Week of September 20, 2010

"Is it a rebellion?" the doomed king of France, Louis XVI, is supposed to have asked in 1789."No, sire," a minister allegedly replied."It is a revolution." The right-wing Tea Party movement in the United States in 2010 is not a revolution. It is a rebellion.

One mystery of the first decade of the 21st century is the decline of democracy. It’s not that nations with democratic systems have dwindled in number but that democracy has lost its luster. It’s an idea without a glow. And that’s worrying.

Today's poverty is the accumulated toll of two forces that have advanced in tandem for decades: The corporate fleecing of family wealth and the bipartisan destruction of a refuge to which those shorn families can turn. We fought a long, hard war on poverty to avoid landing in precisely this place. But the Reagan revolution ushered in a long hard war on government to undue that progress. Bill Clinton's protestations notwithstanding, so-called moderate Democrats long ago conceded defeat in Reagan's war. And as a consequence, government is crippled at a time when we need it most. The simple fact remains that unless someone in Washington is willing and able to gather the strength to rebuild government and ensure there's a floor through which we will not let people fall, America will continue its downward spiral.