There might be some idealistic fuel for Yoshie's general thrust in this thread in the U.S. historical tradition. Believers John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and most of the abolitionists were the most effective and successful revolutionists in U.S. history. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Civil Rights activists, successful radical reformers, were heavily based in liberation theology.
How can we inspire more soul and less patriotism in Americans today ? Or how can we revive the sense of American patriotism that is based in soul, not greed and militarism ? This strand of Americanism came to the fore and prevailed in the Civil War , the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement. Even in the anti-Vietnam war movement. There is an American traditional self-image as fighters for the underdog, the common"man". Perhaps we add a dash of the rational kernels of Benjamin Franklin and Emerson. Mark Twain was an anti-imperialist and a socialist.
There are lots of songs, poems, stories etc. that are basically humanist and democratic. The problem is reality has not matched the myth. Perhaps we , the American left, could wrap ourselves in the myth, as a sort of secular American religion. And that wouldn't be dishonest or hypocritical, in that we truly believe in those ideals.
In fact, of course, there has been a class struggle raging throughout American history, and the slaves, small farmers and workers, women, other oppressed groups have made an imprint on our national ideology. Even as the ruling class has prevailed "ultimately" in shoving the progressive trends to the underground of our consciousness, the underground railroad of the People still exists at some level of soul. It is still taught in elementary schools and high schools that America has been a history of the oppressed struggling against oppressors. Let the left of 2006 unearth that spectre of American communism.
American lefts might fulfill Yoshie's call for a new worldview, new or revived idealism, by saturating themselves with the soulful legends of American history sketched above, and others. " I'm a abolitionist-suffragette-New Deal-Civil Rights-We, the People" American , we might say. We want a revival of American Soul. Let it be "religious" to that extent.
The recent ,briefly reported news of a split from Evangelicals of a "social gospel" trend may be a flickering of this. Jesus was obviously a revolutionary. That's why he was lynched by the state. He hung with the poor, literally, blah, blah, blah. This was basically the approach of John Brown and M.L. King.
Yoshie might want to take a look at _The Urgency of Christian/Marxist Dialogue_ by Herbert Aptheker.
Charles