Comment by gen220

I think you and the person you're replying to agree.

We won't get a New Deal Coalition Part 2 without our own Dust Bowl (climate-change/industrial-agronomy-induced disasters, and the massive disruption to peoples way of lives that accompanied it) and Great Depression to conclusively demonstrate that industrialized, financialized oligarchy "doesn't work".

The two-party system was just as much captured by "free market" idolatry pre-FDR as they are today. There was nearly three decades of socialistic organizing in response to crisis in the 1890s-1920s before we finally had those principles manifest in one of the two major political parties in the executive branch, with FDR in 1932.

We're barely into the nascency of our own century's progressive era. If history's any guide, it'll probably take decades and it will get much, much worse before it gets better. :/

I re-read Grapes of Wrath recently, and it was an uncanny feeling: like I was reading something that was both near-future Sci-Fi and a memory-holed but relatively-recent history.