In my middle-class neighbourhood, you can organise people around dog-walking exchanges, the crimewatch duty roster, mutual baby-sitting, earthquake preparedness and dire household emergencies. But even the most liberal-minded among us seem totally spooked by the currently toxic idea of politically organising our private economic tragedies into any form of communal resistance to Bush-Obama's class warfare – skyrocketing unemployment, home foreclosures, bank failures, vanished investments and social service cuts that directly affect us. Politics? Ugh. Please, don't bother me. I'd rather talk about Tony Soprano's latest session with his leggy shrink.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, each family deals with its own economic injury like a death in the family, but even more tight-lipped. After all, who likes to be known as a loser?

My local area is not noticeably conservative. We probably have a majority of liberal Democrats and a plurality of Jews. We dutifully vote centre-centre-left, contribute money at a safely impersonal distance to mass mailings from good causes, and generally speaking have all the right opinions. The French have a phrase for us: bien pensant, well-thinking, comfortable in received wisdom. In this case the liberal orthodoxy of anti-racism, hand-wringing for Haiti and Darfur and, around here – a real kicker this – a stubbornly emotional attachment to Israel right-or-wrong.

The current atmosphere around here reminds me of the Eisenhower 50s, when the twin gods of the underworld, senator Joe McCarthy and FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, ruled the mass mind. You could go to jail for shooting off your mouth. My campus-newspaper rants were enough to get me blacklisted and – absurd in hindsight – closely tracked across the country by the FBI as if I was a Soviet spy.

Yet even in that apparently static time, seeds of resistance were bursting through unfriendly soil. Nothing was possible … until it was. Almost overnight, it seemed, at the height of the cold war, by the government against its own dissenters, the African-American civil rights struggle ignited a controlled burn of resistance across the board. A byproduct was that the apparently invincible House Un-American Activities Committee collapsed like a paper tiger when don't-give-a-shit yippies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin mocked it with absurd street theatre. Surprise! A nation of Rip Van Winkles woke up and began to laugh at their own fears.

A big difference between then and now is that our collective lifeboat was rising due to a buoyant postwar economy. But now our lifeboat is springing leaks. The Obama government's zombie-like inaction in the jobless crisis means that a lot of us are catching, or soon will catch, more of the misery contagion that is devastating the poorer parts of Los Angeles county. Instead of acknowledging the shared pain, each of us individually is pushing to get into the upended lifeboat, struggling to stay afloat, frantic to hold on to what we've got. There are so many assaults on us on so many fronts – gouging health insurance payments, car upkeep, mortgage due, the BP Gulf disaster, the trillion-dollar Afghanistan war – how can we possibly catch our breath?

Theories abound about why our liberal mood is so paralytic. Old left mass-based action-oriented organisations don't exist any more; unions are down to 12% of the workforce, and anyway are castrated by allegiance to a Blue Dog-dominated Democratic party; suburbia killed militance; Latinos, many illegal, tend to be politically inert; black leadership is feeble when not corrupt; a young generation has no memory of what it was like to have an activist or an antiwar movement, etc etc.

And when all else fails, there is the "bowling alone" thesis (after a popular book by Robert Puttnam of that title), which "proves", with statistics, that the whole idea of community engagement has collapsed because of TV, urban sprawl and more women in the workforce (!)

The late, great Chicago community organiser Saul Alinsky liked saying that the only way to activate people is to appeal not to altruism but to their self-interest. Yet perceived self-interest is unpredictable and sometimes comes from the heart as well as the pocketbook. For example, all across the country, ordinary, deeply conservative Catholic parishioners have recently been motivated to march, protest, sit-in and even barricade themselves when they felt threatened by local church closures demanded by a cost-cutting hierarchy hungry for money to pay out in the sex assault cases.

Rank-and-file parishioners didn't organise by listservs or electronic communication but face to face, neighbour to neighbour.