Steve Schwartzberg

As a candidate in the Democratic primary, and, if need be, 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 civility that at least some of us have enjoyed has depended on those deep dreams which, at the same time, have often served as cover to hide the ongoing abuses that those outside the circle of civility have suffered.  This has been true both domestically and in American foreign relations as well….

The Native views that can be seen through the filter of these seventeenth century missionary accounts [quoted in the full manifesto linked to below] 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, in effect, 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 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 outside of “the rule of law”).

The challenges we face are not simply political—they are relational. Here there is tremendous room for us to learn from the Native peoples how to conduct ourselves in the world.  This is necessary to strengthen our capacity for resistance, and is further needed so that once this corrupt oligarchy and its fascist allies are defeated their reemergence is effectively discouraged, and, above all, such learning from the Native peoples is needed so that we can maintain right relations going forward.

We should also seek to learn from the Polish trade union movement, Solidarity, whose success in organizing 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.

In the modern political imagination, virtue is too often reduced to laws and policies—things we have sought to enforce from above.  But as Martín Prechtel, who has studied deeply with the Tz’utujil Maya, reminds us: virtue is something we grow into, something embedded in the rhythms of the seasons, in the cycles of birth and death, in the ways we care for one another and the stories we tell our children, and, above all, in the responsibilities we inherit from those who came before us. 

In the Enlightenment tradition, from which American democracy has traditionally drawn much of its strength, virtue has long been presented as an individual pursuit, a matter of moral reasoning and personal character.  In many Indigenous traditions, in contrast, virtue is not something possessed—it is something enacted, something practiced within the rhythms of right relationships among beings who share creational identities.

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 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…

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.