Rabbi Michael Lerner argues in Politico that “Barack Obama’s nonideological pragmatism will backfire”:
The nonideological approach implicitly encourages us to believe in Obama himself—he will be our savior, our refuge, our deliverer from the bad times of the Bush administration.
And indeed he may. I believe that we’ve never had a more brilliant, decent and spiritually grounded president. Yet by failing to educate people on a fundamentally different way of thinking, by eschewing articulation of the spiritual and ethical principles that ought to guide us as a society and showing how his programs flow from those principles, Obama is disempowering those who will have to continue the fight when he is no longer president.
[…]
In the politics of meaning that I first articulated to the Clinton White House—much to the annoyance of Rahm Emanuel and others who were religiously anti-ideological—I spoke about America’s hunger for a new ethos that would transcend the individualism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace. America needs a new bottom line so that corporations, government policies, social institutions and even personal behavior are judged rational, productive or efficient not only to the extent that they maximize money and power (the old bottom line) but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, as well as enhance our capacity to go beyond a utilitarian approach to nature so that we can respond with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe.
Read the full piece here.