BARACK OBAMA AND THE 111TH CONGRESS of 2009 were elected by a country staring terrified into an economic abyss, angry at the oligarchs who created that abyss and ready to be led in a new direction by the soaring rhetoric of Hope from their new president. The Reagan/Gingrich-era conservative revolution was about played out, and people were ready for a change.

This, by the way, was virtually a mirror image of the national elections of 1980, if you switch parties and political philosophies. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, there was a general sense in the country that after the hope and idealism of the Democrats from the Kennedy era through the 1960s, liberalism was fractured, tired and not up to addressing the problems faced by the country: spiraling crime rates, rampant and stubborn inflation and a listless economy that lacked the world-beating energy it had in the 1960s.

The mood of the country in 2008 (and since) has been a mirror image of 1980 — just reverse the parties and some of the economic details. The Democratic Party circa 1980 compares very closely with the Republican Party now.

The story the right has been selling for decades — that if only government got out of the way, business would boom and benefit everyone — is now easy to dismiss as the fairy tale it was. It turned out that “getting the government out of the way” merely freed capital to do what it has always done when the restraints are removed: It fabulously enriched itself. Everyone else? Not so much.

Between 1980 and 2010, the productivity of the average America worker increased by more than 40 percent while the inflation-adjusted median wage barely budged. All the benefit of that productivity increase went to the top of the wealth ladder and stayed there. In 1980, CEOs made roughly 35 times what their lowest-paid workers made; those same CEOs now make around 300 times those same workers. There is a reason it is called “capitalism” and not “laborism” — the name reflects the primary beneficiaries.

And here’s the funny thing: A lot of people were actually talking about things in just those terms in 2008, and they still are.

While I don’t deny that Barack Obama and the Democratic 111th Congress accomplished some good things, I am convinced more than ever that the current economic crisis is a shining, golden opportunity for a charismatic Democratic leader to begin a New Progressive Era in American political life. In asking why this opportunity has been heretofore neglected, I think it is time for progressives to contemplate an uncomfortable possibility: that their party has been corrupted by the previously mentioned, massively enriched over-class that is the primary funding source for both major political parties’ campaigns.

What other explanation is there for the stark difference between what the government needs to do to actually address the problems confronting our economy and what the ruling class wants the government to accomplish?

Most of the challenges facing our economy are, at root, a symptom of capitalism run amok — thus, any attempt to comprehensively address those problems is all but guaranteed to be opposed by capital, since reforms would cost them money and power, at least in the short term.

As an example, look at the problem of wages. As a percent of the economy they are at all-time low. One reason corporate profits are so high — higher, in fact, than they have ever been since after World War II — is that companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of the economy’s total output. Even in absolute terms, Americans are making less: the median wage actually dropped between 2009 and 2013. This, in turn, is the main reason the economy is so persistently weak: Those wages represent spending power for American consumers, who are ultimately the customers of those profitable companies.

In other words, corporations’ short-term profit maximization obsession is actually starving the rest of the economy of revenue growth in the longer term. If it is allowed to continue it will eventually destroy the economy.

The Republican Party’s “answer” to this situation is essentially to “keep digging” — that is, to do more of the same things that got us into that deep hole called the Great Recession: deregulate business, cut taxes even further on their rich friends, and so on. (The problem with Democrats is they’ve been corrupted by plutocrats; as far as Republicans are concerned, there’s no question of corruption since This Is Who They Are.)

I’ll discuss what I see as our only way out of this economic dead-end in next week’s column.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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