CHAPTER 20
Building a Political Majority

Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations.

The Great Law of Peace, Constitution of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Nation

The state of the world is most visible in the state of its children.

Raffi Cavoukian, singer, author, founder of Child Honoring

Few contemporary nations seem more divided politically than the United States. Beyond the partisan rancor, however, polling data point to a broad consensus on core values and suggest that if the institutions of governmental and corporate power were accountable to the public will, the United States would be pursuing very different policies both domestically and internationally. These institutions have been so at odds for so long with the core values and interests of the nation that most people have given up hope of any change. The residual frustration, however, runs high and represents a powerful latent political force.

There is near universal agreement among adult Americans (83 percent) that as a society the United States focuses on the wrong priorities.¹ Specifically, polling data affirm that the substantial majority of Americans share a desire for strong families and communities, a healthy environment, and high-quality health care and education for all. They are likewise concerned about the unaccountable power of corporations and government, and they prefer to live in a world that puts people ahead of profits, spiritual values ahead of financial values, and international cooperation ahead of international domination.

These are the values of the true political center most everywhere in the world. That center is composed of people who, irrespective of party 328affiliation, want a politics based on principle, seek real solutions to real problems, and believe government should be accountable and serve the common good. In the United States, as in the world, the defining concerns of the center reveal a deep longing to restore the sense of human connection found in the life of healthy families and communities and reflect a natural desire to support our children in their happy and healthful development.

It is on the foundation of this shared concern for children, family, and community that a majoritarian constituency for Earth Community will be built. It is here that the political extremists of the New Right are most vulnerable, because their policies constitute nothing less than a war against children, families, and communities.

CULTURAL POLITICS

As I noted in chapter 4, Empire holds the edge in institutional power, but Earth Community holds the winning edge in the moral power of an authentic living culture. In chapter 2, I framed the cultural politics of the Great Turning as a contest between the lower and higher orders of human consciousness for the swing vote of the Socialized Consciousness of the Good Citizen.

Recall that the Magical Consciousness of the Fantasizers and the Imperial Consciousness of the Power Seekers represent the lower orders of human consciousness. The Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness of the Cultural and Spiritual Creatives represent the higher orders. The human future turns on the question of whether the prevailing cultural values and worldview that shape the understanding of the swing majority are those of Empire or those of Earth Community. (See figure 2.1)

What the New Right Knows

In the United States, the competition for the Socialized Consciousness has been a one-sided contest, because few Cultural and Spiritual Creatives recognize the nature and implications of cultural politics. While the New Right focused on a relatively unified effort to frame and communicate cultural stories to win the swing vote of the Good Citizens who play by the rules and values defined by the prevailing culture, progressives fragmented into countless interest groups promoting fragmented policy 329agendas based on appeals to logic and conscience. As control of the defining cultural stories gave the New Right a growing political edge, progressives found themselves increasingly on the defensive, limited to efforts to stall or moderate the New Right’s agenda.

U.S. progressives began to realize they were missing something important only after the 2004 U.S. presidential election, when pundits reported on the basis of exit polls that “moral values” had been the deciding factor that returned to power the most extremist and, by many definitions, least moral and least family-friendly imperial regime in memory. Progressives have since been awakening to the significance of the New Right’s mastery of cultural politics and the significance of the swing majority of Good Citizens.

The New Right originally spoke of the “Silent Majority” and claimed to be its voice. Then, realizing that silence does not win elections and legislative battles, the New Right changed the label to the “Moral Majority” and called on Good Citizens to raise their voices in a call for national political morality. Working through churches and the media, the New Right defined morality in terms of issues like abortion and gay marriage, called them family values, and tapped into the near universal concern for the well-being of children and families to mobilize a political majority behind an anti-children, anti-family economic agenda.

Plutocrats and neocons care little about family values, however such values might be defined, but find it useful to emphasize issues like abortion and gay marriage to draw attention away from the economic issues about which they care a great deal. This clever political stroke enabled them to build electoral support for politicians aligned behind the real agenda of monetary concentration and elite imperial rule.

What Progressives Must Learn

If Earth Community is to prevail, progressives must learn to win in the arena of cultural politics. Win that struggle, and electoral and legislative victories will follow naturally. A key to success is to recognize that the different orders of human consciousness operate from different world-views and differ in their capacities for compassion and understanding. Messages easily understood by a higher order of consciousness may seem illogical or even absurd to a lower order.

Appealing to Power Seekers to recognize the moral hypocrisy of their actions is an exercise in futility, because the Imperial Consciousness 330lacks the emotional intelligence required to see itself through the eyes of the victims of its actions. It is far less of a stretch, however, for those of a Socialized Consciousness to recognize the hypocrisy, because they already possess the capacity for empathy, even though they may not yet have become practiced in applying that capacity beyond the circle of members of their own identity group.

Each of us, irrespective of the order of consciousness from which we normally function, is subject to competing pulls toward the values and worldview of those orders of consciousness that lie above and below our own. The Socialized Consciousness is pivotal in this regard as it has the ability to swing in the direction of either Empire or Earth Community—depending on the relative strength of the cultural pull. Earth Community enjoys the ultimate advantage, because the natural human drive—if not blocked—is to grow in capacity and understanding and to connect with ever expanding circles of life. Political extremists must engage in manipulation and deception to thwart this natural impulse. Cultural and Spiritual Creatives need only encourage and support it.

The Cultural and Spiritual orders of consciousness are the natural state of the mature adult consciousness, unless systematically suppressed by Empire. As noted in chapter 4, the circumstances of our time are producing a steady increase in the numbers of Cultural and Spiritual Creatives. It is within our means, should we choose to do so, to make the Cultural Consciousness the adult norm, with a majority achieving a Spiritual Consciousness by late middle age.

Compelling, unifying stories that speak to the potentials of the mature human consciousness are essential to the work of birthing Earth Community. Progressive movements should give substantial priority to the development and sharing of those stories, which provide a unifying rationale for our work and the narrative tools needed to turn the prevailing culture to Earth Community. Such stories become all the more compelling when supported by living demonstrations of the generative power of cooperative partnerships.

Bear in mind that cultural change does not take place simultaneously everywhere. It begins with people joining to create new cultural spaces. These spaces gradually grow and link to create yet larger spaces. As the spaces grow, they express and make more visible the opportunities of partnership and thereby facilitate the cultural and spiritual awakening of others. 331

FOUNDATIONS OF A POLITICAL CONSENSUS

The New Right’s divide-and-conquer imperial politics obscures the reality of what is actually a broad consensus on the importance of strong families and communities, environmental health, international cooperation, and democracy. If our attention as a nation and as a species were focused on the state of our children rather than the growth in our stock portfolios, our children would be healthy, our communities strong, and we would be on the path to the Great Turning rather than to the Great Unraveling.

It is instructive to look at what Americans are telling national pollsters about their concerns and values, as it suggests that a desire to strengthen the human connections of family and community and to secure a positive future for our children may be the most politically potent issue of our time.

Strong Families and Communities

Eighty-three percent of Americans believe that we need to rebuild our neighborhoods and small communities and fear that family life is declining.² Ninety-three percent agree that we are too focused on working and making money and not focused enough on family and community. Eighty-six percent agree that we are too focused on getting what we want now and not focused enough on the needs of future generations.³ Eighty-seven percent of adult Americans think “advertising and marketing aimed at kids today make children and teenagers too materialistic,” and 70 percent feel advertising “has a negative effect on their values and world view.” Seventy-eight percent believe “marketing and advertising put too much pressure on children to buy things that are too expensive, unhealthy, or unnecessary.”⁴

Our children agree. A poll of kids aged nine through fourteen commissioned by the Center for the New American Dream reports that 90 percent said friends and family are “way more important” than the things money can buy. Fifty-seven percent would rather spend time doing something fun with mom or dad than go shopping at the mall. Sixty-three percent would like their mom or dad to have a job that gave them more time to do fun things together. Only 13 percent wished their parents made more money. Seventy-five percent are worried that advertising that tries to get kids to buy things causes trouble between kids and parents.⁵ 332

Strong majorities of Americans also believe that education and health are community as well as individual issues and that they merit a community commitment in support of families and children. More than four out of five Americans consider the state of education (86 percent) and health care (82 percent) to be very important.⁶ Sixty-nine percent favor increasing federal spending for education.⁷ Seventy-nine percent believe it is more important to assure health care coverage for all than to cut taxes.⁸

Healthy Environment

The health and future of our children depend on a healthy environment. Nearly nine out of ten U.S. adults (87 percent) believe we need to treat the planet as a living system and that we should have more respect and reverence for nature. Nearly three out of four (74 percent) are concerned that pollution may destroy farmlands, forests, and seas.⁹ More than four out of five (85 percent) believe that the possibility of global warming should be treated as a serious problem.¹⁰ We strongly agree on the importance of setting higher emissions and pollution standards for business and industry (81 percent), spending more government money on developing solar and wind power (79 percent), and being more vigorous in enforcing federal environmental regulations (77 percent).¹¹

Two-thirds majorities are prepared to make lifestyle changes to improve environmental health. More than two in three would like to see a return to a simpler way of life with less emphasis on consumption and wealth (68 percent).¹² Sixty-six percent agree that it is a good idea to work fewer hours and spend less money, and 48 percent of us report already having voluntarily made changes in our lives that result in making less money.¹³

International Cooperation

Children are best served by a world of laws in which disputes are settled peacefully by negotiation and compromise. Seventy-six percent of Americans reject the idea that the United States should play the role of world police officer, and 80 percent feel it is playing that role more than it should be. Ninety-four percent believe that the best way to fight terrorism is to work through the United Nations to strengthen international laws against terrorism and to make sure UN members enforce them.¹⁴ Substantial majorities of Americans agree that the United States 333should participate in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (87 percent), the Ottawa Treaty to ban land mines (80 percent), the International Criminal Court (76 percent), and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change (71 percent).¹⁵

More than two out of three (71 percent) believe that our dependence on oil leads to conflicts and wars with other countries and believe it is better to deal with our dependence on oil by conserving energy (83 percent). Only a small minority (8 percent) prefers using military power to maintain access to oil in the Middle East and other strategic regions.¹⁶

Real Democracy

One might well wonder why there is such an enormous gap between what people want and what a presumably democratic political system is delivering. Substantial majorities of adults correctly recognize that this reflects the lack of accountability of power.

Nearly three out of four Americans (72 percent) believe corporations have too much power over too many aspects of American life.¹⁷ Clearly distinguishing between big and small businesses, 74 percent say big companies have too much influence over government policy and politicians; 82 percent say small business has too little.¹⁸ Eighty-eight percent distrust corporate executives, and 90 percent want new corporate regulations and tougher enforcement of existing laws.¹⁹ Only 4 percent believe that America is best served when corporations pursue only one goal—making the most profit for their shareholders.²⁰ Ninety-five percent believe corporations should sacrifice some profit for the sake of making things better for their workers and communities.²¹

Because of the excessive influence over government by corporations and other powerful special interests, only 27 percent of Americans trust the government to do what is right most of the time.²² Only 37 percent believe that government has a positive impact on their lives. Only 35 percent feel that ordinary people like themselves have any influence on what government does.²³ Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) believe that government is pretty much run by a few big interests.²⁴

The large number of respondents (83 percent) who believe that government can have a positive impact²⁵ on their lives suggests that most people recognize that the issue is accountability and that they are not rejecting government per se. People generally feel more connected to their local governments (51 percent) than to the federal government (33 334percent).²⁶ Most Americans have very little confidence in any of the major institutional concentrations of power, whether it be the executive branch of the federal government (23 percent), the press (15 percent), organized labor (15 percent), the Congress (13 percent), or major companies (12 percent).²⁷

The underlying pattern is quite clear. People share a healthy distrust of all forms of unaccountable power, feel powerless to do anything about it, and would rejoice in a transfer of power from the mega-institutions of global Empire to smaller, more local, and more accountable institutions responsive to family and community needs. In short, there is a strong constituency for real democracy in the United States.

FOR THE CHILDREN

Raffi Cavoukian, the troubadour whose music has nurtured a sense of love and wonder in millions of children for three decades, is an impassioned advocate for a humane and sustainable world. In 2004, he issued a call to humanity to create a world of “child-honoring societies” that embrace the principles of the Earth Charter.²⁸ It is a simple yet elegant idea that speaks to universal moral values and to the imperative and opportunity of our time.

Lead Indicator

The state of our children will be the clearest indicator of when we have successfully navigated the turn to Earth Community. When every human child is receiving the physical and emotional support needed from family and community to actualize the full potential of his or her humanity, we will know we are on course to a new human future. A child-honoring society must also honor family and community. The current state of our children tells us just how far we have yet to travel.

In the United States, 12 million children, 16.7 percent of the total, live in families that fall below the official poverty line, which means the family income is too low to provide even for the most basic needs of their children.²⁹ An estimated 4 million children in the United States experience prolonged periodic food insufficiency and hunger each year.³⁰

Deficiencies affect mental as well as physical well-being. In the United States, the average child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than 335did the average child who was receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950s.³¹ Even as overall death rates for persons one to twenty-four years of age fell by 53 percent from 1950 to 1999, homicide death rates for this age group rose by 134 percent, and suicide rates, the third-leading cause of death, rose by 137 percent.³² A 2002 National Research Council study reports that “at least one of every four adolescents in the U.S. is currently at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.”³³ The Commission on Children at Risk calls the increasing incidence of mental illness, emotional distress, and behavioral problems among U.S. children and adolescents an epidemiological crisis.³⁴

Numerous studies link the increases in anxiety, depression, and social dysfunction among young people in the United States to a decline in the social connectedness of families and communities³⁵— Frankl’s existential vacuum. According to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, married-couple households as a portion of all U.S. households have fallen from 80 percent in the 1950s to just 50.7 percent at the turn of the century.³⁶ Only 73 percent of U.S. children now reside with two biological parents.³⁷

Globally, UNICEF reports that of the world’s 2.2 billion children, 1 billion, nearly every second child, are living in poverty. Six hundred forty million children live without adequate shelter. Four hundred million have no access to safe water. Two hundred seventy million have no access to health services. More than thirty thousand die each day, eleven million a year before the age of five, mostly from preventable causes.³⁸

These are not the young of some alien species; they are our human children, and they represent our future. Failure to provide them with proper care reproduces the physical and psychological disabilities that are driving a descent into the barbarism of the Great Unraveling that, if not reversed, will define the human future for generations to come. The increasing struggle to provide for their needs is a tragedy being experienced by people in virtually every country that has come under the sway of corporate globalization.

Assault on Family Viability

The New Right’s propagandists would have us believe that family stress and breakdown are the fault of gay marriage, abortion, feminists, immigrants, and the liberals who support them. They are prepared to blame 336most anyone or anything except their own economic and social policies. In the pursuit of their personal power and profits, New Right leaders work tirelessly to

• roll back health and safety standards for the environment, consumers, and workers, including workplace safety standards, a meaningful minimum wage, and the right to form unions to bargain collectively for improved wages and working conditions;
• drive down wages and benefits for working people through international job outsourcing;
• shift the tax burden from the investor class to the working class;
• eliminate public services and safety nets, including public education and Social Security;
• generate military contracts for crony corporations;
• secure intellectual property to facilitate monopoly control and pricing of access to information and technology, including essential seeds and medicines;
• and increase tax breaks and subsidies for large corporations to give them a competitive advantage over local businesses.

Each of these policies transfers wealth and power from ordinary people to the ruling elite and leaves families and communities without the means to provide their children with the essentials for healthful physical and mental development.

The following are but a few of the consequences. The details of this list are specific to the United States, but similar consequences are being experienced nearly everywhere as a direct consequence of neoliberal policies.³⁹

• High unemployment undermines family formation, and punitive welfare policies force single mothers into jobs paying less than a living wage without affordable, regulated, high-quality child care options. Even two-parent households are forced to piece together multiple jobs, allowing no time or energy for child care or for a normal family and community life. Parents are thus forced to abandon their children to television and an unregulated entertainment and gaming industry that finds it profitable to fill their minds with images of sex and violence and to actively undermine parental authority and values.337
• Corporations spend billions on direct marketing to children to create lifetime addictions to junk food, alcohol, and cigarettes, and a childhood obesity epidemic is poised to become the leading cause of premature death.
• Declining health care coverage and skyrocketing health care costs place essential health care beyond the reach of most families.
• A deteriorating public education system is unable to deal with the special needs of children physically and mentally handicapped by the consequences of growing up in physically and socially toxic environments, let alone deal with normal individual differences in learning styles and talents.
• Lax environmental regulations allow corporations to discharge into the air, soil, and water massive quantities of tens of thousands of toxins destructive of children’s physical, neurological, and endocrinological development.

Intended or not, these conditions are all a direct result of the neoliberal economic policies that are the real priority of the corporate plutocracy. They leave families with few or no good options, and they lead to mental stress, family breakdown, divorce, the destruction of community life, and a coarsening of moral values. The New Right argues that it is the responsibility of parents, not the state, to provide proper care for their children. Ideally, that would be the case; but the policies the New Right advances virtually guarantee that the substantial majority of parents are unable to fulfill this responsibility.

Assault on Family Values

Advertising aimed explicitly at children in the unregulated marketplace is one of the more pernicious, intentional, and well-funded assaults by corporate plutocrats on family values. Corporate advertising executives long ago became aware that it is highly lucrative to begin conditioning very young children to value individualistic materialism over family and community. Their efforts became truly sinister a few years ago when they learned that “brand loyalty” begins to take shape as early as age two and that at age three, even before they are able to read, children are already making requests for specific brand-name products. Experts estimate that this early identification may be worth $100,000 per child in lifetime sales.⁴⁰ 338

Corporate marketing executives responded to this revelation by targeting advertising to ever younger children and using ever more sophisticated techniques to reach and claim their hearts and minds. Child-oriented marketing exploded in the 1990s, from an estimated $100 million in TV advertising targeted to children in 1983, to $15 billion in total advertising and marketing expenditures directed to children in 2004.⁴¹

Kid-oriented advertising defines cool as having money and attitude, indulging in material excess and expensive products, outwitting teachers, and tricking parents. Advertisers pride themselves on their ability to make kids feel that they are losers if they lack an advertised product and get them to nag their parents to buy it. The British side of the industry calls it pester power. Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor documents from her research inside a leading advertising corporation that this effort is conscious and intentional, and that it employs highly sophisticated research and techniques of psychological engineering.⁴²

In their efforts to bypass parental filters, corporations have been increasingly successful in bringing their products into schools, inserting product placements into curriculum materials and entertainment programming, and turning school sporting events into corporate billboards. They even hire kids to talk up products with their friends and host slumber parties that become intimate focus groups for testing reactions to new products.⁴³

The average child is exposed to more than forty thousand television commercials each year. Approximately 80 percent of the advertisements targeted to children fall into four product categories: toys, cereals, candies, and fast-food restaurants. The task force concluded that child-oriented advertising contributes to child obesity, parent-child conflict, materialistic attitudes, and tobacco and alcohol consumption and that exposure to media violence, including marketed video games, movies, and other media featuring violent content, contributes to fear, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and violent behavior.⁴⁴

A CONSERVATIVE-LIBERAL ALLIANCE

The New Right presents itself as conservative, but that is part of its deception. Its actual policy agenda is far from conservative, at least so far as the term conservative is understood by most Americans. There is a culture war in America, but it is not between liberals and conservatives, who in fact share a great many core values—including a commitment 339to children, family, community, personal responsibility, and democracy. It is between the culture of Empire and the culture of Earth Community. It is between the lower and higher orders of our human nature. It is between an imperial politics of individual greed and power and a democratic politics based on principle and the common good. It is between Power Seekers at the extreme political fringes who remain imprisoned in an Imperial Consciousness and the realists of the political mainstream who truly want to solve the problems that beset us all.

Call those of us on the side of Earth Community progressives—progressive conservatives and progressive liberals. Although we have our differences, we share a commitment to creating a society governed by ordinary people and dedicated to the ideals of liberty, justice, and opportunity for all. We are driven by principle rather than ideology, and we deal in reality rather than delusion. We have no more in common with the ideological extremists of the Far Left who seek violent revolution and state control of every aspect of life than we do with the ideological extremists of the Far Right who pursue imperial wars abroad, a theocratic state at home, and freedom for themselves to oppress the rest.

A politics of mature citizenship properly honors both the conservative values of freedom and individual responsibility and the liberal values of equity and justice for all. It brings together a conservative concern for community and heritage with a liberal concern for inclusiveness and the creation of a world that works for the whole of life and children yet to come. It recognizes the importance of local roots combined with a global consciousness. In the mature human mind, these are complementary values that call us to a path of spiritual health and maturity.

Progressives of all stripes act from deeply shared values that resonate with the most basic of Christian values —do not kill, do not steal, love thy neighbor as thyself, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yet just as these are not exclusively liberal or conservative values, neither are they exclusively Christian values. They are universal human values shared by believers in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native spirituality, among others. From this foundation, we can pull back from the extremes to find common ground even on those issues that presently are the focus of intense political acrimony, including abortion, gay rights, gun control, and the teaching of evolution. For too long we have allowed extremists on both sides to define these debates in all-or-nothing terms that drive out the search for common ground based on shared moral principles. 340

Beneath the political stresses in the United States that at times threaten to tear our nation apart, we can see the emergent outlines of a largely unrecognized consensus that the world most of us want to bequeath to our children is very different from the world in which we live. Conservatives and liberals share a sense that the dominant culture and institutions of the contemporary world are morally and spiritually bankrupt, unresponsive to human needs and values, and destructive of the strong families and communities we crave and our children desperately need. Deceived by the divide-and-conquer tactics of imperial politics, each places the blame on the other rather than forming a united front to reject Empire’s lies and unite in a stand against the New Right’s war against children, families, and communities.

Most people are stretched far too thin to spend the time it takes to sort out the competing arguments on whether global warming is taking place, why gas prices are so high, or why the Iraq war turned out to be such a terrible mess. What they know very well, however, is that their lives are stretched to the breaking point; their children suffer from asthma, obesity, and a continuous bombardment of sex and violence on TV and of ads promoting junk food; and they are unable both to keep bread on the table and to supervise their children. To raise healthy children we must have healthy, family-supportive economies, and to have healthy, family-supportive economies we must have healthy, democratically accountable political systems responsive to the needs and values of people, families, and communities. The struggle for the health and well-being of our children is potentially the unifying political issue of our time and an obvious rallying point for building an Earth Community political majority.

It is within our human means to create a world in which families and communities are strong, parents have the time to love and care for their children, high-quality health care and education are available to all, schools and homes are commercial free, the natural environment is healthy and toxin free, and nations cooperate for the common good. It is about renewing the democratic experiment, liberating the creative potential of the species, and coming home to life. It is an idea whose time has come and the foundation of a true political majority.