When Change Is Not Enough: Seven Steps to Revolution

[laststeamtrain]

When Change Is Not Enough: Seven Steps to Revolution
By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future

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The American middle class was built on New Deal investments in education, housing, infrastructure, and health care, which produced a very "prolonged period of objective economic and social development." People were optimistic; generations of growing prosperity raised their expectations that their children would do even better. That era instilled in Americans exactly the kind of hopeful belief in their own agency that primes them to become likely revolutionaries in an era of decline.

And now, thanks to 28 years of conservative misrule, we are now at the point where "manifest reality breaks away from anticipated reality;" and the breach is creating political turbulence. The average American has seen his or her standard of living contract by fits and starts since about 1972. This fall-off that was relieved somewhat by the transition to two-earner households and the economic sunshine of the Clinton years -- but then accelerated with the dot-com crash, followed by seven years of Bush's overt hostility toward the lower 98 percent of Americans who aren't part of his base. Working-class America is reeling from the mass exodus of manufacturing jobs and the scourge of predatory lending; middle-class America is being hollowed out by health-care bankruptcies, higher college costs, and a tax load far heavier than that of the richest 2 percent. These people expected to do better than their parents. Now, they're screwed every direction they turn.

In the face of this reversal, Davies tells us, it's not at all surprising that the national mood is turning ominous, from one end of the political spectrum to the other. However, he warns us: this may not be just a passing political storm. In other times and places, this kind of quick decline in a prosperous nation has been a reliable sign of a full-on revolution brewing just ahead.

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http://www.alternet.org/democracy/77498/
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Faster, please.

[leftofthedial]

1. K&R

reading . . .

[bdamomma]

2. it may just (just) come to that.

when it starts affecting people personally that is when people will rise up.

[Q3JR4]

3. I'm pessimistic enough to think that

that's the only way we'll be able to make any permanent and lasting changes. On the other hand I'm optomistic enough to hope for the best without investing too much energy into the prospect of failure.

[Lex Talionis]

4. This statement was interesting.

"These misadventures not only reduce the country's international prestige and contribute to economic declines; they often create a class of displaced soldiers who return home with both the skills and the motivation to turn political unrest into a full-fledged shooting war"


Its going to be ugly if only the Government is armed, don't you think?

[Selatius]

5. I don't see a revolution of any kind unless the US economy is reduced to rubble.

This is bad, what we're seeing, but the US suffered through much worse, like the Great Depression, and somehow managed to avoid a violent revolution against the ruling class and the wealthy, although just barely.

We're not rich like we used to be. The top 1 percent saw to it that the wealth was transferred to themselves, but neither are the peons suffering and dying like they were in the 1930s, and if the rich learn from history, they will avoid another Great Depression out of fear of repeating France 1789.