What new religion awaits birth?

This Sun column, Progressive Majority Coalition, has had a long-standing open mission of converting liberals into progressives. The fact that I am not concerned with trying to convert or persuade conservatives or anarchists is my way of focusing my efforts.

At the risk of narrowing my audience even further, I am compelled to draw some important distinctions among the spectrum of the American Overton window designated by the term ‘the left’. We need to parse this semantically.

In general, I don’t think of myself as a leftist; I identify as a Francine Catholic and as a democratic socialist. The term ‘socialist’ has a specific meaning and a two hundred year historical body of applied knowledge and a tradition of updating of the model every generation.

I am in a very big grab bag of all kinds of sketchy characters and dubious tendencies under the tattered big tent that we call ‘the left’. I disavow quite a few of them, so I don’t feel compelled to conflate our projects. Fox News and MSM love to hippy-punch this imaginary construct. The sad truth is that there is no left, just leftists.

The right and the center both want to create this ideological pinata of ‘the left’ in order to zero in on the most extreme provocateurs or the most unhinged personalities in that subculture.

The subsets of ‘the left’ that I encounter here on the West Coast and the ones that I am most likely to be in coalition with at some point are: The MSNBC Democratic Party liberal base, the identity politics centered radical liberals (rad-libs), the labor union activists, the Greens or conservationists, and the New Age cohort.

I have already expended plenty of ink on my assessment of the current environmental movement, so I’m not going to re-ignite that fire.

I’m going to address my dear New Age brothers and sisters. I love these folks, because I grew up in that culture with my wild free-spirit hippy mother.

They are the kindest people I know. They also have a lot of bad politics, which is never collectively resolved because they don’t like to talk politics.

I have learned the hard way that it is viscerally unpleasant for the most spiritually refined among them to engage in conventional political discourse. They are repelled by the tawdry spectacle.

They can be mobilized along a narrow range of issues, like protecting wilderness areas or protecting native sovereignty. They are disengaged from party affiliation and are not likely voters.

The New Age community reinforces its post-Christian popular religion with frequent gatherings in seasonal cycles in the course of the year. One of the primary elements of these ceremonies are poems and practices designed to resonate with our spiritual longing. A good Wiccan celebration with music, dancing and food is the neo-Pagan Mass.

As a bright young man, like many kids who go to church with their parents, I began to question the utility of our ceremonies. Most of the time, it felt like what we doing is a hopeful elaborate collective visualization designed to manifest a better world. In the real world, we were clearly not bending the curve of history.

The question that the New Age spiritual visioning exercises always evoked in me is: “And the next step is…?”

I demanded to know, step-by-step, in the real world, how does the engine of a visionary planetary consciousness mesh with the drive train of collective will and agency that actually moves the human project forward?

We have to come to terms with the dynamic of power. Until we gain actual power in the world, our spiritual practices are just forms of self-soothing.

History shows how evanescent utopian social movements are without a materialist anchor and institutional foundations.

When are we going move from intention to practice to mastery and work with our confederates to run the world from a new paradigm?