Identity Politics and the Common Good

In his encyclical declaring the need to get honking on global climate change Pope Francis used a phrase I have seldom heard in political parlance since Nixon traded Southern racism for Republican votes and Reagan turned the people’s government over to the corporations. That phrase is “the common good.”

In my youth this phrase was often used. Social Security was viewed as a common good, as was unemployment benefits and public education. Under the constant barrage of propaganda from the corporate media, people were led to believe that the purpose of these institutions was to make money. This was usually argued under the false premise that the private sector could do the job more cheaply.

Bernie Sanders, in my judgement, is bringing the common good back into political prominence. If he and Hillary Clinton are the main contenders in the Democratic primary in the 2016 election the result could be a very clarifying moment in American political culture.

Suppose Bernie continues to define the basic issue this country faces as radical inequality, not just in wealth, but opportunity, education, and the debilitating effects it has on the nation’s well-being. Also suppose that Hillary, lacking credibility on such issues, plays her strong suit, namely, justice for women for which she is rightly acknowledged.

If such a confrontation were to develop between the rights of women and the need to wrest control of human destiny from the grasp of the corporate cabal and their trade agreements, it is not difficult to see corporations pouring their resources into women’s rights as preferable to corporate ostracism. Once again we would see corporate control of society exhibit its divide and conquer manipulations at work.

We would then have a confrontation between identity politics and the politics of the whole. I have long argued that we desperately need to see humanity as a whole if we are to deal effectively with the huge and multidimensional problems that face our species.

While humanity focuses on its own immediate issues, the corporations focus on organizing human society as a whole and for profit. Identity politics and other divisive movements leave the corporations free to pursue their venal machinations.

Let me be perfectly clear. There is ominous evidence that corporations intend to replace government as the controlling institution of society. Aside from the obvious control their money exercises in our own society, they are using the multiplying trade agreements to transfer priority in governance from the people to themselves. By Constitutional law our treaties have the same authority as our legislatively generated law. When corporate lawyers get together to write their secret trade agreements they do so with no consent of the governed and no due process by the representatives of the governed as they are fast tracked.  As an example, several years ago Venezuela sued because our environmental law required the use of low-sulfur oil for fuel. Venezuelan oil is not low-sulfur. Hence a trade agreement was being used to impose increased pollution on the citizens of this country.

It is only when the intent of corporations to control global society is adequately understood that the immense task  Bernie Sanders has set both for himself and the citizens of the United States becomes clear and hence the importance of what he and his supporters are trying to do. People not profits must be placed at the center of global governance. As we put aside many of our identity issues when faced with threat of global dictatorship in World War II, so we must unite to preserve a very fragile democracy.

As we try to deal with the consequences of global warming and climate change we face the prospect of global dictatorship if the effort is too much for the democratic process. The corporations aim to insure that it is their dictatorship. When Bernie is responding to the thousands that turn out to hear him he makes it clear that it will take millions. We must get beyond black and white, gender, my nation, culture, religion, versus yours and focus on our species and its survival. Anything less will doom us to eventual extinction.

The election of 2008 is an example of what happens when identity politic takes center stage. Our focus was on getting a young black man elected president and thereby dealing a major blow to racism, the most virulent political and social disease in America. We got that, but we also got an eight year extension of war, corporation- friendly response to a major recession (some banks are too big to fail and the culprits do not go to jail), a continuance of torture of detainees and their trial by secret courts, a grave failure to support public education and a continuance of the for-profit student loan program that is crushing the young and making higher education once again the privilege of the wealthy. While we celebrated the election of a black president the corporations continued their efforts to control global society through Obama-supported trade agreements such as Transpacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trading in Services Agreement (TISA).       

We cannot let this happen again. We must keep our eyes solidly on the need to defeat the corporations.

Bob Newhard