The election of Obama signaled the desire of the American people to move left.
We will probably always be a relatively moderate country. We will never be an extreme-left nation, but our society has changed repeatedly and, thanks to our democratic form of government, we change our policies and our government, we change from left to right and right to left in order to solve our problems.
Right now, extreme income inequality is a big problem as are racism and the degradation of the environment. When our nation was founded, our citizens pressed to move to the Midwest and then the West so that they could own land, farm, set up towns and provide for their lives.
The 19th century brought the industrial revolution. We remained mostly an agrarian society, but we began to form towns and linked them with railroads. Railroads helped us move produce from the farms to growing urban areas. The Civil War ended slavery and marked the beginning of the close of an agrarian era that used human labor that lived at subsistence levels. The Gilded Age made the development of new technologies and industry possible but it brought right-wing governments and tough time for labor.
The populist movement at the end of the 19th century brought reform including laws that were intended to prevent monopolies, laws about child labor and working hours. Unions began to form. After WWI, which we won, came the 1920s, the emphasis was again on investment and commercial development and lots of new technologies and then there was the crash of 1929.
That was followed by another populist movement led by FDR that culminated in Kennedy and LBJ. LBJ brought us Medicare and other social programs that we enjoy today.
In 1968, Nixon took over and gradually, after Jimmy Carter, we had the Reagan revolution, a move toward conservative, right-wing government.
We now have a new economic era -- computers and trade have resulted in fewer jobs, lower pay for people, still a fairly good living standard for most people but the prosperity has not spread fairly across our society, and we have neglected our public sector.
The trust in government and the public sector that granted land to railroads and settlers for the development of our country, that built sewers and roads and dams and established parks has been weak since about 1980.
But if you talk to young people in America today, it becomes clear that the confidence in the public sector that made our country so great -- as we first settled, as we moved West, as we fought and won wars (something we have not done for a long time -- really win a war) is returning.
2016 could well be the year in which we return to a more populist view and a government that works for all of us, not just the richest few. Hard to tell, but populist reform will come. It's just a question of when.
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