"A fairy tale in realist drag, 'The Pursuit of Happyness' is the kind of entertainment that goes down smoothly until it gets stuck in your craw. Inspired by a true story, as they like to say in Hollywood, the film traces the fleeting ups and frightening downs of Chris Gardner, whose efforts to keep his family from sinking into poverty evolve into a life-and-death struggle of social Darwinian proportions. It’s the early 1980s, and while Ronald Reagan is delivering the bad economic news on television, Chris is about to prove you don’t need an army to fight the war on poverty, just big smiles and smarts, and really sturdy shoes." Excerpt of Manohla Dargis's NYT review of the 2006 Columbia Pictures movie. (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/movies/15happ.html?referer=)

Solidarity requires us not only to fight for the common good but also to think for the common good. We must not cede thinking to the tax-deductible think tanks continuously feeding the billionaires’ grist into the cultural mills. Abstention from the culture wars is not a humane option. Right-wing cultural views have nefarious substantive outcomes for the working class, including PoC, women, children, LGBTs, and immigrants, not to mention straight U.S.-born white male workers. Since the God-fearing Puritans stole the land of the native Massachusetts people, the culture wars were a vital part of how the west was “won" and the hulls of slaving ships built, filled, and insured.

In the service of divide and rule, and cloaked in historical rhetoric, anti-women legislators will continue to co-opt “the right to life,” billionaire faux libertarians “the right to liberty,” and Wall Street swindlers the bootstraps version of “the pursuit of happiness.” Rather than withdrawing from the culture wars, the left must take these wars to an intellectually vibrant, strategic, and structurally comprehensive level, one that threatens the ruling class-cherished but largely unchallenged assumptions of the legal system.

A government that is democratic in pretense but focused on divide and rule in effect relies on continual unacknowledged propaganda by and for the ruling class. Yet, if we dare to squint we can begin to see through the constant engulfing emissions from the legalistic mist machines an authentically humane city on the hill after all. If we the divided democratic masses have the vision to see the very words that are used to misinform and manipulate us we might one day democratically seize the power to reinterpret these words.

While the pitiful nature of U.S. politics was birthed by the so-called founding fathers, these privileged white males signed on to broad precepts in the Declaration of Independence and later the Constitution that can provide functionally humane hope. This hope is unlikely to materialize, despite objective conditions, in part because a commodified judicial, bar, and legal education establishment refuses to support even the free visualization of functionally humane meaning to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and other inalienable rights.

Facilitating a culture of loving visualization is the starting place for the flowering of a loving society. Loving visualization is impeded by a legal culture that serves the economic objectives of the ruling class and the ancillary, mercenary ends of their pet judges, lawyers, and law professors. If it is to succeed, political revolution must deeply address the legal culture. This is not at all a call for anti-democratic thought, much less authoritarianism, but rather a call for we as the people to take over "our" words, the ones through which we were and are deemed to "consent” to be governed. The constitutional framework for logical reinterpretation exists if the working class will begin to comprehend and demand the fulfillment of its inalienable rights. This may involve studying the theories of more than one Brooklyn-born Jew.

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In the middle of the Second World War, two years after Bernie Sanders was born, Abraham H. Maslow, the son of Russian immigrants, published his seminal article in Psychological Review, "A Theory of Human Motivation.” (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm) He continued to work out his theory for more than a decade when the book Motivation and Personality was published. (http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Motivation_and_Personality-Masl...)

I’m not a Sanders idolator much less a Maslow acolyte, but I do think the Sanders candidacy, and in particular his use of "rights” language in reference to health care, can represent the beginning of a mature conversation about not only the meeting of needs in a caring society but also the rights to have those needs met. In contrast to Sanders, Maslow was not at all a political thinker per se. But his thoughts have political implications that he could not completely brush aside, despite his sometimes efforts to do so.

Consider this random description from "A Theory of Human Motivation" and whether it was merely a product of its perilous time:

Some neurotic adults in our society are, in many ways, like the unsafe child in their desire for safety, although in the former it takes on a somewhat special appearance. Their reaction is often to unknown, psychological dangers in a world that is perceived to be hostile, overwhelming and threatening. Such a person behaves as if a great catastrophe were almost always impending, i.e., he is usually responding as if to an emergency. His safety needs often find specific expression in a search for a protector, or a stronger person on whom he may depend, or perhaps, a Fuehrer.
I will not attempt to summarize his thoughts on basic needs, but suffice it to say, he states the challenging obvious--that human beings cannot be expected to focus on what the ruling class depicts as “higher” things when their physiological and safety needs are unmet.

He was not saying something particularly new, but he was daring to speak as a psychologist to psychologists about major gaps in their thinking. And his implicitly democratic honesty left room for subsequent gaps in his own thinking to be freely discussed by his admirers.

Tay and Diener in their 2011 article on “Needs and Subjective Well-Being Around the World” made an exhaustive empirical critique of Maslow. (http://academic.udayton.edu/jackbauer/Readings%20595/Tay%20Diener%2011%2...) They found much that was validated and that portions not validated pointed in the direction of the need for greater human cooperation not less:

Need theories hypothesize that there are universal needs and that they are not substitutable for each other. Supporting this, we found evidence of universality and also substantial independence in the effects of the needs on SWB. We also observed that the needs tend be achieved in a certain order but that the order in which they are achieved does not strongly influence their effects on SWB. Motivational prepotency does not mean that fulfilling needs “out of order” is necessarily less fulfilling. Thus, humans can derive “happiness” from simultaneously working on a number of needs regardless of the fulfillment of other needs. This might be why people in impoverished nations, with only modest control over whether their basic needs are fulfilled, can nevertheless find a measure of well-being through social relationships and other psychological needs over which they have more control.

We also found that societal need fulfillment—particularly of basic needs— has effects independent of an individual’s personal need fulfillment, so that it is beneficial to live in a society with others who have their needs fulfilled. Improving one’s own life is not enough; society-wide improvement is also required. Societies have a substantial influence on whether basic and safety needs are fulfilled, whereas individual factors are more associated with whether psychosocial needs are fulfilled.

Across diverse regions of the world, it appears that basic needs are important for life evaluations, whereas social and respect needs are important for positive feelings. The experience of negative feelings is more related to whether basic needs, respect, and autonomy are met.

Clearly, if our objectives include equality and promoting the general welfare, we should look at the welfare of all members of society. Amazingly, in the U.S. legal system such simple truths, even when grounded in the "plain English” of the framers, seem to evade our so-called scholars.

We on the left should not serve those mercenaries or their masters. We should seek and expose the holistic truth. We should relate to Maslow’s work much like we should relate to the work of 19th Century political-economic writers much less 18th Century “enlightened” ruling class framers—as conscious members and allies of the working class. We do not have the luxury of allowing our intellectual influences to be frozen in time.

The same thing must begin to happen with the supposed guardians of the legal system. Which side are they currently on? Overwhelmingly they, consciously or not, even the so-called liberal ones, are on the side of the ruling class. To think that we could build a just society without addressing their mercenary role is ludicrous. While there were gains in the 20th Century, and have been some even in the early 21st Century, too often legal precedent is the quintessential attempt to freeze in time the preferred interpretations of the ruling class.

Here are some concepts in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that bear not only scrutiny but also in many cases reinterpretation and invigoration for the working class. We can use these words to the advantage of the working class, and even be proud of them, though by and large we cannot be not proud of the people who wrote them and the ways they and generations of legal water carriers have applied them in practice. We must fight for the meaning of these and other foundational words because the enemies of the working class certainly long have and will:

Declaration of Independence

*We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

*That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

*That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

U.S. Constitution

*We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

*The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States

*To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

*The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

*Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

*No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

*The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

*All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.