In this extraordinary week of news — and indeed, in this extraordinary last few years — we see a common motivation: people are rejecting big, concentrated power.
Such power has been a reality of modern life for decades.
We see it in an economy where an elite few have hoarded the gains of the recovery and where sector after sector, from food to retail to media to energy, are now dominated by a shrinking number of merged monopolistic firms.
We see it in a corrupted American political system that answers to cronies with clout and routinely ignores the will of the people on issues like gun responsibility. Or in the European Union’s vast but ineffective bureaucracy that issues rules from afar but can’t manage debt or refugee crises.
We see it in an American law enforcement system that’s become far more skilled at surveillance and incarceration than at building community trust and relationships.
Across all these realms, millions of people — and many more than are saying so out loud — feel they have lost control over their own lives. Faraway, intangible forces shape our lives as workers and consumers. Impersonal power structures have reduced our lives as citizens to passive spectatorship.
Until now.
Now we are seeing a Great Pushback against concentrated political and economic power — a sprawling, disorderly effort by people on the right, the left, and everywhere in between who have felt shut out of the public arena.
From Bernie’s revolutionaries to Trump’s rally-goers to Black Lives Matter activists, from moms against gun violence to libertarians against Big Brother — citizens are no longer accepting being small pawns of big players. They are organizing. They are protesting injustice. They are reclaiming power.
This is the optimistic way to read Great Britain’s vote to exit the EU: as a vote to re-democratize public life by re-humanizing economics and re-localizing politics.
But of course another way to say all that is the mantra to “Take Our Country Back” — from the immigrants and the Muslims, from the strange and the strangers. Or “Make America Great Again.” Or, in the version stated bluntly on a billboard for a Tennessee congressional candidate, “Make America White Again.”
And so the critical question today is whether this Great Pushback — this global, cross-ideological rebellion of the smalls — will lead to positive reform of our institutions or simply unleash nativism and destruction.
The answer will depend in large part on whether political and economic leaders, in America and Europe alike, learn to do two things: listen and offer a better way.
These may seem like obvious things, but we wouldn’t be where we are if the elites were doing them. To listen means not to patronize Trump supporters and Brexit voters and Sanders fans, and not to rationalize away their pain, pride, hope or anger.
To offer a better way means doing more than ringing alarms about resurgent fascism or condemning people for being drawn to destructive demagogues. It means, quite simply, offering citizens a better way: a plan for a more responsive government, a fair economy, and a society where inclusion benefits everyone.
We have a precedent. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1932, dictators dominated the world stage. FDR knew he could not beat something with nothing. And so, with the experiments of the New Deal, he put forth a true alternative — both to the totalitarianism of Hitler and to the do-nothing-ism of Hoover.
Today’s heirs to Roosevelt — and I mean all of us, not just presidential candidates — likewise have to address the great fears of our times. But a new New Deal can’t be based on making government bigger, as FDR did. It has to be based on making citizens bigger.
That requires busting apart monopolies of all kinds. Raising minimum wages, taxing great wealth, shrinking banks. But also simplifying regulation, pushing government funding down to the local, unwinding the prison-industrial complex. Stripping away subsidies for the already privileged. Allowing cities to innovate where states and Congress won’t. Welcoming immigrants while fully integrating them into American life. Making national service easier and more widespread.
Do we have leaders today capable of breaking the left-right, two-party grid with such an agenda? Maybe, maybe not. But the Great Pushback is happening either way. So it’s up to all of us now to steer it in the most constructive direction possible.
