http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/story/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/08/04/robert_reich_enthusiasm_gapWednesday, Aug 4, 2010 17:30 ET
The enthusiasm gap and you
The right has learned to weather political storms. It's time progressives do the same
By Robert Reich
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When it comes to misuse of power, Americans carry two deep-seated fears — of big government taking over and of big business and Wall Street running amok. Both are sometimes justified, but the political response is lopsided. The conservative movement adeptly fits almost every morsel of news to the first fear, giving its members an animating cause: Reduce government.
A progressive movement would focus on the second fear, seeking to protect average working people from the depredations of big business and Wall Street. Given what has occurred in recent years -- from Enron and WorldCom through the devastation brought on by Wall Street, to the price-gouging by health insurers like WellPoint and Big Pharma, right through BP -- there is no absence of dots to be connected.
Average Americans are hurting. But their pain isn’t coming from government. It’s coming from an economy whose benefits are concentrating ever more at the top, whose giant corporations are controlling ever more of our democratic process, and whose costs and risks are becoming ever more burdensome for the middle class and the poor. Public schools, parks and libraries are closing or reducing hours and staff. Median hourly wages are dropping. Unemployment is at levels not seen in decades; long-term joblessness hasn’t been this bad since the 1940s. Social safety nets -- unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare -- are endangered.
Yet corporate profits are reaching unprecedented levels, and the richest Americans — CEOs, other top corporate executives, investment bankers and hedge-fund managers — are raking in as much or more than before the Great Recession.
With the election of Barack Obama, many on the left found comfort in the belief that a single man could make transformative change without powerful tailwinds behind him. But that was a pipe dream. No person can do it alone.
I can understand your disillusionment with a president and representatives that seem to bend to the prevailing winds from the right. But if you and David and other progressives wallow in your cynicism we’ll be in much bigger trouble as a nation than we are now.
Here’s what I learned during my years in Washington: Nothing good happens there unless Americans outside Washington are sufficiently mobilized, energized and organized to make sure it gets done.
Be angry, but channel your anger toward constructive change. This fall, work for the reelection of politicians, or for candidates to replace them, who support a genuinely progressive agenda. And lend your hand to the creation and continued sustenance of a powerful progressive movement in America.
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