Quickly, some scattered links this week:
George Monbiot: Neoliberalism -- the ideology at the root of all our problems: The term is scarcely ever used in the US, where right-wing pundits insist that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (pictured at the top) are regarded as purely conservative folk heroes. Yet the term was coined at a 1938 conference featuring Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who used it to articulate an extreme belief in free markets in opposition to "collectivism" -- a term they felt rounded up all the evil political movements of the era: nazism, communism, and most importantly social democracy. The term soon fell out of use: in the US the ideas mostly appealed to red-baiting right wingers who preferred to call themselves "conservatives"; in Britain, the term has mostly been picked up by its opponents, since it seems to tie together both the Conservative and Liberal parties, as well as describe where the "New Labour" party faction went so terribly wrong. Of course, the same ideas infected the Democratic Party, particularly through Carter's deregulation mania, Clinton's embrace of "free trade" deals and "small government," continuing through Obama (whose signature plans, like health care reform and a "cap-and-trade" greenhouse gas market were originally hatched in neoliberal "think tanks"). Still, I wonder if it isn't too pat to catalog every instance of self-serving capitalist greed and dignify it with an innocuous ideological label. Monbiot notes that neoliberal policy directives have failed so often their underlying theories have achieved zombie status, then complains that "The left has produced no new framework of economic thought for 80 years. This is why the zombie walks." The zombie walks because the rich have rigged the system. What we need isn't another framework; it's countervaling power.
Much quotable here; this is just a sample:
The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.
Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.
Monbiot has a new book, How Did We Get Into This Mess? (Verso). He also cites another interesting title, Andrew Sayer: Why We Can't Afford the Rich (Policy Press, paperback in May). Also links to Paul Verhaeghe: Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us.
Michael Specter: Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America:
It will surprise nobody to learn that life expectancy increases with income. Coming, however, in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which the corrosive effects of income inequality have been a principal debate topic, the data and its implications for public policy are particularly striking: the richest one per cent of American men live 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest one per cent. For women, the average difference is a just over ten years.
The gap appears to be growing fast. The researchers, led by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University, analyzed more than 1.4 billion federal tax returns, as well as mortality data from the Social Security Administration, from the years 2001 to 2014. In that period, the life expectancy of the richest five per cent of Americans increased by roughly three years. For the poorest five per cent, there was no increase.
DR Tucker: Ship of Fools: The fourth down of five straight rants about "Bernie or Bust"-ers ("who still insist that under no circumstances will they vote for the 'corporatist' Hillary Clinton if she defeats Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination"). After five paragraphs of imagining Trumpian hell, he concludes:
The inconvenient truth is that the "Bernie or Bust" crowd is indistinguishable from right-wing fundamentalists in their loathing of compromise and their refusal to recognize that sometimes people can make bad decisions in good faith. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore are neither evil nor corrupt. Neither is Bernie Sanders, for that matter . . . but what does it say about those who only recognize morality in the latter, and malevolence in the former?
First, he probably should have stopped at "evil" and not brought up "corrupt": if there's anything the Clintons have done consistently throughout their political careers, it's been to cozy up to moneyed interests -- be they Tyson and Walmart in Arkansas, or Goldman Sachs and Citibank in New York. Maybe it's legal for a company that was saved by billions of dollars of federal bailouts to pay you $650k for one little speech, but it's hard to say there's nothing corrupt about it. Second, are we really talking about compromises, or simply different goals? When the Clinton's concocted their health care scheme, were they backing off from a single-payer approach just enough to secure passage, or were they trying to pitch fat business opportunities to the insurance companies and HMOs? If you want an example of a compromise, take Sanders supporting Obama's ACA even though he clearly was aware of and wanted something better. I'm not saying that the Clintons don't compromise, let alone that they have no principles to compromise. But I do think it's fair to say that their principles and aims are very different from those of people who prefer Sanders. Probably very different from their own supporters too.
It's pathetic that Tucker can't tell the difference between Sanders supporters and right-wing fundamentalists. Also that he doesn't recognize that most Sanders supporters aren't died-in-the-wool leftists. The least of Clinton's problems is that those "Bernie-or-bust"-ers will wind up voting for Jill Stein. Two much bigger problems are that Clinton won't campaign on anything that materially promises to help the lives of the voters who have been energized by Sanders' campaign and/or that she's already lost so much credibility that many people won't trust her. And again, her problem isn't with confirmed leftists, who are hypersensitive to the perils of fascism and accustomed to settling for "lesser evils." Her problem is the vast mass of Americans who can't tell the difference between the two parties, either because they're uninformed or because they're all too aware that changing the guard in Washington hasn't made any appreciable difference in their own lives.
Worse still is Tucker's Running Up That Hill, where he urges the DNC to ban Sanders from speaking at the Democratic Convention:
Why should Clinton genuflect to someone who a) explicitly said she doesn't have what it takes to be president, b) called for a primary challenge to the current Democratic President, and c) is not a Democrat?
Speaking of concessions, a compelling case can be made that if Sanders suspends his campaign after losing badly in this Tuesday's New York Democratic primary, he should be excluded from speaking in any capacity at the Democratic convention. It would be rather divisive to give a prominent speaking position at that convention to someone who seems to believe that the Democratic Party has prostituted itself to economically powerful johns and contracted the social disease of "corporatism." If Sanders addressed the convention and repeated his campaign rhetoric, would he not offend convention attendees who regard certain elements of Sanders's shtick as a tone-deaf and tacky trashing of President Obama? [ . . . ] Those who are thinking dispassionately will not be offended by the exclusion of Sanders from the convention, and will understand the reasons why he wasn't invited to speak.
Didn't the DNC try to suppress dissent (or do I mean democracy?) once before -- in 1968? As I recall, that didn't work out so well. A sane person would see the convention as an opportunity to bind the Party divided by the primaries back together, but Tucker seems to prefer laying waste to those who had challenged party orthodoxy, thereby exacerbating the split in the Party. I suppose he could point to Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican Convention in 1992 as an example where such a concession backfired. (If you recall that speech, it's probably because Molly Ivins allowed that "it probably sounded better in the original German.") Nonetheless, I can't imagine Sanders following suit -- especially after the votes are counted -- unless Clinton follows Tucker's advice and pushes him out. And if she's that thin-skinned, she's unprepared for the job ahead.
PS: I wouldn't have read these pieces had they not appeared in the otherwise admirable Washington Monthly blog, which Tucker has totally hijacked for his rants. Please bring back Katherine Geier.
Corey Rubin: Magical Realism, and other neoliberal delusions: Among many other thoughts, this on the obsolescence of the DLC political style:
Though I'm obviously pleased if Sanders beat Clinton in the debate, it's the other two victories that are most important to me. For those of us who are Sanders supporters, the issue has never really been Hillary Clinton but always the politics that she stands for. Even if Sanders ultimately loses the nomination, the fact that this may be the last one or two election cycles in which Clinton-style politics stands a chance: that for us is the real point of this whole thing.
I'm always uncertain whether Clinton supporters have a comparable view. While there are some, like Jonathan Chait or Paul Starr, for whom that kind of politics is substantively attractive, and who will genuinely mourn its disappearance, most of Clinton's supporters seem to be more in synch with Sanders's politics. They say they like Bernie and agree with his politics; it's just not realistic, they say, to think that the American electorate will support that.
Which makes these liberals' attraction to Clinton all the more puzzling. If it's all pure pragmatism for you -- despite your personal support for Bernie's positions, you think only her style of politics can win in the United States -- what are you going to do, the next election cycle, when there's no one, certainly no one of her talent or skills and level of organizational support, who's able to articulate that kind of politics?
Daniel Larson: The Libyan War and Obama's 'Worst Mistake': When asked one of those self-flagellating questions, Obama offered that his worst mistake was "Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya." I can think of several worse ones. One was not fixing the Bush tax cuts when he had the votes to do so right after the 2008 election. (Sure, I understand that he didn't do so because raising taxes in a recession would have seemed contractionary, and because he wanted to play up his bipartisanship, and because they were due to sunset in a few years anyway, but they would have cut into the swollen deficits that caused so much alarm, in turn leading to austerity cutbacks that really were contractionary. Moreover, he could have floated tax rebates to counter the increases short-term, so they would have been neutral or better while improving the long-term outlook.) Another was pretending that the US had succeeded in Iraq when his belated withdrawal was complete, which left him open to the charge that his withdrawal turned Bush's victory into the rise of ISIS. I could come up with a few dozen more before getting into Libya, where in retrospect the intervention has come to look like a worse decision than the aftermath. As Larson puts it:
I don't think this was Obama's biggest mistake, but it is revealing that he remains convinced that this lack of post-Gaddafi planning is worse than the far greater error of intervening in Libya in the first place. As we saw last week, this has become the self-serving rallying cry of Libyan war supporters. The only error interventionists are capable of recognizing is that of doing "too little." They can't admit that the intervention itself is a mistake without fully acknowledging their bad judgment in supporting it. [ . . . ]
Obama knew at the time that there was absolutely no political support in the U.S. or anywhere else for a prolonged mission in Libya. Promising not to start an open-ended mission in Libya is what made the war politically viable here at home. The public would tolerate bombing for eight months and then writing off the country, but there wouldn't be similar patience for a new occupation in yet another Muslim country with the costs and casualties that would likely entail.
It was not an oversight by the intervening governments when they left Libya to its own devices. That was part of the plan, such as it was, from the very beginning. So it is hard to take Obama seriously when he faults himself for not committing the U.S. to a larger, costlier role in Libya when he and the other allied leaders deliberately decided against doing that. They made that decision because they wanted a low-risk intervention on the cheap, and they certainly weren't prepared to make a long-term commitment to police and rebuild Libya. But they were willing to help throw the country into chaos and to destabilize the surrounding region and declare victory when the regime change they supposedly weren't seeking had been achieved.
One last point is that the US intervention didn't end when the bombing did. Obama may not have planned for the aftermath, but the CIA blundered in anyway, which is how that Benghazi! fiasco happened.
I want to close with a fairly long quote from Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (pp. 89-91):
[Bill] Clinton's wandering political identity fascinated both his admirers and biographers, many of whom chose to explain it as a quest: Bill Clinton had to prove, to himself and the nation, that he was a genuine New Democrat. He had to grow into presidential maturity. And the way he had to do it was by somehow damaging or insulting traditional Democratic groups that represented the party's tradition of egalitarianism. Then we would know that the New Deal was really dead. Then we could be sure.
This became such a cherished idea among Clinton's campaign team that they had a catchphrase for it: "counter-scheduling." During the 1992 race, as though to compensate for his friend-of-the-little-guy economic theme, Clinton would confront and deliberately antagonize certain elements of the Democratic Party's traditional base in order to assure voters that "interest groups" would have no say in a New Democratic White House. As for those interest groups themselves, Clinton knew he could insult them with impunity. They had nowhere else to go, in the cherished logic of Democratic centralism.
The most famous target of Clinton's counter-scheduling strategy was the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, the bête noir of centrists and the living embodiment of the poilitics the Democratic Leadership Council had set out to extinguish. At a 1992 meeting of Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, with Jackson sitting to his left, Clinton went out of his way to criticize a controversial rapper called Sister Souljah who had addressed the conference on the previous day. The exact circumstances of Clinton's insult have long been forgotten, but the fact of it has gone down in the annals of politicking as a stroke of genius, an example of the sort of thing that New Democrats should always be doing in order to discipline their party's base.
Once Clinton was in the White House, counter-scheduling mutated from a campaign tactic to a philosophy of government. At a retreat in the administration's early days, Bill's chief political adviser, Hillary Clinton, instructed White House officials how it was going to be done. As Carl Bernstein describes the scene, Hillary announced that the public must be made to understand that Bill was taking them on a "journey" and that he had a "vision" for what the administration was doing, a "story" that distinguished good from evil. The way to dramatize this story, the first lady continued (in Bernstein's telling), was to pick a fight with supporters.
You show people what you're willing to fight for, Hillary said, when you fight your friends -- by which, in this context, she clearly meant, When you make them your enemy.
NAFTA would become the first great test of this theory of the presidency, with Clinton defying not only organized labor but much of his own party in Congress. In one sense, it achieved the desired results. For New Democrats and for much of the press, NAFTA was Clinton's "finest hour," his "boldest action," an act befitting a real he-man of a president who showed he could stand up to labor and thereby assure the world that he was not a captive of traditional Democratic interests.
But there was also an important difference. NAFTA was not symbolism. With this deed, Clinton was not merely insulting an important constituency, as he had done with Jesse Jackson and Sister Souljah. With NAFTA he connived in that constituency's ruin. He assisted in the destruction of its economic power. He did his part to undermine his party's greatest ally, to ensure that labor would be too weak to organize workers from that point forward. Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse.
One effect of Clinton's NAFTA push was that the unions were unable to muster effective support for Clinton's signature health care bill. Then in 1994 the Republicans gained control of Congress and Clinton never again had to worry about the Democrats pushing some progressive reform through Congress. And by crippling the unions, Clinton was able to consolidate his control of the Democratic Party machine, something which kept Democrats weak in Congress (except for 2006-2010, when Howard Dean was Party Chairman) and set up Hillary's campaigns in 2008 and this year. (Sure, Obama beat Hillary in 2008, but welcomed her people into his team, got rid of Dean, and restored presidential crony control of the Party machinery, making Hillary a shoe-in this year -- at least until the rank-and-file weighed in.)
The bottom line here is that most people's interests should align with the Democrats -- they damn sure don't line up with the Republicans -- yet the Democrats don't get their votes, because party leaders like the Clintons, despite whatever they may promise during a campaign, cannot be trusted to support them.