ineluctable

If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of the common good.

In the twenty-first century, millions of American workers—most of them with no college education and no union to support them—lacked a political home. Without the alternative of economic populism, Americans were more susceptible to right-wing cultural populism. Eventually, this political void was filled by someone only pretending to be on their

America had a civil rights movement, a women’s rights movement, a gay rights movement, a consumer movement, an environmental movement, a poor people’s campaign, and an anti–Vietnam War movement, but no movement to lift the living standards of the working class.

Our duty, as I’ve come to understand it, is to stop brutality. Our responsibility is to hold the powerful accountable. Our challenge is to stand up to abuses of power. Our moral obligation is to protect the vulnerable.

To claim that “both sides”—the more powerful who seek individual liberty and the weaker who seek social justice—have equal moral claims is to avert one’s eyes from this reality. Lobbyists for large corporations, publicists for the wealthy, lawmakers for the privileged, pundits for the powerful, celebrity peddlers of racism and xenophobia—none of

Some posit a moral equivalence between those who seek social justice and those who want to protect individual liberties, between so-called left and right. But I have come to believe that there is no moral equivalence between bullies and the bullied, between tyranny and democracy, between brutality and decency. No individual can be free in a society

propitious

Since the political rise of Ronald Reagan, his party and the moneyed interests have used Potter-like Social Darwinism to justify tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, and cutbacks in social safety nets.