The grass-roots progressive activism of the past two years has been inspiring. But it’s still a shadow of what the country needs.
This opinion column by David Leonhardt appeared in the New York Times on January 20th, 2019.
The grass-roots progressive movement known as the resistance has had a very good two years. It beat back attempts to take health insurance away from millions of Americans, and it helped defeat a Republican House majority that was enabling President Trump. Neither of those outcomes looked likely when he took office.
But the government shutdown has shown the limits of this new progressive movement. The resistance has had virtually no effect on the politics of the shutdown — and a stronger movement could have a big effect.
When I’ve spoken to people from other countries over the past couple of weeks, they have been shocked that Americans have not begun protesting the shutdown in large numbers. About 800,000 federal workers have now gone almost a month without getting paid. Some are struggling to pay their rent or buy medications. Some have gone to pawn shops to get cash. Major functions of government — airline security, food safety, mortgage processing, farm assistance and so on — have been impaired.
If this were happening in Europe, as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago told me, people would be pouring into the streets. And yet in the United States, there has been nothing but a few small, scatteredrallies.
Instead of lining up to protest, hundreds of federal workers in Washington lined up last week to eat at makeshift soup kitchens. The photos of them doing so were a study in powerlessness. MORE…