Why a second progressive era is emerging--and how not to blow it.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

America is in the midst of a crisis that needs no introduction. Ideological warfare and policy paralysis in Washington. Declining economic well-being among the mass of Americans combined with expanding wealth at the top and an economy too weak and rigged to change the dynamic. A profound need, and public hunger, for solutions from government together with a widespread lack of faith in government's ability to deliver.

These trends have been with us at least since I started writing for this magazine in the mid-1980s (though they subsided somewhat in the latter 1990s). What's different now is that the vast majority of Americans get it. They understand, in a way they did not even a few years ago, that the system is really, profoundly broken; that the downward trajectory of their lives is not temporary or an isolated individual fate, but part of a broad, deep, and long-term trend; and that this decline is somehow connected to the dysfunction they read about in Washington.

In that broad recognition there is a seed of hope. As many observers have noted, there are arresting parallels between our age and the 1890s, the dawn of the Progressive Era. Then as now, vast numbers of Americans found themselves left behind economically. Plutocrats running monopolistic corporations created fantastic accumulations of wealth and enjoyed seemingly unbreakable control of the political, legal, and policymaking process. A rising class of educated, technologically savvy professionals grew alienated from and hostile to a government they saw as corrupt, inefficient, and incompetent at anything other than perpetuating the careers of those in power. This broad dissatisfaction led to sweeping reforms of public institutions and of the rules governing the economy. These reform efforts, which continued in the New Deal, happened in the face of a powerful ideological resistance on the right to the very idea of government having a legitimate role to play in these areas.

Today you see, on the left at least, a growing constellation of voices and organizations inspired by those parallels and trying to build a new progressive reform movement. It's no accident that liberals now call themselves progressives and that the main Democratic Party-oriented think tank in Washington is named the Center for American Progress. Obviously there are many differences between the two eras, too numerous to name. (I hope we are not going to have a repeat of the eugenics movement, for instance.) But...