Robert Reich worries that we're anxious and angry. I worry that we're distracted and docile.
I should amend: Reich doesn't really worry that we're angry, but in a NY Times op-ed he emphasizes the anger out there, manifested in the banging of partisan heads, the "hermetically sealed ideological zones," the "media [that] let us surround ourselves with opinions that confirm our biases," as well as the present-day absence of that greater generation's We're-all-in-this-togetherness, born of depression and war.
So we're divided--symptomatically you might say--because we're angry; and our anger derives from "widening inequality," says Reich, which evinces "what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid style in American politics.'":
It animated the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements before the Civil War, the populist agitators of the Progressive Era and the John Birch Society ... in the 1950s.
Yet yesterday afternoon I watched Reich on "Moyers & Company" saluting the 1950s as a prosperous era of national accord. Whence, then, its politics' "paranoid style"? Certainly not from wealth inequality, according to (yesterday's) Reich himself. Thus what, this morning, is the theoretical value of tying inequality to anger, division and political paranoia? (Reich's point is more valid regarding the Progressive Era's reaction to industrialization's wealth concentration, however Know-Nothingism was principally nativist and anti-"papist.") I'm not quite grasping the link.
Which leads vaguely to the distressing suspicion that Reich is intentionally overblowing the public's anger--for its anger must parallel the immense and undeniable evil of wealth inequality, mustn't it? This is the progressive version of tea-party rage: We the People--whoever we are--are pissed, and we won't take it--whatever it is--anymore.
If only that were true.
Sure, there are "concerned citizens," left and right, who are extravagantly pissed and they know precisely why: it's all Obama's fault, or Mitch McConnell's fault, or Wall Street's fault, or Fox News' or MSNBC's fault or whatever oversized scapegoat one wishes to harness. Most people, though, are only hazily pissed while being oddly indifferent to any precise causation of their anger, because they haven't a clue as to what on God's earth is going on. They simply don't care enough to get informed, and they don't really have to care since they have their satellite TV, their Netflix, their iPods, their DVDs and their cellphone gadgets--the all-consuming debris of American consumerism--to keep themselves gloriously distracted.
Sprawling, deepening wealth inequality? Reich is correct; it'll eat us alive. Yet most Americans are too busy amusing themselves into deathly stupors to ever stop and notice. And that worries me more than the inequality itself, because stupid can't fix anything.