Steve Schwartzberg is a scholar, teacher, and activist whose politics are rooted in the conviction that genuine self-government flows from love, belonging, and a deep knowledge of, and respect for, the sacredness of all life.  This is a knowledge and respect of which we, the American people, still have the opportunity to learn from the peoples of the Native Nations of Turtle Island (this continent), and from listening together to the Earth.  If we are to free ourselves from a corrupt billionaire class, its fascist allies in the Republican Party, and its neoliberal enablers in the Democratic Party, we must do so.  There is no other way for us to live as a free people: to live peacefully “with the Earth,” as Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) puts it—in genuine self-government—rather than abusively “on the Earth” in what remains of an increasingly broken democracy.

Most of the social democratic measures that we can advocate in response to our present situation—even to the extent that they strengthen and improve our civilization—will soon become part of the problem. We can, and must, advocate for an improved Medicare for All and a Freedom Budget, including a universal basic income, to abolish poverty.  But we need to find a way out from under civilization itself—in other words we need to find a way to free ourselves from the politics of domination—a way into a new social self-understanding of who we are.  This is a need that no “authority”—no matter how “benevolent”—can meet.

This present campaign, however, can help provide access to relevant ideas such as those offered by such Native scholars and activists as John Trudell (Dakota) here1 and here2 and Tiokasin Ghosthorse here3 and here4 and Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) here5 and here6.  It can facilitate an international conversation on Turtle Island in which there can be a meeting of hearts and minds from which alone can come all the good we aim at.

“I joined the Young People’s Socialist League in the late 1970s,” Steve Schwartzberg writes, “when the great civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin was the National Chairman of the adult organization, the Social Democrats, USA, and became directly active in politics again in 2016 knocking on doors for Bernie Sanders in Iowa and Wisconsin.  I am a former director of undergraduate studies for international studies at Yale University and the author of Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal. I first ran for Congress in the Democratic primary in 2018 and received 4% of the vote!”

For more about Steve’s views and background, see the text and video of his recent speech on “America and the Kingdom, revisited,” his campaign manifesto, and the “About” section of this website.

A thousand years ago, the great Confucian scholar Zhang Zai sought to share something that may be considered part of the “global knowledge” we urgently need: “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”

Our most profound intellectual mistake, as the American people, has been our failure to understand the responsibilities that come with our location between Earth and Heaven—between immanence and transcendence—our failure to understand that genuine self-government is rooted in our relationship to Earth’s immanent divinity whereas all domination, indeed all claims on the illusion of “legitimate” authority, are rooted in an idolatrous understanding of our relationship to the transcendent divinity of God.

On the basis of a connection with transcendence, we have presumed a “right” to treat our grandmother Earth as if she were made up of “things” to be dominated by our will and disposed of at our pleasure. Perhaps the most grotesque expression of this idolatrous presumption—the beating heart of “Christian” Nationalism—is to be found in Georgia Senator John Forsyth’s advocacy on the floor of the Senate in 1830 for what would become the Trail of Tears: “All Christendom seems to have imagined that, by offering that immortal life, promised by the Prince of Peace to fallen man, to the aborigines of this country, the right was fairly acquired of disposing of their persons and their property at pleasure.”

“This is why the first, and in many ways the most important, issue upon which I am running for the United States Senate,” Steve Schwartzberg declares, “is justice for the peoples of the Native Nations beginning with a reversal of the Supreme Court’s dishonest and anticonstitutional claim that the United States has a ‘right’ to dominate the Native peoples and their lands—beginning with an end to the vicious lie that the Congress, or for that matter any state, has ‘plenary power’ over any Native Nation whether derived from the doctrine of Christian discovery or any other source. There is no basis in the Constitution for such a claim. On the contrary, our treaty obligations to these peoples are among their constitutional rights in our law (properly construed). These nations are meant to be respected as independent sovereigns.”

Such a reversal of two-hundred-year-old mistaken precedent is, of course, only a first step—an effort to put “Brotherhood First,” rather than “America First”—and to understand by brotherhood the maintenance of right relations with all of our kith and kin; with all living beings. “I have no doubt that by putting a measure of respect and love for others out into the world, a measure of love and respect will eventually return from the world to us,” Steve says: “The circulation of spirit, consciousness, and energy is part of natural law.”

The next step will be guaranteeing every Native Nation a viable land base on which to recover what Steve Newcomb calls their “original free and independent existence.”  Ultimately, we should hope to see the day when the international laws and usages that were so much a part of life on Turtle Island for millennia before the eurochristian invaders arrived are again respected and serve as the key to interpreting American law as well.

We must learn as a people, perhaps for the first time, the balance between the transcendent calling us to remember that every being shines with divine possibilities and the immanent reminding us that the divine already lives within every grain of soil, every trembling heart. We have failed to understand this—we have failed to understand the unity of immanence and transcendence, the unity of divinity—and so inserted ourselves into a role that is not ours to play in a seemingly biblically-inspired—but actually utterly twisted and illegitimate—position of domination; a position of domination that can only be sustained on the basis of illusion, idolatry, and violence.

The peoples of the Native Nations know that what they might refer to as “all our relations,” or as the sacred web of life—what we might refer to with Martin Luther King Jr.’s term as the beloved community—always already exists. It is woven into the very fabric of creation. It is immanent as well as emergent in our world. Its presence was once traditionally and widely respected on this continent. Our task is not to invent it, but to re-member it: to restore our awareness, heal our relationships, and align our lives with the balance, harmony, and abundance of the Earth and her cosmic society through respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life. Politics, rightly understood, is antithetical to domination and rests on the practices of love, belonging, and respect. It is the humble and joyous work of restoring what was never truly lost—only forgotten in the midst of illusions that have been terribly destructive in their consequences, but which remain illusions that can be dispelled with what John Trudell calls “clear and coherent thought.”

Seeking to understand—and to respond to—the breakdown of democracy, human rights, and republicanism that we have been experiencing, it is helpful to recognize that there is no going back to a lost “normality.” The politics of domination hidden within our traditions have come to the surface and cannot simply be pushed back down by appealing to civility. Instead, more genuine responses are needed; responses that do not simply replicate or even worsen old problems under new names. Rather than spread fires by attempting to fight them, we need, as Bayo Akomolafe has suggested, to become water. We need to become, as Trudell has suggested, raindrops that can join with the power of Earth’s storms.

There is a new and uncertain future that holds the potential of right relations with all. Rather than become preoccupied with what has become of us, we need to go back to our beginnings, reconsider our origin stories, and, without assuming that we have the ability to “fix things,” seek to align our hearts and minds with the immanent divinity of our grandmother Earth.

We need a revival of the knowledge that—if we are to be a free people—each of us must consider ourselves of as much consequence as all the others. That we must be able to laugh at and make sport of those who consider themselves “leaders”—and these “leaders,” in turn, must have no coercive capacity that they can exert over us. Even more important, we must know that we are all in this together and that no one among us should go hungry, or live in poverty, or fail to get the medical care they need because they can’t afford it.

A call for a twenty-first century version of A. Philip Randolph’s Freedom Budget to abolish poverty in this country, as advocated by Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, has been on this website since 2018. So has support for an improved Medicare for All—which includes an emphasis on home health care, as advocated by C. Gresham Bayne, and an emphasis on proximal health as advocated by Eve Shapiro and Paul Uhlig—an improved Medicare for All which we might call: Abundant Care for All. These are not radical goals as they still rely upon, and can be achieved within, the framework of democratic politics as democracy has traditionally been understood. But anyone voting for Steve should realize that his aspirations for the American people are much greater than this and that he will continue to give voice to them, and to criticize our failures to realize them, even if elected.

“Although I have deep disagreements with both political parties,” Steve says, “they are not equivalent.  If elected, I would caucus with the Democrats.  But as long as their vision for the future remains a kinder, gentler version of what the Republicans have on offer, they can not be expected to accomplish much.”

8 January 2026

© Steven J. Schwartzberg 2026

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