School of Public and Environmental Affairs

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    Achieving and Leveraging Diversity through Faith-Based Organizing
    (New York University Press, 2017-06) Fulton, Brad R.; Wood, Richard L.
    After a perceived hiatus of several decades-"perceived" for reasons dis­cussed below-religious progressives have reappeared in the public eye in recent years. Though mostly very marginal players in the Occupy Wall Street movement that made inequality a prominent public issue in American life by framing it as a struggle between "the one percent and the ninety-nine percent; religious progressives have been prominent participants in the subsequent debates over house foreclosures, bank­ing reform, racial inequities in law enforcement and sentencing, and comprehensive immigration reform (Sanati 2010; Waters 2010; Wood and Fulton 2015). Even before the Great Recession, religious progressives had been among the crucial sectors articulating why access to healthcare was a fundamental moral issue (Wood 2007). Their advocacy helped lead to renewal of the State Children's Health Insurance Program that was twice vetoed by President George W. Bush before being signed by President Barack Obama; their subsequent moral advocacy was crucial to the passage of national healthcare reform in 2009-and particularly to its inclusion of significant subsidies for healthcare for the poor and lower middle class (Parsons 2010; Pear 2009).
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    Introduction: Exorcising America’s Demons, Building Ethical Democracy
    (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Wood, Richard L.; Fulton, Brad R.
    Three demons bedevil American society today. The fi rst is obvious: We suffer levels of economic inequality not witnessed in the hundred years since the Gilded Age, with stagnant or falling wages for the large majority of American families. The second is often misdiagnosed: Political pundits decry the polarization within national political discourse and institutions, but the real problem is not generic “polarization.” In the context of such high economic inequality, polarization is to be expected, for its absence would simply represent acquiescence to stagnant wages and the resultant decline in the quality of family life. Rather, the real problem results from strategic polarization from above, that is, from the manipulation of political sentiment and democratic institutions to produce paralysis within national democratic institutions. Thus the second demon is policy paralysis: our national political institutions’ inability to foster any shared prosperity or good society in the American future— their failure, in the context of strategic polarization from above, to effectively address a broad variety of crucial realities undermining a shared American future. Those issues include economic inequality and stagnant family wages, the underclass status of a large immigrant sector, the ballooning national debt, the corrosive influence of unregulated money on elections, and the unsustainable rise of health care costs despite recent policy reforms.