Back to Robert Reich

Here is a transcript of one of the most important parts of the video I posted a couple days ago.  I touched briefly on this, however I wanted to post it, because I feel it is very important to consider Reich's words.  Note this speech was made in 2005, before the Tea Party movement.

Starting at 53:18, I transcribed this myself, so corrections are welcome.

The working class, that we used to call it, and the poor, increasingly become vulnerable to demagogues, who come along and take their frustration and their anxiety and turn it into and divert it toward targets of animosity.  We’ve seen this before in history.  I don’t have to tell you.  We’ve seen it a little in the United States, not much, but we have seen angry populism.  We saw it in the 1890’s.  The predecessor of progressivism was populism.  William Jennings Bryant, prairie populism, it was an angry populism.  It was an angry divisive populism.  It was an angry divisive populism that blamed a lot of people, some of them who were scapegoats for that populism.  Anti-modernist movements around the world and historically have been animated by demagogues preying upon the anxieties of people who need targets of resentment.  The politics of resentment is not new, folks and when you hear people accusing people like me of being class warriors what I want you to understand is the failure to act on these trends invites real class warfare.  Indeed you might say what we have begun to see, and we began to see it in the 2004 election, was a kind of angry cultural populism that is the first cousin of angry class populism, cultural populism that blames, blames who? Blames eastern elites and western elites, blames Hollywood, blames university towns like Berkeley, blames Jews, blames the French, blames immigrants, blames others.  The politics of resentments that is carried upon and depends upon anxiety and frustration and is utilized by demagogues to further their own selfish purposes.  That’s what snapping apart, snapping-breaking could invite.

A modern society in the 21st century has universal healthcare, has unemployment benefits, has inexpensive education, women have personal rights in regards to their bodies, people can love whoever they choose, is secular, does not support state-sponsored murder, and is welcoming to immigrants of different races, cultures and religions.  America is heading toward (maybe irreversibly) that "snap" that Reich talks about and the Tea Party is absolutely an agent of change for the worse, which is helping to push us towards it.