Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

In January 2014 Reich went to Congress to testify. “I’ve served in Washington, and know how difficult it is to get anything done unless the broad public understands what’s at stake and actively pushes for reform. That’s why we need a movement against economic inequality and in favor of shared growth—a movement on a scale similar to the Progressive movement at the turn of the last century that fueled the first progressive income tax and antitrust laws, the women’s suffrage movement that got women the vote, the labor movement that helped animate the New Deal of the 1930s and fueled the great prosperity of the first three decades after World War II, the Civil Rights movement that achieved the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the environmental movement that spawned the Environmental Protection Act and other critical legislation.”43 Reich’s call to arms was powerful and compelling. To fix a rigged system, what was needed was a comprehensive mobilization. But as Reich was only too well aware, the progressive Left were not the only ones who could draw this conclusion. In fact, the American right wing got there first. Unlike liberal progressives, the libertarian right wing in the United States had never doubted that government was a problem. Indeed, they had always vociferously argued that it was the entire problem. America’s downward slide, the long-running trends toward inequality and oligarchy, the disaster of 2008, the lopsided recovery from it, were all sympt...