When I first heard Van Jones call for the widespread mobilization of a Love Army to stand against Trump’s legions of haters, I was taken aback by the juxtaposition of Love, the life-giving force of pure positive energy in the universe, with Army—a hierarchical human structure organized in the service of war, death and destruction.
I’m still not crazy about the term, but I do appreciate the sentiment behind Jones’ call, especially after reading this excellent interview with him in Rolling Stone.
“Tight around Trump is a little hate army… of very cynical, nasty people who took over our government. We have to build a massive Love Army that can take the country and the government back in a better direction. That is completely doable. Because there’s now many more people wanting to get involved than were trying to get involved a month ago, when it would have mattered. [bitter laughter]
“The problem is not the abundance of people with bad intentions; it’s the superabundance of people with good intentions who don’t know what to do yet.”
Jones suggests we people of good intentions get organized in order to fight back in the service of Love. Impossible to argue with that, and bravo to him and other leaders, from Standing Rock on down the line, to getting right back on the horse after that wild bucking bronco episode otherwise known as the election.
The Army metaphor conjures up a vision of many people coming together in a common cause, carrying out a vision set by the politicians and crafted into an actionable agenda by the generals.
That would be OK if we could trust the politicians to actually represent us. But one thing this election season has made quite clear is the extent to which our political elite has become alienated from the ordinary folks. Bernie Sanders aside, both the Democratic Party and the Republicans showed themselves to be equally tone-deaf to the concerns of masses of Americans in every state who are just barely scraping by in an economy entirely rigged for the rich and powerful.
To use obsolete terms that suddenly seem relevant again, America is host to a huge Third World within its own seemingly First World borders. This has always been the case—ask any denizen of a rural trailer park, a city public housing project, or, for that matter, an Indian reservation.
But now the middle class is slipping into the abyss of poverty too. Between the credit card shysters with their 35% interest rates, the mortgage loan sharks, the exorbitant cost of health care and higher education, the takeover of Main Street by the big box corporations and the steady erosion of working class jobs to other countries and to robots….the middle class is going, going, gone.
Why these folks thought Donald Trump, of all people, might serve their interests, is a puzzle for the historians. It seems mainly to do with the dumbing down of our general populace, raised on reality TV and shoot-em-up video games, trapped in oppressive school systems that discourage creativity, questioning and independent thought, and insulated within conservative communities that fall back on a passive, fatalistic acceptance of “God’s will” that can be easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.
That this is the reality for millions of people in “Third World America” is an outrageous truth that Democrats must bear responsibility for, as well as Republicans. President Obama did his best to be the president of “all Americans,” but with the Republican Congress blocking him at every turn, his hands were largely tied. And even he supported the TTP agreement, another trade deal that embraced globalization without accounting for the harm it might do to working Americans or to the environment.
As Van Jones says in the Rolling Stone interview, both parties sold working Americans down the river—and they’ve been doing it for many, many years, it’s nothing new.
What’s new is the social media technology that enables us to know about it, practically as it’s happening.
Even when we’re talking about Big Espionage operations, like the Russian hacking of the U.S. election, now information that would have been sealed away behind CONFIDENTIAL barriers for years is suddenly rip-roaring through social media channels, totally out of the control of the politicians or the generals.
This can seem scary, but it is also a huge opportunity. If we’re to create a Love Army, it will be a decentralized one, mobilizing from individual communities and operating through household computer networks, connected by telecommunications satellites open to any user with a smartphone.
The elites who developed the technology that is so ubiquitous now did not anticipate it would eventually have the potential to be used in the service of populist goals. Donald Trump, with his simple but effective use of Twitter, is so hard to understand because he’s playing both sides so well: the populist general mobilizing the working class to follow him…while at the same time courting the rich and powerful and promising them total control.
What does “populist” mean in these topsy-turvy times? It means Bernie Sanders as well as Donald Trump—both of these guys tried to work through established channels, the Elephants and the Mules, to gain the power to remake the country in their image. Bernie might have succeeded if the Democrats hadn’t stupidly shut him out, leaving the field open for Trump and his Russian allies to sweep to victory.
But here comes Van Jones and his Dream Corps with a new definition of “populist” and a new, 21st century vision of how to mobilize a decentralized army in the service of Love.
His reset at the values level starts with national teach-ins, “once a week, every week, standing up for the most vulnerable people: Muslims, the DREAMers, Jewish people, women, trans people, black protestors. And once a week, give the whole country a chance to show a whole lotta love – both to demonstrate and deepen a solidarity with those groups, all under one hashtag. #LoveArmy is an opportunity to reassert at a values level….And it has to be inclusive, by the way, of rural poor people, of people in coal country, red-state and industrial Heartland voters who are also going to be let down by Trump, who are also going to be in a lot of pain.
“If you’re building a Love Army that includes all of the usual suspects that Trump went after and also people that Trump tricked, you start building a majority movement. That’s what I’m trying to do. The people that Trump attacked, but also the people that Trump duped.”
The truth is that the Democrats have not acted with sufficient love either. As Jones puts it baldly, “Both political parties suck right now. The Democratic Party has become a hidey hole for all kinds of elite snobbery, and Democrats won’t confess to it and deal with it. The Republican Party has become a hidey hole for all kinds of bigots, and they won’t confess or deal with it.”
Maybe we are at the point in our Union, almost 250 years on, when another party is needed—a party that is truly in the service of all Americans, and even bigger—in the service of Life everywhere on our planet.
This new party needs to go beyond tribalism to work on behalf of the health and well-being of the entire planet and all its denizens, from the rainforests to the boreal forests, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and everywhere in-between. We are all connected—we know that know scientifically, and our values, as Jones says, must come from that profound awareness of interbeing.
I would like to see Jones stir up not just an army, but a political party that could advance his inclusive activist vision and mobilize those of us who want peace, prosperity and the happiness and well-being of all. Maybe he should call it the Dream Party.
I’m in, Van! Sign me up!
While outwardly conforming to the dominant beauty standards for women—dyed and coiffed hair, generous make-up, body-flattering clothing, heels—you also have to be commanding and aggressive, a no-nonsense sort of leader that everyone will automatically respect.
Trump is like a stand-in for every boorish man who ever held power in America, whether a boss or a husband, a rich client or a random stalker on the street. Men like Trump elevate their own fragile egos by putting down others, with women being a convenient, always-in-view set of targets.
Perhaps that was part of what I admired so much about Bernie Sanders—his easiness with being nurturing and warm, even cuddly, on the campaign trail. No doubt this gentleness comes easier for men as they age and no longer have to prove themselves through aggression.
Whenever I turn away from the glare of the brightly lit television screens and stage sets of our political moment, back to the green and gold of the forest, I am reminded of what really matters. The 
Transition Times 