Digby passed on a speech by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka over the weekend, and what she said: it’s a corker.
Trumka delivered his speech to the tweedy types at Harvard in part make common cause with them. As he says, the populist anger free-floating across the nation forces a choice on intellectuals: “whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege.”
Digby comments, laconically:
That anger is going to go somewhere. And right now it’s going toward us. As far as the demagogues of the right are concerned, its the intelligentsia that’s the enemy. We’re all in this together.
My first thought upon reading this paragraph was, “Well, and who’s in the front line?” It’s pastors, of course: we are for many people the only public intellectuals they’ll ever know. It is precisely the tendency of pastors (and other religious leaders) to criticize economic privilege that leads Glenn Beck to attack “social justice churches,” continuing a right-wing tradition that goes back thirty years at least.
So I do believe that intellectuals, unionists and other critics of economic privilege share a common cause. (Sometimes, they are even one and the same, such as RD’s own Peter Laarman, a former labor organizer, current ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and all-around fierce opponent of Mammon.) Anyone who dares to suggest that the market is something less than divinely instituted is going to be in trouble with conservative demagogues these days.
In fact, we are all so much on the same page that I would like to suggest that the unions consider a theologian-in-residence program. If they can endow a faculty position at Harvard, why not underwrite a religious thinker to consider the state of the economy from the perspective of “the least of these?” Some people will grumble that it would be using God’s name in the service of class warfare. But cheese and crackers, it’s not like the right wing hasn’t done the same thing for decades. I’d think a little balance would be in order.
If all a labor theologian did was highlight economic language in the Bible, it would be a valuable public service. Even better would be highlighting the very un-Christian ways violent rhetoric is used in service of economic privilege. Haters and militiamen should not be able to hide behind the screen of faith, that much should be right in the unions’ wheelhouse, as they say.
So how about it Mr. Trumka? Sponsor a little tikkun olam and repair the social fabric of the nation at the same time? We are all in this together, after all.
