When Leaders Falter, the People Must Rise

In the spring of this year, when a budget bill was in the US Senate for the first time since Donald Trump had unilaterally declared his intention to ignore Congressional authority and defy Constitutional obligations, Democrats in the Senate had their first opportunity to leverage their power against an autocratic regime: MAGA couldn’t pass a budget to fund the government without Democratic votes in the Senate. Here was a chance to take a stand and make clear to the American people that we weren’t facing a normal partisan fight; this was an authoritarian crisis, and it demanded a different kind of leadership.

But Chuck Schumer did not seize the moment to rally an opposition to Trump’s authoritarian regime. He made a deal to fund the government.

You cannot make a deal with an authoritarian who doesn’t keep his word and refuses accountability. This is a lesson as old as Moses’ confrontation with Pharaoh. In the biblical story, Moses learned that it didn’t matter what Pharaoh said. When the ruler’s interests no longer aligned with his promise, Pharaoh would use his power to crush the people – forcing them to make bricks without straw and sending troops to force them to comply with his will. Moses learned to trust the God who asked him and the people to consider their own power in the face of an authoritarian regime.

“What’s in your hand?” God asks Moses. When leaders fail the people, what can the people do?

Since this spring, people have risen up in the United States to challenge authoritarianism. No Kings marches have filled the streets with millions of Americans from all walks of life. Boycotts against Target and Tesla and Disney have demonstrated to corporate powers that complicity with the regime’s violence can have real consequences. At the grassroots level in occupied cities, people have come together in networks of mutual aid to care for one another where their government is not only failing them, but actively harming them through ICE raids and violent assaults by unidentified masked men.

In the midst of this popular uprising to meet the authoritarian crisis at hand, we launched Our Moral Moment six months ago to highlight the moral narrative that motivates many of these acts of civil resistance and to platform the voices of directly impacted people because they know from experience what it means to be hunted by ICE, starved by cuts to nutrition assistance, or robbed of loved ones because of the denial of access to healthcare. These directly impacted people – and the millions of Americans who know and love them – are crying out for life. And we went to the polls where there were elections last week to make clear in record numbers that we want leaders who will refuse to bow to authoritarian demands.

Chuck Schumer did not get that message. Whoever met with him behind closed doors and planned for eight Senators who are not up for re-election next year to make a deal did not get the message. But we must be clear: more and more Americans – including many in leadership positions right now – are getting the message.

Democratic leadership in the US House has been clear that they will stand firm now and in future negotiations against a federal budget that cuts healthcare for millions of Americans and makes it more expensive for tens of millions of others. When we met with them last week, they agreed that this was a moral issue that goes beyond partisan allegiances or political calculations. Insisting that an authoritarian regime can’t withhold vulnerable people’s healthcare to force their opposition to give up fighting for healthcare isn’t right versus left. It’s right versus wrong.

But elected representatives cannot hold the line on this alone. They need more than words and votes to win the moral high ground in this budget fight. They need the people who can tell the story of what this policy violence really means to come to the nation’s Capitol with moral and religious leaders to cry out for life.

This is the cry we brought to the Capitol rotunda six months ago: Dear Lord, deliver us from the deceptive lie that says our nation will be better off if those who have little get less and those who have too much get more.

This is the cry that Moral Mondays have brought to Congressional offices across the South since the Big Bad Deadly and Destructive bill passed, setting in motion the policy violence that this shutdown stand-off has tried to stop. We reject the fable that some have embraced to defend Senators who said they had to compromise to help those hurting without SNAP benefits. Millions were hurting long before these attacks. On living wages and voting rights, we’ve heard this story before. Senators say they compromise to get a promise for a future vote on policies that matter to the people, but those promises end up looking like Pharaoh agreeing that the people can be free when he’s under the pressure of a plague only to deepen his cruelty after the pressure relents.

Like the people who followed Moses out to the edge of the Red Sea in ancient Egypt, we do not know if there is any way to stop the bill that passed the Senate and is now going to a vote in the House. But we do know that the political leaders who have maintained their stand cannot win this struggle on their own. We need a massive, nonviolent uprising to petition district offices and the halls of Congress with the moral cry of people who are crying out for their lives.

We need leadership that will embrace a marathon of testifiers to turn the attention of this moment away from those who are determined to abuse power and toward the truth of what these cuts mean in every one of our communities.

The rabbis say that the Red Sea didn’t part to make a way for the people to escape Pharaoh’s violence until Moses had waded into the water up to his neck. We need leadership that will wade in the water, and they need a mass movement at their back, making clear that this is a moral struggle, and we are moving forward together, not one step back.

It’s not enough to say that the leaders who’ve failed us must be replaced in the next election. Ancient wisdom and our recent experience teach us that we must keep building the kind of pressure that pushes our representatives toward the moral leadership this moment demands. We need a moral struggle that gives people a clear vision of what they could vote for - and not just against - next November, and we need a movement that engages the 40% of eligible voters in the US who’ve not shown up in recent years.

When people who suffer under an authoritarian regime do not see anyone standing up and fighting for them, it can be easy to believe that no other future is possible. When hope for change dies, civic engagement dies. And when engagement dies, people die.

We refuse to accept the unnecessary death of policy violence. In the best of our moral and nonviolent traditions, we stand with those insist that bowing down is not an option. Now is the time to keep the pressure on and begin mobilizing the most massive midterm turnout in US history. This is the work we’ve been called to together in this, our moral moment.

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