We Are Progressives

We recently learned from Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal [1] that once again we've returned to the America that gave us the Charleston, the bob haircut, and Lucky Lindbergh: "IRS data," he writes, "go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s."

Big Con readers have returned with me to Roaring '20s before—in this post [2], touching on the Crandall Canyon mine collapse of this summer, and linking to this astonishing report from Keith Olbermann [3]: that the last time America's mine safety record was this bad was 1926.

We are progressives. When you use this word, think of what it means. We want progress. We believe in progress.

We know that the vexed record of humanity, and of our own United States of America, proves that progress is possible. That a nation with too many rattletrap tenements and dust-bowl farms without electricity presided over by an elite class of idle and arrogant rich became, with the New Deal, with the unions, with the exertions of a generation of progressive policymakers, a radically more equal nation. That a nation in which worker safety was laughed at by the arrogant rich who exploited those workers expanded its vision of what it meant to be a nation of laws, and extended federal protections to those whose work was most dangerous and despised.

And now they've taken us back. Taken us back to the nineteen twenties.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. We have to take back America. [4]