A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward.
We are going to battle once again.
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.
Regressives take the opposite positions.
Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.
They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.
The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.
Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they're conservative jurists. But they're judicial activists bent on overturning 75 years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states' rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.
Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.
In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.
Perhaps this is what's beginning to happen again across America.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
1930s - The New Deal - The Great Depression roared on for 20% of Americans. Full employment wasn't reached until wall into 1942, when we were all either in basic training or getting war jobs. People started spending again and collecting paychecks. We forgot we were in a Great Depression.
1950s - Civil Right Movement - Had nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with the Third World that was the South till the 90s (and still is for far too much of the South). Slavery, the Jim Crow held the South back and prevented it from evolving both economically and as a society.
1970s - The worst economic stagnation we have every seen. Manipulation of gas prices, runaway local and state debt, and the draining of the Social Security Trust Fund was terrible. We never really got out of stagflation. Most wealth generation in the 80s existed only on paper. The late 90s saw the rise of the Internet and the dotcom economy and a general lack of manipulation or stimulation by DC to encourage it's growth.
Today - We're still looking for the next "dotcom" boom, but as before the government won't create prosperity. Confidence and risk by civilians is the key.
congress that they attempt to appear like separate parties yet when it comes to criminal complaints they hand slap them if anything at all. For they all know if one falls they all fall for all are guilty of the treason they allowed to be committed under their watch. Just as guilty as the one who actually committed the crime for they stayed silent least the American citizen find out about their lesser crimes.
No, they don't. That is a self-righteously self-serving deception. Progressives believe in the tyranny of the mob, directed and mandated outcomes, and power to every government they agree with following impeachment and imprisonment of every government with which they disagree. Tolerance? Progressives tolerate NOTHING except those who willingly fall into line with their ideology, causes, values, appearance, customs, and idiom.
BTW, you may not be old enough to remember, but it was LBJ who sent us to Viet Nam. And LBJ was not just a Democrat, he was the Father of Fifth Generation Progressivism. And it was Nixon, that Major Devil of Conservativism, who got us out.
Both extremes are a disgrace to this nation. I find both sides revolting.
them all away , who's going to still have them ? Yes the criminals . You
have to enable individuals to protect
themselves and their families . This
ties into our conversation about
economics . You just don't target large
businesses , you give opportunity to every business to be in competion with those large businesses youre talking about. Here is a story that would be your logical conclusion to your viewpoint,... Because you can't dunk on an NBA standard 10 ft rim you should go to the NBA and propose lowering it to 6 ft so you could have the equal opportunity of becoming a NBA star.? What's next its against the law to grow taller than 5 ft because it's an unfair advantage? No , it's hard work and dedication to do or go anywhere in life.
Lumping other things in with economics that are so vastly divergent from it is just being ideologically greedy. Focus your message! Going after guns is the Democrats' gift to the Republicans that just keeps on giving.
Do you want to be "right" about gun control? Or win? Which is more important? Because you will forever alienate vast swaths of the American public by insisting on fighting over this issue, especially if you do it in the very same breath (as Reich did here) as you talk about the economic issues which *should* win over many swing voters and even conservatives to the Democratic side.
But you can't do that if you pee in the punchbowl it.
Make up your mind that you want to win on the issues you need to win on. Don't get greedy and insist on winning on the issues you CANNOT win on and that are not going to turn our economy around, create jobs, or help level the economic playing field so everyone has a fair shot. Going after guns is instead a failsafe way to lose votes by preaching to the choir of people who will already vote for you if they agree and will loathe you if they don't -- so you gain nothing and can lose everything. It's just cutting off your nose to spite your face.
By the way, capitalism is not a form of government. It is a monetary policy that our democracy has chosen.
Yes, everybody does not just Americans. So your company is not insured? Would insurance be a safety net??
In a predatory Darwinian capital system, safety nets are a must or we are back to slave wages, slave salaries, directly to abject poverty and an early gr ave once you are no longer able to produce, accept subpar dangerous products and environment. This is not a myth or hyperbole, we were already there once.
You are able to have business only because the society around you, the infrastructure they created, because they buy your products, and work in your shops. The knowledge you aquired to enable you came from the society around you, it doesn't spring into your mind out of a vaccuum. Don't you think society's health is something you should be concerned about and not just mine, mine, mine??
Would you have been able to build a business if we dropped you in a deserted island? Without even the proverbial kn~if~e which is a product of the society around you, would you have even survived??
Semper fi
There IS a growing disparity between rich and poor in this country, but perhaps the solution is to honestly address the structural reasons for it, rather than demonizing those who produce, innovate, and pay ALL of the income taxes to support the 47% who pay nothing. Perhaps those whom you describe as regressives actually don't want to roll back the safety net, but simply want the country to look more like the America that was once the envy of the world, rather than some crime-ridden, jumbo-sized, broken-down version of Sweden.
So, lets see, unemployment is around 10%. and this includes the truly incapable. This means that 90 %. NINETY PERCENT are hard working people, with the poor holding 2 or 3 Mac-Jobs to make ends meet.
Yet you are intimating that only the 1% are hard working people and of the rest 99% most are lazy and unemployed?? Heh, way to show that the view of the right is based in unreality, stereotypes, and narcissistic lack of empathy.
The Tea party has been bought, financed and organized by Corporate interest, mainly the Koch Bros.
The rich 1% now hold 70% of ALL financial assets. The highest it has been in the last 80 YEARS!!. This leaves the remaining 99% fighting for the remaining 30%. Nice society you are vying for. A lot of this wealth is made by playing the market casino which mostly produces nothing but a lot of paper and products like Morgage Derivatives.
The left is more of a socialistic thing that big government and a big tent for all people not to gather under but to be brought to control under is more the norm....power and control by a select few over the masses is the true goal. The left sees America as a Roman or Egyptian model with the power in the hands of a benevolent few, class warfare and social inequities.
The right is seen as a cut throat robber baron driven devisive money and weath driven society, where power is in the form or monetary gain. A backward looking society based on previous accomplishments, afraid to move into new areas, a global but introverted looking group.
Truth is that we are somewhere in the middle and it too people of all political stripes to pass good laws for this country and make it what it is today......thats what we have lost track of and what we need to find again, it is not left or right, but American Mr Reich!
Where in the world did you get this idea?? You couldn't possibly be more wrong. The left wants Government beholden and enabled by "We The People" and not by monied and corporate interests.