The all but nonexistent job growth in the U.S. since the “official” end of the last recession in December 2007 coupled with the equally stubborn problems of the European debt crisis have engendered a bout of hand wringing over the future of the middle class.

Growing income inequality — expressed simply by the Occupy movement as the 99 percent versus the 1 percent — has led some to question even the future of representative democracy.

Francis Fukuyama, in an article in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, says, “The current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.” Similarly, New York Times columnist David Brooks asks — “Why aren’t there more liberals in America?” — implying that, given the problems we face, there should be.

Both imply that if we don’t “do something” about globalization and the inequality it generates, we will lose the middle class and with it the implicit social contract upon which our two-century experiment in self-government has been built. Failure to find that “something” means the inevitable rise of some sort of Hitlerian demagogue, a gradual slide into fascism and a future of global violence among a small group of dictatorships, a future eerily similar to the state of permanent war envisioned in Orwell’s “1984.”

I think such fears are largely misplaced, not because the threats from globalization and growing inequality are not real, but because the Chicken Little-like scurrying around to find the “something” to do about it will only make matters worse.

The efforts to “reform” health care, Wall Street and housing bring to mind not the enlightening debates of our Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention but the quagmire of Cold War-era anti-communism; not the optimistic appeal of “We find these truths to be self-evident,” but the cluelessly unself-conscious explanation that, “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

I am sometimes accused of being cynical, of not giving government programs a chance to work. My response is, “not cynical, skeptical.” I don’t find the so-called truths behind many efforts at reform to be “self-evident.”

I want to see the evidence before I join the march. And I’m not alone.

The reason there aren’t more liberals in America, or Ron Paul libertarians, or science-denying creationists is that the “truths” they espouse aren’t ones the vast middle in our country is ready to go to the barricades for. Those in the middle are looking for something much more practical, something neither so simplistic as to be silly nor so complicated as to be beyond common sense.

They are looking for a truth that is “self-evident.” Fukuyama says, “Ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people.”

The task for liberals, or anyone else interested in moving beyond the stagnation of ideological stalemate, is twofold: identify those concerns and speak to them honestly rather than as a ploy to get elected.

What those decrying the demise of the middle class seem to forget is that the very existence of the middle class is a product of globalization.

A century and a half ago, romantic naysayers worried how this country, any country, could survive the onslaught of former farm workers pouring into urban centers after being displaced from the fields by more productive agricultural technology. These people and their brothers and sisters from Ireland, Germany, Poland and Italy, among other places, became the middle class.

The problem in the U.S. today is not the demise of the middle class but the emergence of a middle class in lots of other places around the globe. And the only honest way to speak to their concerns is to say what was said to those coming off the boats and through the halls on Ellis Island — prepare yourself for a new life. And the only way to make that preparation is to look around to find what is needed. And the only useful government development programs will be those supporting that migratory search.

I recently reviewed the results of a survey of marine-related businesses in another New England state. It was designed to identify the labor force needs of those enterprises seeking to hire new workers.

The most striking finding was that the most frequently cited of the so-called “technical skills” were not manual but social. Sales/marketing and customer service garnered 28 percent of all selections. And for the so-called “soft skills,” the most frequently cited were “teamwork” and “interpersonal skills,” together accounting for 25 percent of all responses.

The most effective way to “speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people” is not to raise barricades against the world in fear of a fascist dictator, but to break down the barricades between education and employment so that we can prepare to face the world on the terms our fathers created.

Charles Lawton is senior economist for Planning Decisions, a public policy research firm. He can be reached at:

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