Peter Davis, a 2008 George Mason High School graduate who will be entering Harvard Law School this fall, made a stimulating presentation to a gathering hosted by the Falls Church League of Women Voters at the Community Center Sunday that argued for a new “Progressive Era” like the one the U.S. experienced in reaction to its first “Gilded Age” in the late 19th century.

The nation is suffering a “new gilded age” now he said, and a form of civic engagement and activism is called for that goes beyond “flipswitch” politics – where a single issue is agitated for and then changed – to a more organic, community-based efforts at reform. Politics are now run by managers as mass spectacles, he said, where the public is alienated from its government that becomes more like an impersonal vending machine. “Wagging fingers doesn’t work” to fix this, he said. But instead “successful alternatives are the best protest,” achieved through the systematic public learning of civic creativity through new institutions dedicated to that purpose.

The goal is to achieve projects, not just back candidates: that was the model operative in the first “Progressive Era,” he said.