Strategizing among progressives is often infected by a sort of millennialism, in which there is an idea that a golden age awaits in the future. This view holds that something will happen that will open a space for progressive ideas that does not exist at present. This something could be an unforeseen upsurge of labour radicalism, or spontaneous organizing like Occupy, but an order of magnitude larger, or perhaps another economic collapse like we saw in 2008–9.

This is not a productive path forward for progressive politics. There will always be unforeseen events, but the idea that these events will open the door for the backlog of progressive reforms we have kept on the shelf is little more than wishful thinking. In fact, the failure of the economic crisis following the collapse of the housing bubble to lead to anything more than minor political changes should be instructive. Even a catastrophic economic event, which is unlikely to be repeated any time soon, does not necessarily open any doors for progressive politics. If we want to see progressive policies advance, then we will have to build from where we are today, not hope for a gift from the heavens to clear the path.

In this respect, we need to learn from the Right. They have made enormous headway by going step by step. They have worked to undermine every institutional basis for progressive support, most importantly the labour movement, but also programs like Legal Aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other sources of public funds, that could be used to support progressive causes. At least as importantly, they went behind the scenes to restructure the economy in ways that redistributed income upward.

While the right-wing is not shy about demanding a lower tax burden on the wealthy, making the tax system more regressive, their efforts to reshape the before-tax distribution of income have had far more impact on the living standards of the bulk of the population. They have pushed policies, many of them obscure and seemingly unimportant, which have led to the largest upward redistribution of income in the history of the world.