A Skeptical Survivalist

It’s time for the left to get off its duff and turn the tables on the radical right. And our history reveals that there’s an excellent method for accomplishing precisely that: a great march of the unemployed on Washington.

Recent polls reveal that Americans are decisively more concerned about the crisis of unemployment than the issue of our national debt. But as many commentators have observed in recent weeks, the results of the midterm elections, with Republicans gaining control of the House, and the associated rise of the tea party have pushed an agenda of austerity in government spending ahead of using government resources to fight unemployment.

Once there, these unemployed people would deliver a simple demand: The government must act immediately to give them back employment. They could invoke quite a number of interesting historical precedents: the platform of the pre-Civil War Whig Party, whose leaders, including Henry Clay and young Abraham Lincoln, urged governmental “internal improvements” — public works such as canal- and road-building projects — to give work to the jobless during a ruinous depression that followed a financial panic in 1837.

They would naturally invoke the great precedent of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, an agency that under the leadership of Harry Hopkins created jobs for the jobless almost overnight, thus providing some desperate and innocent people with a way to save their families and homes.

To be sure, the left has tried to address economics: It has protested repeatedly on the issues of out-sourcing, deregulation of the financial sector, and so on. But in the midst of the worst economic contraction since the 1930s, it has somehow allowed the extremists of the right to run roughshod over them.

That needs to change. Even many sincere and committed centrists admit that there are times when a disproportionate influence in one direction will require some vigorous counter-pressure if a wholesome balance is to reign.

A march of the unemployed might be the way to do it. And there’s historical precedent for this idea, too — not only in the still-remembered marches on the nation’s capital that occurred in the 1960s, but also in the largely forgotten marches of the unemployed that occurred both in 1894 and (more consequentially) 1932.

The preparations would have to start soon if such an exercise in grass-roots activism is to stand a real chance of affecting our political balance of power next year. Is the left prepared to rise to the occasion?

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