We don't need to bridge the class divide — we need to end it. [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/03/time-radical-action-not-national-therapy

Brooks fails to acknowledge what or who has actually led us into a Second Gilded Age, placing the American dream out of reach for vast numbers of Americans, and fostering that crisis of solidarity. He makes absolutely no mention of the class war from above that has marked American life for the past 40 years – a class war that has placed private greed and profits before the public good and general welfare. Not only has it made the rich exceedingly richer and working people poorer, it also has raised up an oligarchy to keep our democracy in check; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women and African Americans; and devastated the communities, organizations and solidarities they built to make their lives more secure.

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Brooks tells us we are in crisis, that the nation’s deepening social divide has undone the solidarities of the past. Notably, he remains silent both as to how this happened and how those solidarities first developed. Though he cites the 1930s WPA as a program possibly worth emulating, he fails to mention how Americans fought the Great Depression by electing the progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency and how that president led the fight for recovery, reconstruction, and reform both by launching public works projects to engage their labors in improving the nation, and empowering them to organize unions and collectively confront their bosses.

Brooks also fails to recount how in the course of those industrial struggles millions of Americans learned firsthand about solidarity and trust and not only succeeded in enhancing American democracy and securing better lives for themselves and their families, but also prepared us to beat our fascist enemies in World War II.

One cannot help but imagine that Brooks sees what we see – that growing numbers of Americans are rejecting the appeals of political establishments both right and left – and that seeing it gives him reason to be concerned, if not fearful and pained. Some Americans are angry. Some are hopeful. And yet, for all of their evident and at times antagonistic and vicious differences, the angry and the hopeful do seem to share a determination to confront the treachery of the nation’s political and economic elites and bring to an end the class war from above that has denied them their nation’s historic promise.