Only through a political movement such as America had a century ago when progressives reclaimed our economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.
That was when Wisconsin's "fighting Bob" La Follette instituted the nation's first minimum wage law; presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies; and President Teddy Roosevelt busted up the giant trusts.
When suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony secured women the right to vote, reformers like Jane Addams got laws protecting children and the public's health, and organizers like Mary Harris "Mother" Jones spearheaded labor unions.
America enacted a progressive income tax, limited corporate campaign contributions, ensured the safety and purity of food and drugs, and even invented the public high school.
The progressive era welled up in the last decade of the nineteenth century because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power at the top were undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize.
We may have reached that tipping point again.
Both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party grew out of revulsion at the Wall Street bailout. Consider, more recently, the fight for a higher minimum wage ("Fight for 15").
Bernie Sander's presidential campaign is part of this mobilization. (Donald Trump's bastardized version draws on the same anger and frustration but has descended into bigotry and xenophobia.)
Surely 2016 is a critical year. But, as the reformers of the Progressive Era understood more than a century ago, no single president or any other politician can accomplish what's needed because a system caught in the spiral of wealth and power cannot be reformed from within. It can be changed only by a mass movement of citizens pushing from the outside.
So regardless of who wins the presidency in November and which party dominates the next Congress, it is up to the rest of us to continue to organize and mobilize. Real reform will require many years of hard work from millions of us.
As we learned in the last progressive era, this is the only way the vicious cycle of wealth and power can be reversed.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
