Steve Schwartzberg

Steve Schwartzberg is a scholar, teacher, and activist whose politics are rooted in the conviction that genuine self-government flows from love, belonging, and deep knowledge of the sacredness of all life.  This is a deep knowledge that we, the American people, still have the opportunity to learn from the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent (Turtle Island).  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 in genuine self-government rather than abusively on the Earth in what remains of an increasingly broken democracy.  There is no going back to a lost “normality.”  There is a new and uncertain future which holds the potential of right relations with all.

“I joined the Young People’s Socialist League in the late 1970s,” Steve 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.

“We should not seek to build the beloved community as if it were something absent, something that human hands must somehow construct from nothing,” Steve declares: “The beloved community—the sacred web of all beings—always already exists. It is woven into the very fabric of creation. Our task is not to invent it, but to re-member it: to restore our awareness, heal our relations, and align our lives with the balance, harmony, and abundance of the Earth and Her cosmic society. Politics, rightly understood, is antithetical to domination and rests on the practices of belonging. 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 (Dakota) calls ‘clear and coherent thought.’”

The deep knowledge that we need is in the original instructions of our spiritual DNA.  The problem is that it is easy to forget what we know in the midst of what Trudell has called “tech-‘no-logic’ civilization.”

Writing of the Wendat Nation, in 1648, the missionary Father Lallemant noted that “They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.” Writing of the Montagnais-Naskapi, six years earlier, another missionary reported: “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases.” The missionary Gabriel Sagard, in an even earlier work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, observed: “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”

The Native views that can be seen through the filter of these seventeenth century missionary accounts are part of the self-understanding of more genuinely self-governing societies; a self-understanding—if we will adopt it—that is capable of bringing down a corrupt billionaire class and an authoritarian administration threatening to move from trade wars of aggression to more conventional ones by invading traditional friends like Greenland, or Panama, or Canada, or Mexico, while supporting Netanyahu’s grotesque and genocidal attacks in Gaza and while ignoring Putin’s grotesque and genocidal attacks in Ukraine.  First, the American people were told that brutality might have to be tolerated in the interests of economic prosperity.  Now, we are being told to accept economic misery in the interests of pursuing brutality.

The “civility” of traditional American politics, a “civility” that has always excluded some—such as, for centuries, the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent—is now threatened with destruction.  This “civility” has been deteriorating for decades, but now—instead of a corrupt oligarchy more or less covertly seeking to buy elections and politicians—we face the prospect of a fascist president almost openly seeking to serve the billionaire class by treating the American people—and, especially, the working class—in a closer approximation to the way the peoples of the Native Nations have been treated (in other words in violation of “the rule of law”).

In addition to learning from the Native peoples, we should also be learning from the Polish labor movement, Solidarity, whose success in organizing trade unions and conducting a general strike, in the spring and summer of 1980, began the overthrow of the Soviet empire.

Traditionally, and unfortunately, American politics have been shaped by a vision of human beings as separate from each other and separate from the land that sustains us. There is another way: a way of belonging, a way of reverence, a way of remembering that before we are citizens of any state, before we belong to any human tradition, we belong to the Earth and Her cosmic society; that we all begin with what might be called “creational identities.”  Knowledge of these creational identities does not erase any other identities, but rather invites us into a deeper understanding of who we are.

These creational identities are rooted in the fact that all beings—animate and inanimate, seen and unseen—are our kith and kin and always already form a beloved community of which human beings are a small and dependent part. We are, all of us, responsible to act with respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life in pursuit of alignment with the balance and harmony and abundance of the Earth. This is part of global knowledge, part of those aspects of Indigenous knowledge that are perhaps easiest for non-Natives to apprehend.

The great Confucian scholar Zhang Zai sought to offer something that may be considered resonant with such global knowledge a thousand years ago:

“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.”

This is the heart of our vision: a society rooted not in domination, but in sisterhood and brotherhood. A politics not of division, but of equal belonging. A democracy that does not merely—and only ideally—seek to govern on behalf of the people, but a more genuine self-government in which we remember who we are and who we can be—together.

The deepest problems we confront as a nation are rooted in our failures to see the world through the framework of global knowledge; our failures to treat all as we would wish to be treated, and in our inflicting on others conduct we would not want inflicted upon us.  We have mistakenly placed our faith in “benevolent authority” (however variously defined) rather than in a collective self-consciousness committed to a healthy social self-understanding of natural law grounded in love for the Earth….

As an independent candidate for Congress in the Illinois 5th District, I will caucus with the Democrats, if elected.  It is my position, however, that both parties must learn to grasp the complex political truth of America: That our country was founded not only on slavery and genocide, but on deep dreams (some of them worthy) of building both a better country and a better world, and that both of these aspects of our reality are central to who we have been as a society.  The genuine civility that at least some of us have enjoyed has depended on the worthy dreams among those deep dreams which, at the same time, have often served as cover to hide the ongoing abuses that those outside the circle have suffered behind the facade of a false civility.  This has been true both domestically and in American foreign relations as well.

If we are to do markedly better in the future—and to live in genuine self-government rather than simply dream it—we must choose the way of reverence as a people and as human beings: We must change our collective self-consciousness and adopt a new social self-understanding grounded in the wisdom of this land and our maintenance of right relations with each other and with our grandmother Earth.

18 May 2025

© Steven J. Schwartzberg 2025

For the full manifesto

Vote for social democratic leadership for the Illinois 5th District to champion:

  •  Universal pre-K
  •  Free/Affordable Public College
  •  Transform Our Energy System
  •  Overturn Citizens United
  •  Guarantee Paid Family/Medical Leave
  •  Raise The Minimum Wage to $18/hr
  •  End the War on Drugs
  •  Rebuild Our Crumbling Infrastructure
  •  Restore Eisenhower Era Top Tax Rates
  •  Stop Endless Military Spending
  •  Expand Social Security
  •  Train the Police in De-escalation
  •  Demilitarize the Police
  •  Bust up the “Too Big to Fail”
  •  Welcome Refugees and Immigrants
  •  Support Planned Parenthood
  • A Foreign Policy for Civility
  • End the Genocides in Gaza and Ukraine
  • Justice for the Native Nations
  • A Freedom Budget to Abolish Poverty
  • Abundant Care for All (M4A+)
  • ___________________________
    The artwork above, “The Valley,” is a painting by Nick Fisher. It presents a view of a peaceful, prosperous, and ecologically-sound community.