Are we heading towards a new 1968?

The very fabric of society is tearing.

Ferguson. This is just the beginning. What exactly happened during those 90 seconds when a white police officer killed a young unarmed black boy while fighting his inner demons may never be clear, but what is clear is that America's poor and especially its young and people of color are losing whatever faith they had left in the legal and political system.

We may be entering another 1968 -- the year when young people across the world took to the streets protesting wars and injustice. The governments had failed to deliver on hope and justice, peace and prosperity, focusing all their effort on protecting the rich and waging wars that were often ill-conceived and ill-executed.

The Great Recession (which began in 2007 and exploded in the autumn of 2008) robbed the American middle class of its security, pulled the rug under the Black and Latino population at the same time as it allowed the obscenely rich tenth of a percent to multiply their undeserved wealth.

Charles Dickens would have said that it was the best of times and the worst of times. It all depended on if you belonged to the top quintile or the bottom four quintiles. Inequality has exploded in America and the rest of the world and the "losers" -- as Mitt Romney and many conservatives -- like to call ordinary people, have lost their patience. The result is deep anger, frustration, social unrest and in some cases extreme political movements.

The very fabric of society is tearing and the economic, political and legal system is unable to address its deepest and most serious problems.

The Democratic Party is a party without ideas and only a few steps behind the Republican Party as far as corruption goes. The Republican Party is equally void of ideas (unless we call the Tea Party's hatred of the United States's first black president a set of ideas rather than an ignorant mix of populism and racism), but at least twice as corrupt as its rival.

We've had a Democratic president for six years, and although he led the country out of the recession George W. Bush and his Republicans let lose, he failed to stand up to Wall Street, and compromised away much of the support he had on the left and center-left. The Republican strategy has rested on two legs, political obstruction even when it undermined the country's economy and national security and voter suppression. They know that they the demographic changes in the U.S. work against them, so they have been working hard, and the Supreme Court have enabled them, at disenfranchising the majority of America's population.

Today they have a lock on the economic and political power. All that is left is the Presidency. But as we have seen over the past six years, they can pretty much run the country without controlling the Presidency.

Hence the disillusionment among the poor, a large part of the middle class and the minorities (despite the fact that they will soon become a majority of eligible voters.)

       

*

Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, is similarly critical of the “upscale capture” of the Democratic Party. In an email, he wrote that in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008,

the country is desperate for economic relief, but as time goes on it becomes clear that the administration’s economic policy is to take care of the financial sector, where hundreds of people are clearly guilty of fraud in any layman’s view. The result is building disappointment, resentment, and rage in the public, which results in the 2010 debacle.

“Today,” Fiorina writes,

We have a situation where voters can choose between a party that openly admits to being a lap dog of Wall Street and a party that by its actions clearly is a lap dog but denies it. At least vote for the honest one.

*

Thomas B. Edsall: Who Will Save the Democratic Party From Itself? (New York Times, November 25, 2014)


The Social Impact of the Great Recession

Läs mer om Hirschman här

Ferguson protests around U.S. clog streets