BEYOND OUTRAGE

Reich (Public Policy/Univ. of California, Berkeley; Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, 2011, etc.) spells out what he thinks citizens need to do to ensure Washington acts on behalf of the public good, not special interests.

Bill Clinton's former labor secretary reports that, due to the emails he receives, he is well aware of the electorate’s mood. He believes citizens must band together “without scapegoating or cynicism” on the basis of “moral clarity and undeniable facts” if they want to succeed. Reich writes that the basic bargain—“that employers paid their workers enough to buy what employers were selling”—underlying America's post–World War II prosperity has been violated, with the result of increasing inequality and poverty. This reversal reflects a deliberate choice, which Reich attributes to “regressives,” embodied by such officials as Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. They want to “return America to the 1920s—before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage,” etc. Still others, writes the author, want to go back even further, promoting a political revival of 19th-century social Darwinism to justify shameless inequality and survival of the fittest. For Reich, the Republican Party, which disavowed social Darwinism in the 1950s, is marching backward, but the author writes that the Democrats' “stunning failure” to offer an alternative has helped regressives gain political traction. The author outlines a series of organizing initiatives intended to broaden citizen involvement at all levels of government and provides a handy list of the “Ten Biggest Lies” the regressives are using to fuel their campaign.

Short and lively, this is a timely contribution to making the ongoing discussion more productive.