Congress should repeal this law and allow victims of gun violence their day in court. Today, gun companies are free to design and distribute unsafe weapons without concern for their destructive impact and without fear of being held accountable.

Public safety requires robust product-liability laws. In 1972, 13-year-old Richard Grimshaw was riding in a Ford Pinto when the fuel tank exploded and burned him. After 70 surgeries, he sued Ford for the fuel tank’s flawed design, a defect the company was aware of. He was awarded $3 million in punitive damages. After the case, car companies were put on notice: Unsafe designs would hurt their bottom line.

Before the passage of the gun-industry protections, lawsuits like this one could hold gun companies responsible for product safety. In March 2000, Smith & Wesson, one of the nation’s largest gun manufacturers, voluntarily adopted a robust set of handgun safety controls as part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by a coalition of mayors. Then, the NRA accused the company of being the first gun maker “to run up the white flag of surrender and duck behind the Clinton-Gore lines.” But since the 2005 immunity legislation, gun companies have no incentive to work with government to make their products safer. Today, Smith & Wesson has not only walked back on its pledge to the Clinton Administration but was actually inducted into the NRA’s “Golden Ring of Freedom” for donating over $1 million to the pro-gun lobby.

The 2005 act denies victims of gun violence the ability to sue companies for design defects, or even negligence, with regard to their products. Senator Larry Craig, the bill’s sponsor, promised that it “will not prevent a single victim from obtaining relief for wrongs done to them by anyone in the gun industry.” Except that’s exactly what the bill did. Veronique Pozner, whose six-year-old son was killed in the Newtown shootings, was frustrated to learn that the gun company was immune from a lawsuit despite its refusal to install a high-tech safety guard that would have prevented a non-owner from using their semi-automatic weapon. “If their wallets were threatened, they would have a greater interest in making firearms safer,” she noted.

As a mouthpiece for the gun industry, the NRA will fight tooth and nail to defend immunity for gun companies. Since 2005, the NRA has received between $20 and $50 million from gun companies. The NRA no longer represents the majority of gun owners; it’s tethered to supporting the financial interests of these large corporations.

Despite the uphill battle, some leaders are beginning to turn back the tide on the gun industry. Representative Adam Schiff has introduced the “Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act,” which would repeal the 2005 law and allow gun violence victims to have their day in court. Sixteen members of Congress have joined with Schiff, but we’ll need far more in order to make this bill into a law.

As a first-year senator in 2005, Barack Obama couldn’t do anything more than vote against immunity for the gun industry. As President, he has the power to restore accountability for those who profit from violence on our nation’s streets. Our schools, places of worship, shopping malls, and homes will be safer in a society where gun companies are accountable for their products under the law.

Williamson writes that, according to the conventional wisdom, the Republicans and Democrats “flipped” positions on race in the 1960s—that the Democrats, once a bunch of backwoods racists, became enlightened, while the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, became the party of George Lincoln Rockwell (or thereabouts). This, he says, is a “myth,” since a majority of Republican senators support the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while the Southern Democrats opposed it.

True, all true. But—and this is so basic that it’s embarrassing to say it—the political landscape has changed dramatically in 50 years. In 1963 both parties were ideologically diverse coalitions. The Democrats included everyone from Adam Clayton Powell (black nationalist) to Richard Daley (white urban ethnic) to James Eastland (Southern white supremacist), while the GOP included Jacob Javits (Jewish urban liberal) to Bill McCulloch (small-town Ohio conservative) to Barry Goldwater (Sunbelt libertarian). Rather than falling along an ideological spectrum, the parties were constellations – there were Southern racists who backed the New Deal (Lister Hill) and Midwestern, small-government conservatives who backed progressive civil rights legislation (Everett Dirksen). So, yes, in the 1960s some Republicans supported civil rights. Some didn’t. Some Democrats were ignorant racists. Others weren’t.

For a variety of reasons—including, but not only, racial politics—both parties went through ideological realignments in the postwar decades, so that today we speak of Republicans as almost uniformly conservative and Democrats as almost uniformly liberal. The GOP of today is simply not the GOP of 1963. Williamson claims that you can draw a pro-civil rights line through a century of Republicans, from Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony to the likes of Jacob Javits. True. But you can’t draw a line from Javits to, say, Jim DeMint, so drastically has the party changed. Williamson is either willfully ignorant of that fact, or he has never cracked a political science textbook. Either way, somewhere in America a high school history teacher is crying behind his desk.

This isn’t the only con job that Williamson botches. He also argues that the realignment of the South, from overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican, had nothing to do with race. To prove it, he name checks a 2006 book by the political scientists Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston, which argues that rising incomes, not race, drove the South to the GOP. It’s not clear that Williamson actually read Shafer and Johnston’s book, which is much more nuanced than he presents it (he doesn’t quote from it, instead relying on a squib from a potted synopsis, written by yours truly). And it’s obvious he hasn’t read the towering stack of books by such luminaries as Earl and Merle Black that argue the opposite, that race did in fact play a major part in the Southern realignment. In any case, no serious political scientist—not Shafer, not Johnston, certainly not the Black brothers—argues that race was irrelevant to the Southern realignment. Williamson is alone on this one.

Williamson also ignores, or isn’t aware of, the fascinating recent historical work that demonstrates how race and class in the postwar South were complementary, not mutually exclusive. As Princeton’s Kevin Kruse demonstrates in his seminal history of postwar Atlanta, White Flight, the rising income among whites allowed overt racism to morph into something more subtle, from dominance through social control to dominance through space—in other words, whites just moved to the suburbs, where high property values proved just as effective as Jim Crow in keeping blacks at arm’s length. The new breed of conservative Republican politicians, in turn, realized they could avoid the stain of overt racism by appealing to these middle–class, de facto segregationists: hence the rise of anti‒bussing, anti‒urban politics in the 1970s and 80s, campaigns in which the words “black” and “segregation” never needed to be mentioned. Any serious discussion of race and American party politics needs to at least engage with such work. Williamson doesn’t.

If nothing else, Williamson’s article is instructive because it points up a depressing fact about American political culture. We cheer on Republicans or Democrats like we do sports teams, with little appreciation for the underlying values they claim to represent. That’s hardly news, but Williamson’s anachronistic ignorance takes it to an absurd extreme—presenting incoherent revisionism without actually understanding the history he’s trying to rewrite.

The reason is that arguing against government funding of contraception would reveal the impaired logic behind conservatives’ broader complaint that Obama wanted, in the melodramatic words of a Heritage Foundation blogger, “Two Centuries of Religious Freedom Rolled Back.” Because once you argue that taxpayers should not have to pay for things they morally object to, there would be nothing left to tax.

For instance: Many religions have strong pacifist traditions, including Jainism, the Quakers, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. While we’ve granted members of religions like these conscientious objector status, no one has ever seriously advocated that they should be able to opt out of paying taxes that fund the military (and can you imagine a Republican doing so?). Scientologists don’t believe in psychiatry, and yet their tax dollars fund psychiatric research, and psychiatric care in hospitals and other places. Should they get an exemption as well? Jews who keep Kosher nonetheless have to pay taxes that will be used to subsidize animal products they believe violate their scripture. Is their religious freedom being violated too? This road leads quickly to absurdity.

Conservatives and Catholic organizations would likely have one response to this line of argument, and it brings me to the title of this post. They would argue that paying an insurance company that then distributes contraceptives is far more direct than paying tax dollars into one general pot that’s used for everything. It’s a fair point. But it’s a point that implies the opposite of what these same pundits argued during the health-care reform debate—it implies that health care, including contraception, should be a societal concern. We should all pay into it, and receive benefits dictated by consensus reflected through government, not by the unique moral and religious concerns of whoever happens to be our employer.

To put it a different way, a single-payer system would have much the same effect that the tradition of loading blank cartridges into random rifles in a firing squad had: diffusion of responsibility and plausible deniability. Each person could think that his or her money wasn’t being used in a way they didn’t approve of, whether it was birth control or anything else. Further, we could debate what should be covered as a society, rather than as balkanized interest groups.

Single-payer won’t be implemented in the near future, and conservatives will probably continue to demagogue this issue. But it’s worth remembering, whenever “religious freedom,” is invoked, that we all pay for things we don’t believe in; that’s living in a democracy.

Basically, this: While I embrace the claim that Lochner jurisprudence, so-called, was not crude laissez-faire policy-making, I also believe that there was a mutually reinforcing relationship between the prominence of laissez-faire thinking and the shape the Court gave to substantive due process (and, in important respects, to the Commerce Clause). So while I think the traditional story did harm by taking a reductive view of legal reasoning, it was plausible in part because it responded to a real relation between law and the larger field of ideas. We see this in many places, from Justice William R. Day’s 1918 assertion in Hammer v. Dagenhart that the division between federal and state power was essential to preserving liberty of commerce—suggesting an overriding aim that infused constitutional design, quite apart from the specifics of Fourteenth Amendment “liberty of contract”—to the arguments of plaintiffs in anti-regulatory constitutional cases, which routinely construed Supreme Court precedents as establishing precisely the categorical laissez-faire rules that the Court never in fact embraced. One might explain virtually any passage on independent grounds, but in sum laissez-faire thinking infused strands of elite and popular thinking and lent plausibility to such claims, and to the Court’s doctrine as well.

The same basic claim holds for the recent cases that I discuss in my essay and our neoclassical update of laissez-faire thinking. If I may put it this way, from an internalist legal perspective, the traditional Lochner story was way too crude. From a perspective with stronger externalist notes, it captures important features of that time, which our time shares. Today as then, laissez-faire ideas in the larger intellectual and political culture contribute to the development of anti-regulatory lines of jurisprudence.

David says (to simplify) that the First Amendment cases are about mistrusting government, not idealizing markets. I think this is an important point: I mean to argue in the piece that these are two sides of the same coin, with one emphasized more in some cases, the other in others. David’s comments, and those of a few others, help me to see that I should spell this out more clearly.

David points to the scholarship observing that “more democratic” government (I use the quotes because I’m simplifying, not because it’s his phrase or his idea) often doesn’t, as I would like to put it, legislate to limit private economic power. I don’t mean anything in my argument to depend on whether “republican” democracy is in fact more redistributive than what we might call market democracy. I do mean to defend the legitimacy of such interventions in principle. Still, I do appreciate being brought back to the empirical case for mistrust of democracy and regulation as we know them. As an avowed liberal-conservative-socialist-anarchist (I suspect David and I share between 1 and 2.5 of 4 among those labels), I never object to this kind of cold water. Even so, I believe that political intervention into economic inequality is legitimate in principle and that the tendency to restrict it under the Constitution reflects the ascendancy of anti-government laissez-faire ideas, now as it did a century ago. ]]> tag:www.democracyjournal.org,2011:/arguments//3.897 2011-11-30T16:54:49Z 2011-11-30T17:37:23Z

A fascinating spat has blown up in recent weeks over the role of the Internet in public life. It begins with Evgeny Morozov’s October review in The New Republic of Public Parts, a new book by Jeff Jarvis, a TV personality, blogger, professor, and all-purpose prophet of the benefits of the Internet.

Morozov is author of The Net Delusion, the widely reviewed and much-praised exposé of the role of information technology in tracking and suppressing grassroots movements around the world. Published just before the so-called Arab Spring, Morozov’s closely documented work provides a counterpoint to the blandishments of social media as universal engines of democratic empowerment.

]]> Morozov’s review of Public Parts is long, detailed, and unremittingly hostile. He casts Jarvis as an archetypal “Internet intellectual”—a category of thinkers that “left unchallenged…may succeed in convincing us that we do inhabit the digital wonderland of their imagination.” In their world, Morozov notes, the Internet affords a cornucopia-like flow of benefits for public life, including richer public debate, more efficient and responsive public and private institutions, and (of course) economic bounty. Morozov scores Jarvis’s paeans to “publicness” and his skepticism of privacy advocates. He takes Jarvis to task for shallowness, inconsistencies, and simplistic renditions of heavyweight thinkers from Arendt to Habermas. You begin to wonder: If the book is really this bad, why spend more than 6,000 words picking it apart?

Jarvis fires back point-by-point in similar detail and language no less extreme. Morozov’s review amounts to “character assassination,” he holds. Jarvis denies being categorically against privacy, but merely proclaims himself against “self-appointed watchdog groups, legislators, regulators, consultants, companies, and chief privacy officers…” Far from trading in pronouncements that are pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous as Morozov charges, Jarvis protests, “I despise closed worlds—whether in the academe or media or government. I distrust priesthoods who would exclude others from entering their fields…” And on and on, via print and electron, as others join the fray. With example piled against example and charge following counter-charge, you feel that this could go on forever—and given the articulate energies of the principals, you fear that it may.

What are we to make of all this? First, a reading of Public Parts confirms that the work is indeed target-rich. True, Jarvis’s book offers factoids that grab one’s attention—for example, his account of efforts in early-twentieth-century America to outlaw the activities of “fiendish kodakers,” i.e., reporters bent on photographing unwilling subjects with the cutting-edge information technology of the day. But overall, the attention span is short, and the analysis no more than retina-deep. The author’s self-advertisement is pervasive—perhaps in keeping with his proclaimed ethos of “publicness”—and his stance toward Internet magnates (above all Mark Zuckerberg) almost fawning. Most alarming is the “what, me worry?” attitude toward the social world emerging in concert with the Internet. “Ancient and authoritarian regimes told people what they must think and do,” Jarvis writes. “[M]odern societies enable and ennoble citizens to do what they want to do, alone and together. Publicness is a progression to greater freedom.” That will be news to the many who have taken beatings, literal and figurative, from misappropriation of their personal data by unfriendly parties ranging from identity thieves in consumer societies to the victims of political repression in Iran.

But even acknowledging the deficiencies of Jarvis’s book, one senses that Morozov’s relentless assault on its every detail is not the whole story of their disagreement. Like a couple who argue incessantly over every little thing, Morozov and Jarvis are actually warring about something deeper. At work here are deeply antipathetic mind-sets on the role of science and technology in human affairs that go back at least as far as the Enlightenment. At one end of the spectrum are thinkers who see in the elaboration of science—these days especially including information science—the hope of realizing all the best of human potentials. At the other are those who fear the mobilization of science and technology as central to real-life horrors ranging from mechanized death factories like Auschwitz; to unacknowledged, one-sided government and corporate surveillance over “private” life; to the devolution of public discourse into tweets and sound bites. Enlightenment visionaries like Saint Simon imagined that scientific thinking would ultimately transform matters of political conflict into scope for rationally guided administration. By the late twentieth century, science and technology were getting much more skeptical treatment—as in Herbert Marcuse’s portrayal of them as instruments of pervasive repression. Exponents of these contending visions have about as much chance of playing nicely with each other as dogs and cats.

There is no sense in debating whether science and technology are ultimately life-giving forces for a better world or ultimately dangerous and destructive. Both these possibilities (and many intermediate ones) obviously play themselves out in specific settings, at specific moments. It simply doesn’t help to cast discussion in terms that sound very much like “Information technology— Whoopie!” versus “Information technology—Booo!”

But some debates on very big, and closely related, questions do have to be waged. These are debates on how to fashion principles of law and policy to shape the social role of science and technology—in this case, to channel the evolution of the Internet and other information technologies in directions compatible with key public values. For the most pressing of practical reasons, the public must decide what uses of information, and particularly personal information, will be encouraged, permitted, or proscribed.

For guidance in these matters, it will not do to invoke mantras like “Information wants to be free.” Neither “Information” nor “Technology” nor any other disembodied force offers directions for human affairs apart from the interests associated with them. The interests in play here are both disparate and contentious. We need to fashion basic grounds rules for what kinds of information are subject to what kinds of control and regulation under what sorts of circumstances. Such decision-making can only be political—in the best and broadest sense of emerging from collective soul-searching about what kind of (technologically abetted) world we want to live in. (See Rule’s “The Whole World Is Watching,” Issue #22.)

A perfect case in point is delineation between personal information held normally accessible as part of the public sphere versus that defined as private, a distinction often invoked in the Jarvis-Morozov dust-up. Nearly everyone must agree that such delineation is essential to any civic life worth living—and anyone who has tried to fashion a practical principle to enact it will agree that it is excruciatingly difficult to do so. People must be able to refuse others’ prerogatives of recording, disseminating, and profiting from some forms of information about themselves. Yet a world where others could never compel any disclosure of personal data would be morally intolerable—as when my neighbor is reasonably suspected of carrying bubonic plague, or nuclear weapons—as well as totally unfeasible. Thus hardly anyone would challenge the prerogative of the state to station a police officer on a street corner to try to spot a wanted felon. But should the state be permitted to train face-recognition technologies on all passers-by at any (or every) street-corner—thus moving us a step toward tracking of all citizens, all of the time?

Clearly, answers to any such questions compel us to weigh deeply contested and ultimately unknowable dangers against equally hypothetical benefits. But as citizens of a world where information technology affords more and more such choices, we have no alternative but to take a stand—or have such choices made for us by highly interested institutional parties.

Polemical manifestos on behalf of such sweeping notions as privacy versus “publicness” do not help much here. Morozov and Jarvis have dug in on high ground in their dramatic and polemical face-off. But the hard work of fashioning an information environment that we are all prepared to live in will have to occur in the uncertain and ambiguous space between maximalist positions.

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Lotteries' revenue is consistent with the Pareto principle, which in this context states that 80 percent of total profit often comes from roughly the top 20 percent of consumers. For most businesses, this is intuitive and unproblematic. A bookstore depends on avid readers, a stereo shop on audiophiles, and so on. But when it comes to vices—especially state-sponsored vices—we need to be more squeamish.

A widely-cited 1999 Duke study determined the demographics of this top 20 percent, and the results are disturbing. African Americans comprised 25.4 percent of the heaviest players, even though they make up only 12.2 percent of the country. High school dropouts were 20.3 percent, but 12.3 percent of the country. Those with household incomes under $10,000 are 5 percent of citizens, but 10 percent of the heaviest players. The practical impact? Lottery players who were high school dropouts spent $700 a year on the lottery on average. Those with yearly household incomes under $10,000 spent nearly $600. These are the players on which lotteries rely.

State governments encourage this level of gambling with marketing campaigns unlike that of any other government service. Residents of New York in the 1990s will still remember the slick, “Hey, You Never Know” ad campaigns. My own grocery store’s lottery kiosk is a shining blue, with the giant (and slightly desperate) marquee “Lots Of People Win.”

Governors and legislatures defend these lotteries with disingenuousness at best and shameful self-interest at worst. Many lotteries “earmark” the funds toward popular programs—education the most prominent example. But while studies have found that earmarked funds do increase education funding, it’s virtually never at the amount advertised. Lawmakers anticipate the revenue increase and divert funds from the earmarked program to others.

An argument familiar to those in states that have recently legalized lotteries is that “the state next door is taking our money.” The reasoning goes that, if an adjacent state has a lottery, that state will “take” the home state’s revenue. This is persuasive at first blush, but it’s really a race-to-the-bottom technique masquerading as pragmatism. In reality, the amount of funds lost to people who live near the border and play in other states is small enough that it could be raised in countless ways.

Indeed, possibly the saddest aspect of most state lotteries is that the revenue really is not vital. It’s simply preferred because it’s yet another way (with fees, surcharges, and other gimmicks) of raising money without “raising taxes.” In fact, the National Conference of State Legislatures found that lottery proceeds constituted only 0.95 percent of net state revenue in 2006—“less than the revenue from motor vehicle license taxes.”

Truthfully, for lawmakers whose goal is to extract as much money as possible, no alternative will be preferable to what’s in place. But alternatives do exist: return to an illegal lottery; legalize and tax lotteries; or split the difference by allowing lotteries that provide solely for charities or other efforts in the public good.

Criminalizing lotteries would return us to the status quo until the mid-1960s. In those days, people with gambling itches often played in underground “numbers games.” UCLA Professor Mark Kleiman has argued that these games caused much less harm than modern government lotteries do. Black markets can’t advertise on television or erect kiosks in grocery stores, and therefore would not take in anywhere near the sum state-run lotteries do. Many liberals, though, have become uncomfortable criminalizing activities whose only victim is one’s wallet (although this is the policy toward casinos in most states).

A second option, then, would be to legalize all lotteries and tax them as we do most other vices. Practically, this would probably have the least impact on consumers. Prices would probably drop, because the states’ monopolies allow them to charge prices with massive profit margins, which a private market would undercut. States could then tax these private lotteries to make up the revenue. Allowing a citizen to purchase a vice disincentivized through taxation is far preferable to the government actually selling that product.

Finally, a third option would be to carve out exemptions for charities or non-profits. For instance, the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario runs a $2 million lottery. An idea with a similar motivation has been advocated by Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame: the “no-lose” lottery. Implemented in Michigan, the idea is that you deposit money in a participating bank or credit union, which then uses the combined interest to pay out lottery-like prizes, even though the player didn’t actually spend anything. Why hasn’t this been implemented more? It’s illegal in most states, because it would be competition.

Lotteries are bitter policy pills, because while it’s unlikely they’ll be repealed absent a major scandal, it’s not an exaggeration to say that no political ideology should support them. Conservatives and libertarians are against government programs, and especially against raising more revenue. It’s hard to imagine a principled conservative thinking a state monopoly whose sole purpose is to generate money is a good idea. Progressives, on the other hand, are adamant that protection of the poor and minorities is a responsibility of government, and that revenue should be raised by progressive means. But lotteries are terribly regressive, and actually rely on money from disadvantaged groups. Even though collecting revenue is important, we should remember that money is a means, common welfare the end—not the reverse.

Photo Credit: Dex1138

For decades, we have focused on extending liberty in the realm of the marketplace, but this has come at the expense of democratic equality. There was a time when our government approached economic policies with a dual bottom line: Policies were meant to create not only competitiveness, but also social well-being. In recent decades, however, our policy-makers have shifted to pursuing competitiveness as an end in itself, without regard for social benefit. As a result, we now witness a failure to create broadly shared prosperity—a failure that takes the form of glaring inequalities of wealth.

But there’s been a failure in our politics as well. Our system has too often failed to include the voices of working- and middle-class Americans as part of the discussion, privileging the political speech of the wealthy. As Harold Meyerson recently asked in The Washington Post:

After all, did the financial deregulation of the past two decades get enacted on its merits, or because of the campaign contributions and lobbying prowess of the financial sector? The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had kept federally insured commercial banks separate from investment and speculator banks, didn’t happen because speculative banking had suddenly become safe. It happened because Citibank and other institutions made mega-campaign contributions and lobbied ferociously for repeal. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated derivatives, was enacted because the leading banks believed they could make untold profits if it passed. And because they did indeed make untold profits—in the past decade, banks’ gains reached 41 percent of all the corporate profits in America—they had even more money with which to influence our lawmakers.

Americans are not only feeling a financial pinch; they’re feeling disenfranchised. We have experienced cuts to the welfare state for decades. But what we saw in Wisconsin and other state-level fights in early 2011 was that when Republican governors coupled further rollbacks in social services and decreases in education funding with attacks on some of the few remaining middle-class jobs in America, it created a level of insecurity that drove people—in numbers rarely seen—to voice their concerns outside of an electoral framework. These people used protests because the more traditional channels of democracy seemed blocked to all except those who could afford high-priced lobbyists. The same lack of democratic equality gave rise to Occupy Wall Street, and it will continue to motivate protests for as long as it persists.

Even within the business world, a variety of figures have recognized the imbalance. Henry Blodget, CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, argues, “Importantly, the inequality that has developed in the economy over the past couple of decades is not just a moral issue. It's a practical one. It is, as sociologists might say, “de-stabilizing.” It leads directly to the sort of social unrest that we're seeing right now.” Meanwhile, Laurence D. Fink, Chief Executive of BlackRock, states of Occupy Wall Street, “These are not lazy people sitting around looking for something to do. We have people losing hope and they're going into the street, whether it's justified or not.” And for his part, Vikram Pandit, chief executive officer of Citigroup, says: “[These protests are] completely understandable. Trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S., and that is Wall Street’s job, to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust.”

Historically, social movements have often been unpopular—and yet they’ve made important contributions to American politics. When viewed in hindsight, many protest movements once thought to be too unfocused, unkempt, or unruly ended up securing gains that are now taken for granted in our society.

While some observers may feel disappointed or confused by the message coming out of Occupy Wall Street, we should recognize that social change is a messy process. During the 1930s, those opposed to such measures as social security and labor rights frequently denounced those pushing for changes as dangerous Bolsheviks. Historian Kim Phillips-Fein notes that William Clinton Mullendore, president of the Southern California Edison Company and an influential conservative thinker, argued in 1931 against that era’s reformers, “[Those stirring up ‘trouble’ are] apostles of hatred.”

Yet in the end the social movement activism derided by establishment figures proved essential to creating the political climate necessary for change. Labor unionists and others speaking out made the reforms of the New Deal possible and paved the way for the growth of the American middle class in the post-World War II period. Few can argue today that this wasn’t a good thing for our country.

What’s at stake now is the health of our democracy. When a disproportionate number of Americans feel disenfranchised, it weakens the social fabric of our country. We see this in the ever-more-acrimonious clashes displayed on cable news. Will Occupy Wall Street, like New Deal-era activism, be viewed in retrospect as effectively pushing our political debate in a healthier direction? This remains to be seen. But it is clear that a renewed drive to again create shared prosperity in our economy and democratic equality in our politics is long overdue.

Photo Credit: david_shankbone