motivated Chavez to fast for 25 days, in order to resist the hatred he sensed on both sides of the dispute between migrant laborers and moneyed agriculturalists. It allowed RFK to see and communicate the common humanity, suffering and aspiration that united poor blacks and whites with destitute Native Americans. Kennedy’s presidential campaign lasted only a few short months, but in that time he was able to cobble together a geographically broad, cross-ideological, multi-ethnic coalition that is virtually unimaginable for Democratic politicians today.
United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy poses for a portrait in his Justice Department office circa 1964 in Washington, DC.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesToday, alas, talk of spirituality is risky on the American left.
The Republican Party has long branded itself as the party of family values, community, faith, and tradition—and the political coalition that helped Ronald Reagan inaugurate a four-decade neoliberal consensus married pro-business, anti-regulation, supply-side ideology with openly political evangelical Protestantism.
Democrats have differentiated themselves by doubling down on tolerance, separating religion from public life, and reinforcing ostensibly secular, humanist notions of fairness, and justice. Those are important values and worth fighting for, but the left is missing an opportunity to ground this work in a generous, inclusive, galvanizing spiritual vision.
This kind of grounding could help attract many unlikely new partners to the left.
Donald Trump stumbled upon the broad dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, and his attacks on global trade and political conventions lit a fire under disaffected voters who had given up hope that any presidential candidate would ever contest the neoliberal consensus. But Trump’s critique was paper thin, and in the end, he offered no actual vision for a path out of the dog-eat-dog values and imperatives of neoliberalism.
But with few exceptions, the Americans who connected with Trump’s message, even temporarily, are right about a lot of what is wrong. They are hungry for a way out of the frantic competition for a piece of the ever-shrinking pie, and for a world in which our politics promise something more than, as Obama often put it, a “fair shake” at a slice of that pie. Those voters are ripe for recruitment to a new coalition, if the left can be generous and far-sighted enough to invite them in.
This invitation is within our power, if only we will engage in the kind of brave, humble, heart-deep spiritual questioning that has animated so many of our tradition’s greatest achievements.
Chris Murphy is a United States Senator representing Connecticut.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher at Harvard Medical School, and a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita.
