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If you think American democracy is sticking by the fingernails, you won’t get an argument from Rev. William Barber II. Still, he is quick to let you know that our best hope for less divisive politics and a more perfect Union is when we spotlight the overlooked and struggling among us.
Barber, a prominent pastor and civil rights activist, is a driving force behind the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that, after Martin Luther Kings Jr., says Barber and his allies want to bring poor and low-income people into a union whose voices say he, “would fundamentally change the economic architecture … of the nation”.
Right now, Barber sees Texas as a place to make this point more visible when the Poor’s Campaign stages a 27-mile “Selma-to-Montgomery-style” march from Georgetown, Texas to Austin starting July 27th .
I recently spoke to Barber for an hour when he came to Austin to speak at a rally in support of House Democrats who had left for Washington, DC to prevent the Republican majority from revising the electoral rules of the State in force. “Legislators went to DC,” he told me, “but Texas is … the eye of the storm.”
In Barber’s view, support for full voting rights is intrinsically linked to five overarching problems preventing the nation from moving forward: systemic racism; Poverty; ecological destruction; denial of health care and the war economy; and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism.
“We have to address these … injustices at the same time, but we can only do this with a merger coalition that has people of all races, beliefs and colors who can change the narrative and give up power.” He calls his vision the Third Reconstruction, a nonviolent crusade which contrasts sharply with the troops that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
Barber, thoughtful and dedicated, a MacArthur Genius Fellow, is ubiquitous. His YouTube posts include a rattle-rattling speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention urging Americans to use a “moral defibrillator” to fuel the ailing heart of our democracy. His sermon at the National Cathedral in January 2021 implores President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris to help fill the nation’s gaps in prosperity and opportunity and to become “fixing the rift,” as Barber calls his activist organization.
Admirers have compared Barber’s coalition-building skills and ambitious goals to King’s. “I don’t know if I’ll … see the abundance of movement,” he said. “But what I do know is that this is a seed that is germinating.”
Barber claims that approximately 140 million people, 43% of the US population, are living in some form of economic hardship. Sensible critics oppose grouping people who live below the official poverty line with low-wage earners with significantly higher incomes, even if experts agree that a crisis of falling expectations is not good for the country.
Barber makes a habit of adopting public policy views that do not preach to the choir. As Sean Illing put it on Vox: “Barber is a progressive, but politically he is still difficult to pin down. He rejects the language of “left” and “right” and instead relies on the religious values of the gospel to drive a strong anti-poverty agenda…. He speaks in morally clearing terms about the plight of low-income people while refusing to engage in distracting cultural warfare. “
Barber urges people to look beyond the media’s hot takes and their own socio-economic bubbles to think deeper about the causes. He criticizes Donald Trump and political leaders enchanted by Trump who are more interested in consolidating political power, especially in times of COVID, “than they are to keep people out of coffins”.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been so relentlessly focused on middle-class voters in recent years, he claims, that they “stopped altogether with poor and low-income people of all races and colors and with many. .. people just said, “Well, we’re not going to participate anymore.”
Barber sees an opening there. If poor and low-income individuals “organized around an agenda,” he said, they would have the votes to “determine in principle who sits in the White House, in the Senate, in the governor’s mansion.”
So how do you build such a coalition, critics ask, if poor and low-income whites are not known to side with poor and low-income blacks? A dualistic view of the world is short-sighted, said Barber.
America’s “liberal versus conservative … political discourse … is too puny for what’s ahead,” he told me. “Some things are not about left and right. It’s about right and wrong. It’s about constitutional, unconstitutional. “
Our policies are fickle, he said, because some “people would rather just burn the house down … trying to somehow hold onto their greed and power.” “But I still don’t think they represent the majority … of this country, and that’s why we’re mobilizing.”
Extremism has been shaped by marble throughout our history, Barber said; Trump “charismatized” it, “he did not create it”.
What we see today, he said, are “pieces of what has never been completely eradicated from our political body and society, and all that means is that it is now our time that” [in] In every generation there must be truth-tellers, moral dissidents and people who stand up and say, ‘It is time to take a few more steps towards a more perfect union.’ “
The protests against Black Lives Matter, which rocked the nation after the assassination of George Floyd in 2020, marked a turning point in Barber’s view, in some ways still looking for an agenda. “Regressive public order … cannot kill” in the immediate, highly emotional way that “a cop shoots someone,” but what is often overlooked is how many Americans die unnecessarily each year from poverty and poor health care.
The problem in solving our problems, he said, is not a lack of resources or ideas, but a lack of awareness, the lack of a “movement to put these problems into a face because that’s the only way to get the hearts of the nation.”
“You have to show the nation [to] yourself before you can tell her about yourself, which is why the campaign for the poor aims to give her a face. “
Last Sunday, from the pulpit of a neighborhood church in Georgetown, Barber said that every generation has their Goliath-like problems that won’t go away without action. He urged the parishioners, as is so often the case everywhere he goes, not to sit metaphorically, but to express themselves and step into the breach.
That day he talked about the genesis of the upcoming march to the statehouse in Austin. “We will not allow the things that are right to be buried,” he vowed.
On our previous phone conversation, Barber said, “There has never been a time in this country where there has been a fundamental change in system … be it slavery, denial of women’s suffrage or denial of union rights” without a movement to support the struggle. “It always took motion to flip up the mirror … to tell the truth.
“And whether you are rejected because of your race or class, your different abilities, your sexuality, your poverty”, it is up to the ignored and rejected to “lead a moral revival”.
“You have to become the nation’s consciousness in order for the nation’s consciousness to change.” It is Barber’s Article of Faith that the time has come. “There is a hunger,” he said. “The people are ready.”
Tracy Dahlby is Professor of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.
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