I wonder how many people backed off from engagement in the Insight Meditation tradition, or in other convert Buddhist traditions in America, because of the silence around the genocide in Gaza? I wonder how many just straight-up left? And what happens to a culture when many of its people of conscience quietly walk out the door?
We’re watching the same thing happen politically, as the new Progressive left breaks from Corporate Democrats, most sharply over Gaza. I think the same underlying forces are driving both splits. It gets filed under the “culture wars,” but what we’re actually witnessing is the collapse of Neoliberalism’s authority, in politics and in religion at once.
The Signature of Neoliberalism
Here’s what makes the split so hard to see, and so oddly funny: in both political and religious institutions, Neoliberals say all the right shit. Take them at their word and they sound like allies of every progressive aim, from Medicare for All to LGBTQ+ inclusion to racial justice.
The tell isn’t what they say. It’s a pattern that repeats across both domains:
Progressive rhetoric.
Market-based access, where the good stuff is priced for those who can pay.
Institutional self-preservation as the unspoken first principle.
Moral statements that stop exactly where cost begins.
That’s the signature. And it’s why the Neoliberal Dharma establishment can sound so good while doing so little. (A note on that link: Alexandra is writing about liberalism broadly; I’m narrowing the target to neoliberalism, the post-1980 version where the market does the sorting and the institution protects itself. The near enemy she describes is the same, but I want to be specific about which one I’m targeting here.)
I know the pattern is real because I saw it in my own teachers. Two years into the genocide, I asked them to use their considerable public influence to call for the protection of Palestinian lives. They declined. I’m not going to guess at why; I don’t need to. The stated mission was liberation from suffering, and when the moment came to spend some accumulated reputation on it, the reputation was kept and the mission was not. That is what selling out means, in the classic sense. And what got sold was my family’s lives in Palestine.
That’s the truly sad part of the old Neoliberal institutions. They don’t ask you to do anything evil. They just require that others be sacrificed on the altar of personal comfort and position, and that nobody says a fucking word about it.
The Good News
These institutions are losing legitimacy fast, especially among young people. And it’s worth being clear-eyed about what’s falling. Neoliberalism as a toolkit still runs most things, including most retreat centers. What’s collapsing is its authority, its ability to command belief. Notice that the political right has already gone post-Neoliberal too, with tariffs, industrial policy, and a state fused with culture-war religion. The old order is ending either way. The only open question is what replaces it.
So we have a front-row seat. We will either be the ones who build what comes next for the next generation of Americans, or we’ll cede that power to greedy oligarchs, feckless politicians, and self-absorbed religious leaders who are fine with us sliding into a kind of Neofascistic hell.
The rise of a Progressive American Dharma
Progressive American Dharma is a lotus growing out of the mud of Empire.
I’m obviously on the emerging Progressive side, politically and religiously. But let me say plainly what that word used to mean, in American history, so we don’t inherit the wrong lineage of meaning. The original American Progressives were by-and-large a credentialed, moralizing, improving class, and their signature achievement was Prohibition, an attempt to make everyone good by force. Progressive Dharma has to be the opposite of that: less purity, more honesty. More cursing in our dharma talks, less pretending to be perfect people beyond reproach. Getting real and staying real, even when anger and conflict arise.
It also isn’t new. We have ancestors: Ambedkar, Sulak Sivaraksa, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bhikkhu Bodhi’s Buddhist Global Relief, Joanna Macy. Convert Insight Buddhism in America quietly set that lineage aside in favor of an individual-cessation model with an upper-middle-class access model bolted on. Progressive Dharma is less an invention than a recovery.
Here’s what it means to me in practice.
A Dharma inherently accessible to working-class people. That’s the whole argument here, and it means accessible online and in every bioregion, not just at a handful of destination centers.
De-centering the retreat center. As the primary model for spreading the Dharma it is financially inaccessible and ecologically insane. In its place: inclusive online practice spaces, bioregional practice opportunities, and peer-to-peer methods that can be shared and linked to other domains of life (eg. meditating while bearing witness to the harvest ).
Collective liberation alongside individual liberation. Not as separate domains, and not with the individual as primary. Collective suffering is suffering.
Softening our educational and cultural elitism, which is mostly a matter of who gets to speak and what it costs to be in the room.
To make this concrete rather than aspirational: in the Pragmatic Dharma Sangha we run 8–12 week trainings taught by lineage holders, priced in a way that working class folks can afford. Multiplayer Meditation happens in small peer groups of 3–4 people, because awakening is a team sport, and because a small group doesn’t need a building. None of this is the finished form. It’s one attempt at a Dharma whose aspirational economics match its aspirational ethics.
That’s the test, in the end. Not what an institution says about liberation, but who it will sacrifice to keep itself comfortable. The Neoliberal answer is now on record. Ours is still being written.