I’ve written before about how the Hillary Democrats are running against hope, and how the Sanders campaign have outed them as frank corporate shills and enemies of even mild social democracy. But now even nominal liberals, or progressives, or whatever we’re calling them these days have gotten in on the act. Not content with merely saying “No!” to new programs like single-payer health insurance and free college, they’re highlighting the worst aspects of the New Deal in an effort to…well, what exactly? Promote Hillary? Fight Trump? It’s hard to tell.
A few days ago, Jamelle Bouie, “chief political correspondent for Slate Magazine and a political analyst for CBS News,” tweeted this remarkable observation (since deleted):
Actually, that working class movement had a lot to do with the Communist Party, which was an antiracist organization with a large black membership. Not only did it organize auto workers in Flint, it organized black farmers in the South and black urbanites in Harlem. But saying nice things about the CPUSA is not the way to keep a job with CBS News.
Not long after Bouie’s ridiculous tweet came a longer instance of 1930s-bashing from Bryce Covert, “economic policy editor at ThinkProgress and a contributor to The Nation.” Covert identifies Donald Trump’s pledge to “make America great again” as appealing to whites, especially men, longing for the days before the civil rights movement and feminism ruined things for them. That’s not a controversial point; it may be incomplete, but it’s not untrue. Covert’s innovation is to locate much of that appeal in New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance, and postwar successors like the G.I. Bill.
This is rather odd, given the holy place that the New Deal once had in Democratic discourse. Covert’s beef is that to get the votes of racist Southern Congressmen, FDR had to craft his programs to exclude black workers. This is both true and awful, though it’s not clear how they would have gotten through Congress otherwise. But instead of saying that the New Deal was a good partial model, something that should be built upon—probably the only period in American history when a sense of the collective, and not competitive individualism, dominated our political thought—she emphasizes only the exclusions, and identifies them as the source of the nostalgias that Donald Trump, not previously known as a friend of social programs, has been basing his campaign on.
Neither Bouie’s tweet nor Covert’s op-ed makes any sense unless they’re trying to discredit an ambitious social agenda. That is precisely what the Hillary Democrats are doing to fight off the persistent Sanders threat that just won’t go away. (That despite the fact that, as Gallup recently reported, a majority of Americans support a single-payer system. The least popular option is Hillary’s position, keeping Obamacare largely as is.) But how is this going to play once she wins the nomination? At first it seemed like the rightward, anti-social-democratic tilt was intended to lure moderate suburban voters who might have voted for a sane Republican (not that there was one among the initial Gang of 17) but can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump. Bernie’s voters were expected either to shut up and fall in line or just go to hell.
But that strategy might not pan out. As Dave Weigel reports in the Washington Post, Trump is winning over a lot of those suburbanites that Dem strategists were, just a few weeks ago, hoping to harvest in November. As former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell put it less than two months ago:
For every one of those blue-collar Democrats [Trump] picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that.
Now it looks like that might not happen. But that’s no cause for worry. The endlessly creative Rendell revealed a new strategy to Weigel:
Will [Trump] have some appeal to working-class Dems in Levittown or Bristol? Sure…. For every one he’ll lose 1½ , two Republican women. Trump’s comments like ‘You can’t be a 10 if you’re flat-chested,’ that’ll come back to haunt him. There are probably more ugly women in America than attractive women. People take that stuff personally.
Rendell and the centrist Dems do deserve a moment of sympathy. When you have nothing positive to sell voters, you have to get creative. Trolling for votes by calling your potential supporters “ugly” is seriously creative.
Posted in Bernie, Hillary, Trump | Tags: campaign 2016, neoliberalism
At first I thought that Hillary Clinton would have no trouble dispensing with Donald Trump. Sure, she’s the second most unpopular presidential candidate (and likely nominee) in the history of polling—but he’s the first. She’s unpleasant, but he’s downright repellent. All she has to do is win Obama’s states and a swing state or two and it’s all over for Trump, and he’d go back to being a third-tier real estate guy.
Now I’m not so sure. The same pundits and pollsters who assured us he could never get the nomination are now telling us that there’s no way he could win in November. While past performance is no guarantee of future results, this record doesn’t inspire confidence.
And the Hillary campaign so far isn’t performing impressively. All they have been able to do since Trump became the almost-certain nominee is uncork insults against him and marshall quotes from alarmed conservatives who can’t support him (for now). Some of her supporters are denouncing his supporters as ignorant bigots. Many of them no doubt are, but far from all, and that’s not the way to win friends and influence people. Lots of people are turning to the huckster because their lives are a mess and the political system doesn’t do shit for them. Hawking hats like this will drive away more of the discontented than it’ll attract. It speaks to the complacent and comfortable, which seems to be a major Hillary target audience.
Adding further to my doubts is Trump’s wiliness as a psychological warrior. Having destroyed Jeb and Marco with cruel, accurate epithets, he’s now ready for Hillary. And, at least according to an article New York Times by Patrick Healy, his approach looks to be a lot more sophisticated than one might have expected.
In a telephone interview, he noted that women did not like seeing Mrs. Clinton insulted or bullied by men. He said he wanted to be more strategic, by calling into question Mrs. Clinton’s judgment in her reaction to Mr. Clinton’s affairs — people close to the couple have said she was involved in efforts to discredit the women — and in her response to crises like Benghazi.
“Just getting nasty with Hillary won’t work,” Mr. Trump said. “You really have to get people to look hard at her character, and to get women to ask themselves if Hillary is truly sincere and authentic. Because she has been really ugly in trying to destroy Bill’s mistresses, and she is pandering to women so obviously when she is only interested in getting power.”
He acknowledged that Republicans tried to discredit her judgment in the marathon Benghazi hearing in the fall, to little avail. But he said that he would be more pointed and memorable in linking her to the failings and deaths in Libya, and that the debate would have a vastly larger television audience than the hearing. Still, advisers of Mrs. Clinton pointed to her face-off with the Republican-led Benghazi committee as a sign of her unflappability.
This is dead-on, not least because every word of it is true. The contrast with the conventional GOP approach on Benghazi is striking. That was always a bogus scandal. But she was central to the regime change in Libya (“We came, we saw, he died”), from which little good has come. Pointing that up undermines one of her most heavily advertised attributes, her “experience.” Citing Hillary’s undeniable (and impressive) “unflappability” is the strategy for for fighting the last war. Hillary can be tough, but she’s also capable of blurting out embarrassing things under pressure, and it’s almost certain that Trump will get viciously under her skin.
When I first started doing my Hillary research, my Democratic friends (I still have a few) hated me for it. I countered by saying I was actually doing them a favor by pointing to the many vulnerabilities of their candidate. They would hear none of it. They still won’t. Tweet negatively about her and you’re more likely to get blocked than to be met with an intelligent argument.
Twitter isn’t real life, for sure, but the move is emblematic of their response to criticism—stop the ears and denounce you as a misogynist. The psychoanalyst in me attributes that response to a strenuously disavowed awareness of her vulnerability, and the lack of strong positive arguments for her candidacy. She’s going to have to come up with some simulations of those, or Donald Trump will do her some serious damage.
Posted in Hillary, Uncategorized | Tags: complacency, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton
Just posted to my radio archive:
April 28, 2016 Greg Grandin on the recession of the Pink Tide in Latin America • Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks, on aging and ageism
I didn’t produce a new show this week; it was a rerun of this show:
August 13, 2015 William Darity on discrimination, a job guarantee, and baby bonds • R.L. Stephens II, founding editor of Orchestrated Pulse and author of this essay, talks about Black Lives Matter and the creation of a leadership class
And for the next three weeks, KPFA is fundraising, so I’m not sure what I’ll be posting. Back to regular programming on June 2.
Posted in radio, Uncategorized | Tags: ageism, aging, Latin America, pink tide
Although Hillary fans discount her early enthusiasm for Barry Goldwater, she did say this in 1996 (audio here): “I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with. I don’t recognize this new brand of Republicanism that is afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects. I am very proud that I was a Goldwater girl.” (Her distinction between “reactionary” and “conservative” is hard to parse; Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, wanted to privatize Social Security, and once suggested that we “lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin.”) And now that many on the right are recoiling from likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, she gets to quote contemporary conservatives approvingly. A striking name on the list: Ken Cuccinelli, the abortion-opposing homophobic former Virginia attorney general. But there are many more treasures below. That rightward-pointing red arrow is carrying more meaning than ever. This press release is just in from her media operation:
Conservatives Rebuke Trump As He Captures Republican Nomination
Last night, Donald Trump effectively captured the Republican nomination, successfully bullying his way through a crowded primary field. However, many prominent activists, journalists and elected officials in his own party have figured out what Hillary Clinton has argued all along: Donald Trump is too big a risk for America.
Take a look at the large group of prominent conservatives who are already promising that they’ll never vote for Trump:
Rep. Scott Rigell [R-VA]: “My love for our country eclipses my loyalty to our party, and to live with a clear conscience I will not support a nominee so lacking in the judgment, temperament and character needed to be our nation’s commander-in-chief. Accordingly, if left with no alternative, I will not support Trump in the general election should he become our Republican nominee.”
Former Romney staffer Garrett Jackson: “Sorry Mr. Chairman, not happening. I have to put country over party. I cannot support a dangerous phony.”
Former top Romney strategist Stuart Stevens: “I think Donald Trump has proven to be unbalanced and uniquely unqualified to be president. I won’t support him… Everyone has to make their own choice. I think Trump is despicable and will prove to be a disaster for the party. I’d urge everyone to continue to oppose him.’”
Rep. Carlos Curbelo [R-FL]: “I have already said I will not support Mr. Trump, that is not a political decision that is a moral decision.’”
Sen. Ben Sasse [R-NE]: “Mr. Trump’s relentless focus is on dividing Americans, and on tearing down rather than building back up this glorious nation. … I can’t support Donald Trump.”
Daily Caller editor Jamie Weinstein: “If it’s Trump-Hillary with no serious third party option in the fall, as hard as it is for me to believe I am actually writing these words, there is just no question: I’d take a Tums and cast my ballot for Hillary — and I suspect so would many other life-long conservatives, whether they are willing to admit it now or not.”
Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes: “This is what political division looks like. Trump’s claim to be a unifier is not just specious, it’s absurd. This casual dishonesty is a feature of his campaign. And it’s one of many reasons so many Republicans and conservatives oppose Trump and will never support his candidacy. I’m one of them.”
Former McCain adviser Mark Salter: “The GOP is going to nominate for President a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it’s on the level. I’m with her.”
RedState editor Ben Howe: “#ImWithHer”
Billionaire Bush-backer Mike Fernandez: “If I have a choice — and you can put it in bold — if I have a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton, I’m choosing Hillary.”
Lifelong Republican, foreign policy expert Max Boot: “[Hillary Clinton] would be vastly preferable to Trump.’”
Former NJ Gov., Christine Todd Whitman on a Clinton/Trump matchup: “I will probably vote for her.”
MA Gov. Charlie Baker: “I’m not going to vote for [Donald Trump] in November.”
Former RNC Chairman Mel Martinez: “I would not vote for Trump, clearly.”
Former VA Senate candidate, Ken Cuccinelli on Trump: “When you’ve got a guy favorably quoting Mussolini, I don’t care what party you’re in, I’m not voting for that guy.”
Former RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman: “Leaders don’t need to do research to reject Klan support. #NeverTrump”
Former Bush spokesman Tony Fratto: “For the thick-headed: #NeverTrump means never ever ever ever ever under any circumstances as long as I have breath never Trump. Get it?”
Former Eric Cantor communications director, Rory Cooper: “#NeverTrump means…never. The mission of distinguishing him from Republican positions and conservative values remains critical.”
Conservative blogger Erick Erickson: “Reporters writing about the “Stop Trump” effort get it wrong. It’s ‘Never Trump’ as in come hell or high water we will never vote for Trump”
Fox News’ Steve Deace: “Apparently @secupp has a #NeverTrump list to see who keeps their word to the end. You can sign my name in blood.”
Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini: “I will never vote for @realDonaldTrump. Join me and add your name athttp://NeverTrump.com . #NeverTrump”
America Rising co-founder and former Jeb Bush communications director Tim Miller: “Never ever ever Trump. Simple as that.”
Former Rep. J.C. Watts [R-OK] said he’d write-in someone before voting for Mr. Trump in November.
Former Director Of NV and MS GOP Cory Adair: “You’ll come around,” say supporters who just got done saying their candidate doesn’t need me. Nah. I won’t. #NeverTrump
Townhall editor Guy Benson: “Much to my deep chagrin (& astonishment ~8 months ago), for the 1st time in my life, I will not support the GOP nominee for president.”
DailyWire editor Ben Shapiro: “Really? #Nevertrump. Pretty easy.”
Wisconsin conservative radio host Charles Sykes: “I suppose I should clarify: #NeverTrump means I will nevereverunderanycircusmtances vote for @realDonaldTrump”
Editor at RedState, Dan McLaughlin: “For the first time since turning 18, I will not vote for the Republican candidate for President.”
George Mason law professor, Republican David Bernstein: “ “I’d rather Hillary Clinton win. I’d rather (and I never thought I’d say this)… If Trump wins the nomination, I will actively seek to prevent him from becoming president.”
Conservative columnist George Will: “If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.”
Redstate contributor Leon Wolf: “I will never vote for Donald Trump. I will not vote for him in the general election against Hillary, and I would not vote for him in a race for dogcatcher. Heck, I would not even vote for him on a reality television show.”
Former Romney adviser Kevin Madden: “I’m prepared to write somebody in so that I have a clear conscience.”
Pete Wehner, former speechwriter for George W. Bush: “I will not vote for Donald Trump if he wins the Republican nomination.”
Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard: “Donald Trump should not be president of the United States. The Wall Street Journal cannot bring itself to say that. We can say it, we do say it, and we are proud to act accordingly.”
Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, Eliot Cohen: “I will oppose Trump as nominee. Won’t support & won’t work for him for more reasons than a Tweet can bear.”
Former Jeb Bush digital director Elliott Schwartz: “In case there is confusion about #NeverTrump.”
Doug Heye, Former RNC communications director: “I cannot support Donald Trump were he to win the Republican nomination.”
Former IL GOP Chairman Pat Brady said he’d back a third-party candidate or “just stay home” if Mr. Trump is the nominee.
Washington Examiner’s Phillip Klein: “I have officially de-registered as a Republican.”
Hypeline News’ Kyle Foley: “I’m willing, if need be, to vote Hillary. That’s how strong my disdain is for Trump #NeverTrump”
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson: “I registered Republican when I was 18 because I thought free markets and liberty were important. Not sure what “Republican” means today.”
Posted in Hillary, Uncategorized | Tags: conservatism, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, right
Katha Pollitt is now a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but she wasn’t always one, as this review of her dreadful book It Takes A Village shows (although the opening is a portent of the future). In the spirit of my earlier reposting of Katha’s polemic on the repeal of welfare, here’s her view of HRC’s pieties from twenty years ago. Clarification: the business with the ghostwriter, Barbara Feinman is serious; Hillary and the White House tried to stiff her out of her last payment, and she wasn’t acknowledged in the book. For more, see Carl Bernstein’s A Woman In Charge.
The Nation — February 5, 1996
Village Idiot
Katha Pollitt
“Saint or Sinner?” asks the cover of Newsweek about Hillary Clinton. On the New York Times Op-Ed page, Maureen Dowd calls her a hybrid of Earth Mother and Mommie Dearest. I must say, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Don’t countless politicians (and their relatives) use their positions to make profitable contacts and advance their friends? And don’t they all talk about family, morals, responsibility, children and God? Even if the First Lady is guilty of the worst that is alleged against her—and if you can explain exactly what that is, you’ve probably been up to no good yourself—there’s nothing new or exceptional about it: See the careers of Newt Gingrich, Al D’Amato, Bob Dole et al. This is what politics is all about, especially in places like Arkansas, a k a The Heartland. “The people you read about in the papers? They all live next door to each other,” an Italian journalist told me after a visit to Little Rock. “It’s just like Italy!”
Well, there is one new thing: the gender issue. A lot of people still expect the wives of politicians to concentrate on the Kinder-Kirche-Küche side of life, while their husbands go after the bright lights and boodle. H.R.C. has failed to observe this division of labor in her own marriage, for which tradition-minded folk like William Safire cannot forgive her. Now the First Lady has written a book, It Takes a Village—And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, only to land herself in more hot water. In yet another column criticizing H.R.C., Maureen Dowd took her to task for not acknowledging the ghostly pen of Barbara Feinman, a former researcher and editor for Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward and Sally Quinn, all now apparently up in arms at this slight to their beloved assistant. Between Whitewater, Madison Guaranty, Travelgate and now Thankyougate, H.R.C. isn’t likely to get much time to talk about her book, and since I know how painful that can be, I sat down and read the whole thing. Who knows? I may be the only columnist in America who can make that claim.
The ostensible thesis of It Takes a Village is that the well-being of children depends on the whole society. The real message is that H.R.C. is for family values. She prays a lot, alone and en famille. She’s a good mom. She thinks young people should abstain from sex until they are 21. She opposes divorce: “My strong feelings about divorce and its effects on children have caused me to bite my tongue more than a few times during my own marriage”—I’ll bet—“and to think instead about what I could do to be a better wife and partner. My husband has done the same.”
I know I’m not supposed to take these notions seriously, any more than I’m meant to gag at the weirdly Pollyannaish tone of the prose, or wonder if Sunday school could really have been her formative intellectual experience. Like her disapproval of television talk shows—thanks to which “we are saturated with stories about priests who molest children” and have become “skeptical of organized religion”—they’re just campaign theater, nods to the cultural conservatives that are balanced by other nods, to flexible gender roles, legal abortion (a very small nod), a “modest” rise in the minimum wage. There’s no attempt to think anything through: the damage to organized religion versus the damage to children left at risk of molestation, for example, or the kinds of social pressures that would be necessary to produce that bumper crop of 21-year-old virgins. Her opposition to divorce is left characteristically vague: She’s “ambivalent” about no-fault divorce (the pet peeve of former White House aide and communitarian William Galston, who proposed abolishing it for couples with children recently on the Times Op-Ed page), but she says nothing about what it would really mean to return to the old system, in which spouses, lawyers and judges colluded in perjury, and wives who strayed could be denied custody and support. It’s easy for her to talk: Her husband has obligingly provided her with grounds that would withstand even the most Savonarolaesque reforms.
What else? The First Lady is for sex ed that has both an abstinence and, for those youths determined to ruin their lives, a birth-control component; a free market that’s also socially responsible; government that’s both smaller and more social-worky. For every problem she identifies, a study, a foundation, a church, a business or a government-funded pilot project is already on the case: teaching poor young mothers how to improve their babies’ cognitive abilities, encouraging fathers to spend time with their families, involving parents in their children’s school. Some of these programs sound terrific, but none of them are on remotely the same scale as the problems they confront. If parents are too poor to afford school uniforms, they’ve got problems much graver than the community recycling of hand-me-downs can solve. The First Lady is thus a kind of center-liberal version of Arianna Huffington, who claims that “spirituality” and volunteerism can replace the welfare state. For H:R.C. the state itself becomes a kind of pilot project, full of innovation but short on cash, and ever on the lookout for spongers.
The real irony, of course, is that at the same time H.R.C. is conceptualizing society as a “village” united in its concern for and responsibility toward children, her husband is panting to sign the original Senate welfare bill, which his own Administration’s figures say would plunge 1.2 million more children into poverty and render more desperate the condition of those already poor. How can a self-described child advocate, who goes on and on about the importance of providing children with enriched parental attention and quality care from their earliest moments of life, square herself with policies that would force low-skilled mothers of small children into full-time subminimum-wage jobs, with warehouse care for their kids? Exactly how will permitting states to deny benefits to children born on welfare further those kids’ development? And what about the kids at the end of the line when the block grants runout?
After the media figure out Whitewater and insure proper recognition of Ms. Feinman’s labors, some enterprising reporter might consider asking the First Lady about that.
Posted in Hillary, Uncategorized | Tags: family values, Hillary Clinton, It Takes A Village, Katha Pollitt, welfare reform
Gail Collins wrote this ludicrous paragraph in her New York Times column today:
The bottom line on Hillary Clinton is that she’s spent her life championing women and their issues. She began her career with the Children’s Defense Fund, fought for better schools in Arkansas, for children’s health care as first lady and for reproductive rights as the senator from New York. As secretary of state she spent endless — endless — days and weeks flying to obscure corners of the planet, celebrating the accomplishments of women craftsmen, championing the causes of women labor leaders, talking with and encouraging women in government and politics.
These assertions bear a rather casual relation with the truth:
But when you’re writing about Hillary for the newspaper of record, you can stuff a lot of baseless nonsense into a single paragraph, and few readers will doubt you.
Posted in fact-check, Uncategorized | Tags: bullshit, feminism, Gail Collins, Hillary Clinton
Just added to my radio archive:
April 21, 2016 Bruce Dixon, managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, on black voters’ mysterious lingering romance with the Clintons • Alfredo Saad Filho on the vote to impeach Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff
Posted in radio, Uncategorized | Tags: black politics, Brazil, Hillary Clinton
Just posted to my radio archive:
April 7, 2016 David Howell on the increase of the minimum wage to $15 in California and New York • Vidar Thorsteinsson, author of this article, on the political crisis in Iceland unleashed by the Panama Papers
March 31, 2016 Nikil Saval, author of this article, on the hippie-inspired new architecture of the Silicon Valley • Alfredo Saad Filho on the ongoing political and economic crisis of Brazil
Posted in radio, Uncategorized | Tags: architecture, Brazil, Iceland, minimum wage, Silicon Valley, tech bubble
Just added to my radio archive:
March 24, 2016 Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba, on the art scene in that country as Obama visits • Sam Stein, author of this article, on neoliberal housing programs, de Blasio style
March 17, 2016 Ben Zachariah on the activities of India’s fascist BJP government at home and abroad • David Rieff, author of The Reproach of Hunger, on the economic development racket
Posted in radio, Uncategorized | Tags: affordable housing, Bill de Blasio, BJP, Cuba, economic development, fascism, India, neoliberalism, poverty
It’s always a delight to read Zoë Heller, especially so when she says this about My Turn: “a solid and persuasive guide to what has been characterized as shady or shabby or unprincipled in Clinton’s political career.”
Other, less personally relevant, highlights from the piece:
…[her memoir Hard Choices] fairly brims with “aren’t women amazing?” sentiments of the sort one finds cross-stitched on decorative cushions.
…her much-vaunted “women’s rights are human rights” declaration in Beijing in 1995 (a speech that her supporters characterize somewhat implausibly as a watershed moment in feminist history)…
Just as in 2008, Clinton has found herself rejected by her “natural constituency” as a less inspirational candidate, a less plausible agent of change than her male opponent—and this time, it’s rather more galling, because the opponent in question is not an elegant, younger black man who can sing Al Green songs, but a seventy-four-year-old white man with the oratory style of a staff sergeant.
Notwithstanding these rather cynical appeals to feminist sympathy, her trials as a female public figure have always inspired considerable fellow feeling in American women, particularly college-educated, white women.
It would be a fine thing to have a woman in the White House. But, really—let’s not put her there because someone once said she had “cankles.”
But she does get one thing wrong. She quotes me saying “If by some miracle Sanders were to be elected, the establishment would crush him,” and concludes from that that I’m “not a Sanders fan.” But I am! I love the way Bernie has made it clear that there is an excitable constituency for social democracy; I love the way Bernie has exposed the class fissures within the Democratic party, forcing Hillary and her surrogates to run against social democracy. Even though Hillary will almost certainly get her damned nomination, Bernie has opened up American politics and given us a lot to work with beyond July.
Posted in Bernie, self-promotion, Uncategorized | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Zoë Heller
Paul Krugman’s talking shit about Bernie Sanders again:
Indeed, what the Sanders movement, with its demands for purity and contempt for compromise and half-measures, most nearly resembles is not the Trump insurgency but the ideologues who took over the G.O.P., becoming the establishment Mr. Trump is challenging. And yes, we’re starting to see hints from that movement of the ugliness that has long been standard operating procedure on the right: bitter personal attacks on anyone who questions the campaign’s premises, an increasing amount of demagogy from the campaign itself. Compare the Sanders and Clinton Twitter feeds to see what I mean.
This is funny, since it’s a bitter personal attack coming from a centrist ideologue on a political movement that challenges his view of the world and that of his candidate, Hillary Clinton. Anyone who believes in popular mobilization and not rule by technocrats is a demagogue to someone like Krugman.
But speaking of purity and demagogy and contempt for half-measures, let’s do a little time travel and recall what Paul Krugman wrote about the massive fraud that used to be Enron, which collapsed in 2001 causing scores of billions of dollars in losses and putting 20,000 employees out of work. Pointing out that the company paid him $50,000 to join this advisory board to introduce this quote would no doubt be regarded by Krugman as yet another bitter personal attack. Pure coincidence for sure! Anyway, here’s Krugman writing in Fortune in 1999:
The retreat of business bureaucracy in the face of the market was brought home to me recently when I joined the advisory board at Enron—a company formed in the ’80s by the merger of two pipeline operators. In the old days energy companies tried to be as vertically integrated as possible: to own the hydrocarbons in the ground, the gas pump, and everything in between. And Enron does own gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. But it is not, and does not try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies, buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker and market maker than a traditional corporation. It’s sort of like the difference between your father’s bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company’s pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.
It’s all there—the born-again 1990s neoliberal love of The Market, the embrace of business as revolutionary, the genuflection before Goldman Sachs, and the excruciating cliché “not your father’s X.”
The Krugman archives are full of interesting material. For example, he wNow he’s busily denouncing Sanders for his attempts to bring something like a Scandinavian welfare state to the U.S., citing the worries of his tepid liberal colleagues that it would just be too expensive. In 1998, just before he wrote that Enron informercial, he disclosed that his ideal regime would be “Sweden of 1980…very generous and high social expenses, a flat income distribution and no unemployment.” Seven years later, in 2005, he told Pepe Escobar that “We should be getting 28% of GDP in revenue. We are only collecting 17%.” (Update: now it’s 19%.)
It’s funny—now that there’s a candidate advocating something like that agenda, he’s against it, standing instead with the finger-wagging, “No, you can’t have that!” contingent. But a guy who’s getting paid $225,000 a year to teach one graduate course and study income inequality is familiar with embracing contradictions.
Posted in fact-check, Uncategorized | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Enron, Hillary Clinton, Paul Krugman
Just added to my radio archive:
March 10, 2016 Anne Balay, co-author of this article, on the tough but romantic life of the truck driver • Lester Spence, author of Knocking the Hustle, on neoliberalism and black politics
[Back after KPFA fundraising break. If you like these shows and want to keep them coming, please support KPFA. If you do, be sure to mention Behind the News.]
Posted in radio, Uncategorized | Tags: black politics, neoliberalism, truck driving, working class
In a remarkable New York Times story, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell has revealed the strategy of the Hillary Democrats as they face the challenge of Donald Trump:
“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats he picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that,” he said.
In other words, they’re hoping to terrify the moderately conservative into voting for their candidate. Forget having any positive message that might attract disaffected “blue-collar Democrats,” meaning the white working class. The appeal is going to be to the center–right. Forget too the enthusiasm for Sanders among the young, an appeal based on hope for a better future. As former Obama advisor turned Uber advisor David Plouffe put it in the same article:
“Hope and change, not so much. More like hate and castrate.”
Marco Rubio coyly suggested the other day that Donald Trump has a tiny todger (as Keith Richards said of Mick Jagger). Plouffe is jonseing to cut it off.
So it’s come to this: as I wrote last week, the Dem leadership hasn’t merely abandoned hope, it’s running against it. Policies that could materially benefit those disaffected blue-collar sorts would displease the party’s funders and must be ruled out. The Dems’ desperate hope is that fear of Trump will close the deal.
Maybe it’ll work—though everyone has underestimated Trump’s appeal all along (me included, I should say). But this strategy of writing off the white working class is precisely what has fueled his rise. As Ed Luce, the Financial Times’ very sharp columnist, wrote in yesterday’s paper:
It is the white vote—and particularly white males—that ought to worry Mrs Clinton. Blue collar whites are America’s angriest people. They feel belittled, trod upon and discarded. The future belongs neither to them nor their children. Mrs Clinton personifies an establishment that has taken everything for itself while talking down to those it has left behind. Mr Trump is their revenge.
Rendell & Co.’s strategy feeds into this unfortunate dynamic.
Dems will, of course, dismiss those angry white voters as hopelessly racist and sexist. Some no doubt are, and that’s the source of Trump’s appeal to them. But that’s not all that could appeal to them. The Sanders campaign has shown that policies that could benefit them materially have great electoral potential. But the Dem leadership would rather court suburban independents and Republicans than cross their funders.
So far that potential hasn’t shown up much in the Democratic primaries, because the disaffected don’t normally vote in them. But the longer-term potential shows up repeatedly in the popularity contests and hypothetical general election matchups. There’s one out just this morning from CNN and ORC International that should cause worry at Hillary Central. Some highlights:
Polls at this stage of the election are more suggestive than definitive, but the “electability” argument for the HRC candidacy is based mostly on the wishes of her fans.
Not mentioned here: race. Hillary clearly has a huge base of support among black voters, and it would be ugly and unproductive of me to type out a lecture on how they’re mistaken in that preference. I don’t understand it, but it’s not my business to second-guess it. What I will say, though, is that the Democratic establishment is playing a cynical game, relying on that “firewall” of support while they court moderate Republicans in the Columbus suburbs by running against social democracy and amping up the fear factor. Because as the man from Uber says, “Hope and change, not so much. More like hate and castrate.”
