Lazarus, arise and walk!

Liberals' night of the living dead is over

By Andrew Ross

Feb 24, 1996 | When E.J. Dionne looks around, he sees what historian Robert Wiebe saw in the dying decades of the 19th Century: "Americans everywhere crying out in scorn and despair."

And Dionne is encouraged.

Now, as then, he believes a fast-changing economy, social dislocation, moral squalor, and political cynicism -- characteristics of the laissez-faire Gilded Age -- are precursors of a new progressivism, one that will be dominated by the political heirs of FDR and Harry Truman, not Newt Gingrich.

"Not since the industrial transition at the turn of the century and the mass dislocation of the Great Depression have Americans felt a greater desire for creative approaches to governing," Dionne writes in "They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era" (Simon & Schuster).

As Dionne, a political columnist with the Washington Post, pointed out in his previous book, "Why Americans Hate Politics," both liberals and conservatives have responded to such desires with little more than irrelevant sloganeering.

Next Page: Who are the new progressives?

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