This account of the founding of Indiana Moral Mondays was originally published on Examiner.com. Another published account of the founding by me, "Indiana Moral Mondays," appears on the socialist website New Politics, http://newpol.org/content/indiana-moral-mondays --GF
By media accounts,
Indiana Moral Mondays got off to an auspicious start the weekend of its
founding in Indianapolis, Friday, September 19 and Saturday, September 20 . (See, e.g., in Indianapolis newspapers, Indianapolis Star, Vic Ryckaert, September
20, 2014, “Indiana Moral Mondays battles low pay, injustice, racism, and more,”
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2014/09/20/moral-mondays-battles-low-pay-injustice-racism/15979953; Indianapolis
Recorder, Ebony Chappell, September 25, 2014, “Fast-food workers join Moral
Mondays movement,” http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/news/article_c7c34c48-44ce-11e4-9c4c-0b68ff004dfb.html.)
Reports gave the attendance at Saturday’s rally at the State House at 200
to 400 to hear the Rev. William Barber, head of North Carolina NAACP and
guiding spokesman for that state’s Moral Mondays movement which sparked the
spread of Moral Mondays organizations to 13 states in the South and Midwest,
including Indiana, give the keynote address.
Barber’s impassioned address
in the oratorical style of the African American church, heavily emphasizing
morality and the moral implications of the political issues involved, was a
rhetorical tour de force, aesthetically pleasing in that same deeply emotional
way that African American gospel music is.
Harry Targ, a
professor of political science at Purdue and member of Indiana Moral Mondays
Steering Committee, limned the founding of Indiana Moral Mondays well in an
article posted September 24, 2014 on the left news listserve Portside. This basic information article, “Moral
Mondays come to Indiana,” originally published by Targ September 23 as his
entry on his BlogSpot blog, “Diary of a Heartland Radical,” http://www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com/,
and reposted the next day on Popular Resistance, http://www.popularresistance.org/moral-mondays-comes-to-indiana/, is a fundamental primer on the impetus behind Moral
Mondays and the basics of its program, stressing as it does at its heart the
“five-point agenda” adopted by Indiana Moral Mondays as its chief goals:
- Secure pro-labor, anti-poverty policies that insure
economic sustainability;
- Provide well-funded, quality public education for all;
- Stand up for the health of every Hoosier by promoting
health care access and environmental justice across all the state’s
communities;
- Address the continuing inequalities in the criminal
justice system and ensure equality under the law for every person,
regardless of race, class, creed, documentation or sexual preference;
- Protect and expand voting rights for people of color,
women, immigrants, the elderly and students to safeguard fair democratic
representation.
In an interview with the author
following Rev. Barber’s speech, Targ provided additional information. (Self-disclosure: I have known Targ for years.) Targ said that Indiana Moral Mondays endorsed
a “state-oriented” political approach that would rely heavily on “fusion
politics” to draw diverse constituencies into participation on the key
“interconnected issues” of labor, education, healthcare, women’s reproductive
rights, and gay and lesbian rights. He
stated, “Rev. Barber has articulated what he calls ‘fusion politics’” as
stressing “the only way progressives can make a dent is if we can work together
and look at the interconnectedness of all these issues.” Targ continued that while Moral Mondays would
be strongly oriented at “pressing” the Indiana General Assembly, the state’s
two-house legislature, and the Governor’s office, both presently dominated by
Tea Party-leaning Republicans, on issues, undertaking education and voter
registration, and working also for alternative candidates for office, Indiana
Moral Mondays “is not primarily or exclusively and electoral movement.”
Targ further emphasized that Moral
Mondays was looking toward a long-term strategy and presence, and perhaps would
be more able to flex its muscle by the 2016 elections. Education and “working class” economic issues
such as inequality, poverty, low-paying jobs and persistently steady
unemployment would be emphasized, and that pushing for the right of workers to
form unions would be “just one part of a broader effort” to reach out to that
90+% of Indiana’s workforce that was non-union.
As part of “fusion politics,” outreach to white workers that educated
them on the shared commonalities of what they faced with African American
workers would be an important component of Moral Mondays’ work. As Targ stated, “All workers are experiencing
increased exploitation and immiseration.”
Indeed, outreach to the “white working class,” long an electoral base
for the Republican Party in heavily Red-state Indiana, was emphasized by
several speakers at Saturday’s rally.
Much the same was articulated by
another professor whom I interviewed, Joseph Varga, Assistant Professor of
Labor Studies at the main campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, a self-professed “labor activist and LBGT
activist” also active in South Central Indiana Jobs with Justice. (Self-disclosure: I’ve known Varga for some time.) He was enthused about Moral Monday’s
potential for “coalition building,” as he saw that “the only way we’re going to
stop the reactionary movement in this country is through numbers.” Son of a
Hungarian immigrant factory-worker father, Varga grew up with a blue-collar
identity and saw that his own fellow white worker cohorts would support social
safety-net and populist measures out of self-interest, even as they “stayed
away from labels of what we call liberalism and leftism in this country.” Varga feels the U.S. is in a “state of
emergency” for poor and working people, emphasizing “working people and poor
people have no representation whatsoever; they are getting destroyed.” He adds, “I don’t think workers vote against
their self-interest if we have a Democratic Party that’s not doing a damn thing
for them.”
Varga thinks “actions are going to
speak louder than words,” and that workers will be attracted to, and join, a
movement that is in “the places where goods and services are transported and
being moved and clog that system up so badly that it cannot operate until our
concerns are addressed.” Civil disobedience
was, of course, a hallmark of the North Carolina Moral Mondays, and was also
mentioned by Rev. Barber in his speech here in Indianapolis.
Admitting to feeling a “little bit
skittish” with Moral Mondays because of the moralistic emphasis and active presence
of churches and Christian religious believers, Joe Varga emphasized that the
activities in Bloomington were strictly secular and, as for overt religious
influence, the best course was to “just ignore it.”
Harry Targ highlighted in his article
above that Moral Mondays, in the 13
states in the South and Midwest where it has a presence, “have
begun to build a new fusion movement that draws together workers, women, young
and old, black, brown, and white people, documented and undocumented,
environmentalists, people of faith and atheists, and the LBGT community based
upon ‘moral’ and ‘constitutional’ agendas.” (Despite these assurances of inclusiveness
from Targ and Varga, however, I saw no discernable Jewish or Muslim presence,
and certainly no overt atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist one, at
Saturday’s rally.)
At present, it certainly is true that
Moral Mondays has galvanized much of the radical imagination, and has become a
pole of attraction and excitement. But whether
Indiana Moral Mondays can become an effective political force, based as it is so
fervently on moralism little backed up with concrete program, is another matter
altogether. The Occupy movement also had
a galvanizing presence in Indiana, and it too was similarly based on fervid moral
indignation with little, or no, attempt to develop a program of concrete
action, either nationally or in Indiana.
So Occupy left little or nothing discernable in its wake except fond
memories among activists. But perhaps, as
Moral Mondays begins articulating its vision and building coalitions, it will
draw more people into it and thus over time become more concrete and
programmatic in its approach. And
perhaps the success of Moral Mondays movements will vary from place to place,
which seems the most likely. But despite
the publicity and activity of the original in North Carolina, it seems to have
had little deterrent effect on the Republican Supermajority in control of the
legislature. Yet despite this, Moral
Mondays there has certainly not closed up shop.
Indeed, far from it—to continue the marketing analogy, the franchise has
only broadened and set foot in new locales.
But in terms of Indiana, Targ’s and Varga’s optimism might be based more
on both of them living in bucolic college-town islands where left political
activity is far more the norm than elsewhere in Indiana. This is especially this author’s jaundiced
take on the potential of Indiana Moral Mondays here in Indianapolis where I
live, where the prevalent overweening religious pietism and religiosity could turn
Moral Mondays into yet another clique of the “peaceable religious progressives”
who will hostilely exclude anyone not of their religious persuasion. Such happened here before in Indianapolis
before during my 34-year residence to date as an open Marxist atheist activist
who found himself ostracized and belittled at every turn. Something that forced me to give up any
attempt at local activism and concentrate instead on writing for the national socialist
and alternative press, limiting myself only to attending certain local demonstrations
and activities and writing on them.
For unfortunately, I saw too much
promising activism thwarted: in the
derailing of a promising, more broadly-based and secular peace movement here in
the mid- to late-1980s, when key people instead turned it into an exclusively
religious pacifist clique that focused solely on “symbolic protest” and did no
mass outreach; and in the destruction of the Solidarity Books/Paper Matches
youth collective here a decade-and-a-half ago, where a group of feisty
anarchist youth tried to set up a truly viable non-sectarian left bookstore,
and were driven out in frustration and disgust by the “respectable religious
progressives” who were incensed over these youths’ revolutionary rhetoric. Which now means the only way to purchase left
literature in Indianapolis is through the local Barnes & Noble outlets, or
else order online through anti-union but low-price Amazon or union-organized
but higher-price Powell’s Books. Or some
other online outlet, making this, the Circle City, a major MSA, completely
bereft of any radical bookstore whatsoever.
Also, statewide movements in Indiana
have never been able to sustain themselves successfully. The Indiana Green
Party tried, but disbanded, and the only movements here that have been able to
sustain themselves over a long run have been regional ones based preponderantly
in certain major cities and urban areas:
Gary/Northwest Indiana, near Chicago; Lafayette/W. Lafayette, where
Purdue University is; Bloomington, where Indiana University is; Mishawaka/South
Bend, where Notre Dame is; and Indianapolis, leaving large swaths of Indiana
without any active leftist or radical, let alone any progressive or liberal,
presence whatsoever. Except for the
northern, more industrialized part of the state, the rest, preponderantly
rural, is home to the Republican and Tea Parties, and these two have dominated
Indiana politics easily now for many years; as for the Democratic Party, it’s
more a vote-gathering machine which sees “moderates” and “conservatives” having
the best electoral chances.
Further, Indiana is staunchly socially
and culturally conservative, even hidebound, and in this is more akin to the
Old Confederacy than to the Midwest which it is geographically part of. Indeed, Indiana, because of its cultural
conservatism and lack of significant urbanity, even in its cities, is the great
sleeper, the great stealth juggernaut, of Red-state politics that’s
consistently overlooked by the national media.
(For an excellent journalistic portrait of this hidden aspect of the
state, see Truthout, Bryan K. Bullock, June 27, 2014, “The Ultra-Right-Wing
State Nobody Mentions,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24552-the-ultra-right-wing-state-nobody-mentions.)
But then, perhaps, Indiana Moral
Mondays will succeed where others have failed.
Perhaps, though it’s far too early to tell one way or the other. And while it will take more than moralistic
fervor to make Indiana Moral Mondays consistently, viably effective, it
certainly seems to be off to an auspicious start.
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