Radicalize the Middle Class!

This post at Daily Kos makes it clear that it is possible to craft a truly nonpartisan political consensus on the issue of radical economic injustice of the past twenty years. Economic equality, economic justice should in fact become the refrain of a new Progressive Platform. Of course economic justice has been denounced by demagogues of the right as "socialism."

Unfortunately for them, the economic policies of the past twenty years have sqeezed the middle class so hard that the consensus against governmental intervention has been broken by the broken government of the Clinton-Bush eras.

When I was in college and graduate school, the relative comfort of the middle class made them complacent: radicalization seemed barely possible. This economic complacency produced abberations on the left that led to an identity politics polarized splitting off the new social movements into fragmented demands for recognition, peace, an end to violence -- making political struggle a question of metaphysics. I have blogged before about the "take back the night."

Take back the government may be the new slogan of a new generation of proletarianized middle class families who have seen their paychecks looted by a new generation of free market oligarchs and plutocrats.