The invisibility is even worse. Human dignity is about being recognized, listened to, and acknowledged as an individual human being with an irreducible moral worth. But at a time when one in six Americans live in poverty and virtually all of our social indicators are worse than at any time since the Great Depression, the political system is locked in partisan paralysis. They are not being heard, so increasingly they will make themselves seen. And given unemployment rates, millions of Americans have nothing better to do with their time.

If we have learned anything from watching the Arab Spring over the past nine months, it should be that efforts to ridicule, ignore and block these kinds of protests only fuel them further. The only effective response is a political response, of a nature and magnitude that convinces protesters on the streets that they can in fact secure the change they seek within, rather than outside, the system. The news anchors and political commentators who scoff at the Occupy Wall Street marchers’ lack of direction or articulated demands only make them madder and more determined.

Moreover, it’s not hard to discern a political agenda taking shape. If the Tea Party is obsessed with debt and hence the size of government, the “99 Percent” movement is focused on problems that depend as much on the state of our political system as on any specific government policies. In the words of one protester interviewed in San Francisco, “We don’t have a government for ‘we the people’ anymore.”

Our political system is skewed to extremes by party primaries and beholden to donors at every subsequent stage. Neither Democratic nor Republican candidates can win without the support of the wealthiest 1 percent. And even if they could finance their campaigns more broadly, moderate candidates on both sides of the aisle who are willing to compromise and make the dramatic economic, environmental and energy policy changes our country needs cannot survive partisan primaries. The result is a government that does not actually represent the majority of the American people.

Yet solutions are not hard to find. California has replaced party primaries with open elections, a measure that passed easily. New York City has a matching campaign finance system that offers $6 in public funds for each of the first 175 dollars that a donor gives to each candidate, an approach that has been endorsed by campaign finance reformers on both the left and the right.