Americans are fed up

January 15, 2016

Americans are fed up and fighting back. Seen in isolation, the Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, the climate-justice movement, the immigrant-rights movement, the campaign for a financial-transactions tax, and the renewed push for single-payer healthcare may seem like unrelated causes. Taken together, they form a rising chorus of outrage over a government that caters to the demands of the super-wealthy, while failing to meet the needs of the many. They share a fury at a politics captured by special interests and big money, where pervasive corruption mocks the very notion of democracy.

-The Editors for The Nation

President Lincoln's "House Divided" speech was written to address the issue of slavery, but with a few tweaks we might refit his words to our current circumstances.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, such inequality. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of gross inequality will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become entrenched in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.