Introducing The Raven

Mapping the Politics of the Future

The Raven is a journal of commentary and analysis that brings insights from history and experience to bear on the politics of today and tomorrow, with an emphasis on the United States. It seeks to envision pathways and map futures through increasingly troubled and uncertain times, pointing toward solutions that distribute and democratize power. 

The raven is a fabled bird weaving through myths and legends of cultures across the world. Three of those mythic images define the prime themes of this journal. Raven as Harbinger. Raven as Trickster. Raven as Protector. 

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RAVEN AS HARBINGER

When Edgar Allen Poe wrote his masterpiece, The Raven, he was calling to one of the carrion-eating bird’s traditional mythic images as the harbinger of death, the end of things. Poe’s raven has nothing to say but “Nevermore,” driving to despair and madness the protagonist who will never see his dear Lenore again. No further. No future. Poe was reflecting his own darkness. His wife was dying of tuberculosis and would be gone two years after the poem’s publication in 1845. He would follow her two years later at age 40. 

Poe was part of the Dark Romantic trend counter to Emerson, Thoreau and other Romantics, bright lights of a rising America, expositors of a radical individualism who envisioned human perfectibility in a nature regarded as benign. He was more in a line with Melville, whose Moby Dick was published in 1851, and Hawthorne. All saw a darker side of nature, human and otherwise. Melville, in his tale of America’s first oil industry, with his mad Ahab in search of the deadly white whale. Hawthorne, a descendent of one of the Salem witch trial judges, with his witch-haunted House of the Seven Gables, also published in 1851. And Poe with his bearer of bad news, the raven who in legend was smitten black by Apollo because he told the Greek god of an unfaithful lover, or as the Celt goddess Morrighan came as a precursor of death in battle. 

The Dark Romantics were emerging as the machine-driven economies and elites of the North were rising to challenge the slave-driven South, until then the prime source of national wealth. Cotton had been the sun around which the U.S. economic solar system revolved. It was the basic raw material of the industrial revolution, fueling the spinning mills of Manchester and the country’s own textile industry. The U.S. was far and away the dominant producer and exporter. But the manufacturing sector, which had been dependent on selling tools and clothing to equip the slaves, was achieving self-sustaining takeoff in a growing Northern market connected by ever expanding railroad networks. The telegraph and steam-driven press were creating history’s first genuinely mass media linked by distance-transcending communications. Poe himself was part of this, first publishing The Ravenin the New York Evening Mirror. Radical divergences between the South and an increasingly confident North were stirring forebodings of some great conflict on the horizon, even as the Compromise of 1850 sought to settle the issue of slavery in lands taken from Mexico, only to pile up fuel for a conflagration that would erupt 11 years later. 

Today is a similar era. Sources of wealth are shifting. The manufacturing economies of the heartland are being supplanted by the technology-driven economies and elites of the coasts. New modes of communication are revolutionizing the meaning of media and access to it. Individualist ideologies spanning the political spectrum have decayed values and institutions of the common good. National divisions are at a pitch many compare to the time that led up to the Civil War. The racial divisions that were the original cause never vanished, and again occupy the center of gravity. The idea of national breakup is moving from the fringes. Whether there will be a United States is open to question in a way that would have astounded us a few years back. Still seemingly unlikely, it is gaining more cache than anytime since those decades leading up to the Civil War. 

It goes beyond the U.S. though. In this world, we are systematically at the end of things, whether you look at the deepening climate crisis and the erosion of ecosystems in general; the related trends of radical wealth inequality, breakdown of political institutions and rising authoritarianism, or increasing conflict between great powers armed with weapons capable of destroying all life. Systems are radically failing, and worst-case scenarios are increasing in probability. Much as Poe’s protagonist tries to send the raven away, not wanting to hear its dark message, most of us have been unwilling to grapple with the many danger signals coming our way. But the raven continues to perch and tell us what we don’t want to hear. The facts are unavoidable. The Raven as Harbinger is one of the hallmarks of this journal. To point out where systems are failing, and how they must change in fundamental ways to avert catastrophes social, political and ecological. 

Every week or two, maybe more frequently, The Raven will comment on current affairs, report on key developments, and review books with an emphasis on U.S. history and politics, but venturing into broader histories and topics, including social, environmental and economic alternatives. I will highlight some of the best newer books, but also recall older gems. Books we should remember that have something to say to today. I intend to keep access free to reach the broadest possible audience, including young people and members of disadvantaged communities at the forefront of today’s movements who might have trouble affording a subscription. I will need the support of people who can afford one to sustain my work. So if you’re capable, please do. If you opt not to subscribe, please sign up to receive emails when I post.

I will also tell some of stories of my own life since I entered the world in 1952, and how they reflect on broader histories. I will bring to bear my own experiences from 40 years of participation in progressive activism and journalism. From direct action to save the great forests of Cascadia – aka the Pacific Northwest, to the push to make cities greener and more sustainable.  From opposing nuclear weapons and imperial wars from Central America to the Mideast, to halting the slide towards climate catastrophe. I’m a climate veteran, writing about the issue since around 1990 and working on it politically since the late 1990s from a wide range of angles. From crafting dozens of research publications on climate science and solutions, to getting myself tossed in county jail opposing fossil fuel infrastructure and investments. I will share my insights on why we have so far failed, but may be starting to succeed, and track emerging developments in climate politics, science and solutions. 

Based on extensive reading in history over a lifetime, much of The Raven will focus on the ways our histories ramify to the present and the future. For example, how the legacies of U.S. growth as a settler-colonial state and society are coming to the fore in ways ranging from the Black Lives Matter uprising to the Trump presidency. Or how the U.S. led the world into the modern, fossil-fueled consumer economy, making it one of the forces most resistant to needed changes. What can we learn from our history to redeem our present and future? 

In a sense, national breakdown has already occurred, as the sharp divisions around the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol demonstrate. Divergences between coasts and heartland, between urban and rural, between classes and cultures, have reached an extreme. It’s been called a Cold Civil War. There are many indications we are heading into a fractious 2020s, when these will come to a head. The Raven will seek to map a way through this, to an American future that works for all. As I go into below, I believe it will come from creating centers of progressive strength and people power in particular places. 

RAVEN AS TRICKSTER

The Raven will write not from certainty, but from an exploratory perspective, because the path to the future is uncertain and murky, a trail to be mapped as we go, a light dimly peering out of the darkness. This calls to the second mythic imagery of Raven as Trickster that appears throughout indigenous traditions in my neck of the woods, the North Pacific coast of North America. Beyond the Raven who heralds dark comings, to the Raven who comes out of dark places to bring the light.  

A selfish old character has been holding the world in darkness, keeping the light locked in a box. To the Tlingit, it’s a seagull. To the Haida, an eagle. In the legends, clever Raven tricks the character into opening the box. He quickly snatches it, then flies away to distribute the light to all the creatures of Earth, creating the sun, moon and stars. Thus, Raven the Trickster also becomes Raven the creator of a new world in which all can prosper, and not just the selfish monopolist hoarding all the light to himself. 

This speaks to the primary source of the multiple crises now overtaking our world, too much power and wealth in too few hands, ever more concentrated in massive corporations and a narrow slice of absurdly wealthy people. This is not about gratuitous rich-bashing, but the behavior of the class as a whole, driven by the imperatives of profit and power. One of my local Seattle rich people, Nick Hanauer, warns members of his class that widening wealth gaps inevitably stir masses bearing “pitchforks and sticks.” I hear talk of guillotines. The spread of tent encampments in the city we share, a place with some of the richest people on Earth, is a poster for the wealth divide. Hanauer and other one percenters advocate for higher taxes on the rich and higher wages for working people. We need more such “traitors to their class.” Because powerful corporations and individuals pursue their own interests, often at the expense of the common good, even as they gain disproportionate sway over public institutions meant to preserve it. The more powerful they are, the more unbridled they become, and the more potentially damaging their impacts. 

Consider how the mad Ahabs captaining today’s insatiably avaricious oil industry, whose own scientists in the 1970s forecast their products would cause severe climate disruption, have blocked significant action since, funding big lie disinformation campaigns, plunging the planet toward the abyss. Or how increasing wealth disparities have fed reactionary politics and racial tensions, even as the wealthy have leveraged their power to seize an ever-growing piece of the pie. Or how a world order rooted in the colonialism of the past 500 years continues to ravage societies and ecosystems in the Global South, still drained of wealth by elites of the North and complicit ruling classes in the South. Or how the security establishments and military-industrial complexes of great nations once again ramp up a mad arms race with consequences that cannot be foreseen, even as the American global system prevalent since World War II fades in a diversifying world. 

This is an order that cannot endure, which is why the subtitle of The Raven journal is “Living at the End of Empire.” We don’t know what’s coming next. But we do know that the systems that currently prevail are developing too many contradictions and dissonances to continue in their current form. Something’s got to give. 

Calling to the mythos of Raven the Trickster who takes the light from the selfish hoarder and distributes it to all creatures, creating the world anew, The Raven will explore alternatives that share political and economic power more broadly, restoring democracy and the human scale to society, politics and economics. Like the trickster, we will need an asymmetrical savvy to cleverly break open the locked boxes of power. To shine the light on the stories that shape our minds and actions, and change them. 

The Raven calls to the decentralist tradition, and recalls its some of seminal thinkers. The regionalism of public intellectual Lewis Mumford. The vision of democratically managed regional commonwealths as an alternative to our globe-encircling “Empire as a Way of Life” forwarded by the historian William Appleman Williams. The “Small Is Beautiful” thinking of Ernest Schumacher, and the big-is-bad thinking of Leopold Kohr. Jane Jacobs’ thoughts on urban life and the role of cities. Hazel Henderson’s alternative economics. Kirkpatrick Sale on bioregionalism and human scale as the counter to massification and anomie. Seymour Melman on workplace democracy. And others. The Raven will seek out their contemporary counterparts, to stir a dialogue about how we might do this world differently. 

This is not a simplistic notion in which modern forms are ditched in favor of some utopian paradise. As much as some would like, the world will not turn into a set of anarchist communes anytime soon. Instead, this is about re-balancing a world that is now badly out of whack, corporations growing to monstrous scales, governments increasingly captured by them, the top percentiles taking greater shares of wealth. Our complex and interconnected world requires large institutions up to the global scale. How do we democratize them, while building up community and regional institutions and societies that restore a balance of power?

A central thought is that restoring democracy and the human scale is requisite for building a more ecologically sustainable society.  That we might come back into balance with the planet on which we live by creating local and regional economies more in tune with ecosystems, both regional and global.  This is a thought reflected through the literature of decentralization, and it has inspired many community-based institutions and initiatives.  My own work on climate has centered on solutions at local, state and regional levels, where the fossil industry forces that have hobbled federal action have less power, and ordinary people can gain greater traction.  This is, in fact, where the bulk of climate progress has been made in the U.S., demonstrating practical decentralization in action. 

The Raven will speculate on more decentralized pathways for the nation we now know as the United States and its neighbors. The idea that starkly different forms might rise on the North American continent is credible in ways unparalleled perhaps since the Civil War. A spate of new books on secession, soon to be reviewed by The Raven, underscores this point. I am in no way a secessionist, but I do believe that the malfunctioning of national institutions, our inability to grapple with growing problems and crises, indicates we might consider other forms that give more power to states, cities and regions, to enhance their role as “laboratories of democracy.” A commonwealth built on strong and vital places. 

Any restoration of the power of place must come with a critically important caveat. It must guarantee basic human rights and environmental protections. Winning civil rights for African-Americans started from the peripheries, brave people confronting white supremacy in their own communities. But they had to leverage the federal center to overcome local and regional resistance. When Ronald Reagan during his 1980 campaign told the crowd at Neshoba County Fairgrounds, a few miles away from Philadelphia, Mississippi where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, “I believe in states' rights,” his racist dog whistle was heard and understood by everyone. In the Pacific Northwest, white supremacists envision making interior mountain regions into an “Aryan Homeland.” Similarly, when counties and states in the U.S. West seek to gain control of federal public lands, it is to eliminate environmental protections and unleash a resource exploitation free-for-all. Often, a greater moral and political authority is required to overcome self-serving local interests and bigotries. 

That brings up another key point, by way of both apology and explanation, around the use of the terms “America” and “American.” Our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere rightly point out they are Americans too. I use the terms to describe both, as synonymous with the U.S. because that is the common vernacular, and in the broader sense. Because, in reality, all of us Americans are growing together, especially those who live in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean nations. Our histories are deeply intertwined in ways we U.S. of Americans tend to downplay, from the role of Caribbean slave rebellions in spurring growth of slavery in what would become the U.S., to how Central American wars fueled by the U.S. led to today’s surge of refugees and the accompanying racial and political backlash. A long-term colonial relationship with Cuba that predated U.S. conquest in 1898 metastasized into a near nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. How will we as Americans in the larger sense learn to live in just and non-colonial relations with each other? The Raven will explore that question. And as we draw closer to each other, we must also ask whether the fairly artificial borders we draw around our nations will remain into the indefinite future. The Raven will hold open the possibility they will not. 

RAVEN AS PROTECTOR

Raven as Harbinger warns us we are on dead-end paths and must change. Raven as Trickster illuminates the nature of change, a democratic re-distribution of political and economic power that re-creates the world. The third mythos, Raven as Protector, points to how we make the changes, and who will be in the forefront of making them. 

This mythos is perhaps most prominent in my own ethnic heritage. My maternal grandfather was a Welsh immigrant to the U.S. In the medieval legends of Wales, Bran the Blessed, whose name is translated as raven, was King of the Britons. He was a giant who ruled over the entire isle until he was mortally wounded in a war with the Irish. Bran asked his companions to cut off his head and plant it on British soil to protect the island from invasion. Finally, after years making it back from Ireland, the head talking like an oracle all the way, they buried it at White Hill, reputed site of the Tower of London. The British have created a myth, though it might be of relatively recent vintage, that the realm would fall if six or seven ravens were not kept in the tower belfry. Churchill knew the mythology was powerful enough to import seven new ravens from Wales when German bombs killed the old ones in the Battle of Britain.

In the past few years since native peoples and their allies gathered around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to try to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from running under the Missouri River, the identity of the water protector has come to the fore. People standing to protect the very fundaments of life. The protector has emerged in many forms over recent years. Led by youth, people of all ages have hit the streets seeking to protect the climate system from the increasing disruptions assailing it. Black people and their allies are marching to protect Black and other ethnic communities from police violence and oppression. Still others are mobilizing to protect working people from the ravages of an increasingly exploitative and brutal corporate capitalism, pushing for higher minimum wages and unionization.

It will be the protectors who will lead the way beyond our dead-end directions. People from the cultural and geographical margins and peripheries who will bring it to the centers and cores of power. Make some of John Lewis’s good trouble where necessary. In particular, young people and ethnic groups comprehensively oppressed by the systems pushing the world towards those dead ends. People on the brute end of systems are far more capable of seeing through them than people who have benefited from them. The Raven will seek out voices from the margins, to learn from them and spread their insights. 

Time and again, it’s been shown that innovative ideas and breakthroughs start at the periphery and make their way back to the core, where the forces of the status quo are always strongest. The $15/hour minimum wage movement had its first success in Seattle. It has now become part of the national debate, and comfortably won on the 2020 Florida election ballot even as Trump swept the state. Feed-in tariffs that pay people to produce renewable energy have driven Germany’s successes in solar and wind. They started in Aachen. Black Lives Matter took root and spread from Ferguson, Missouri. With the uprisings of 2020 it is beginning to chip away at the unchecked power of police departments and unions. The movements and ideas that will shape tomorrow will gain traction in specific places first, spreading until they reach critical mass and win in national centers. Facing what is certain to be a fractious 2020s, we must grow local and regional centers of progressive strength that root in people power organizing and link with each other across the continent.

The raven is regarded as one of the smartest of birds, maybe even the smartest. It is an awesome creature, capable of replicating human speech like a parrot and sailing to the heights like an eagle. It learns and adapts to many circumstances, often fooling us so-called smart humans. The raven’s mythic imagery in cultures across the world, as harbinger, as trickster and creator, as protector, testifies to its intelligence. The Raven journal will seek to live up to those imageries, and use them to help map a path to the future. Please join the conversation, sign up to be on the mailing list, and subscribe if you can.