I mostly liked Jamelle Bouie’s article on Bernie Sanders and his campaign or “movement” or whatever you want to label it. The piece is largely accurate, and it’s realistic and filled with solid advice for Sanders’ supporters. He does completely drop the ball on one thing, though, and it’s critically important.
Bouie begins by looking at the campaign rhetoric of prior liberal presidential candidates, Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, and Jerry Brown, and identifying similar rhetoric about the importance of “getting money out of politics.” But then he forgets about that message and he fails to pick up on any other similarities between previous progressive challengers to the status quo of the Democratic Party.
The result is an analysis of how progressives can leverage their progress in the Sanders campaign to do something similar to what conservatives did in the Republican Party after their bruising losses in the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, but without spelling out what progressives would really be seeking to accomplish.
There are some things that connect Sanders to previous candidates, for example Bill Bradley was skeptical about NATO-expansion into the former Soviet Union, and Sanders is eager for European countries to pay more of their freight to keeping the NATO deterrent funded and operational. There are other things that seem unique to Sanders, like his proposal for free state college tuition. Does anything really unite progressives outside of wanting less money in politics?
What would bind them together? It seems to me that the glue that held conservatives together was a serious of losses, both political and judicial, but progressives are making incremental progress across the board in nearly every area except reversing the trend towards greater income inequality.
In any case, people need to be motivated, and it’s hard to predict which parts of Sanders’ platform will be picked up by the next progressive champion and how much their appeal can expand to attract other pieces of the Democrats’ coalition.
Bouie does a good job of explaining how progressives may lose the battle but win the long war, but he doesn’t do a good job of telling us the “what for.”
And I think the lack of a “what for” is the biggest impediment to making that “how” come true.
Considering how hypocritical the Democratic Party sounds on this issue these days, even this may not be true.
1.) You forgot climate change. It’s still on the backburner right now, but give it 8-12 years.
2.) Except reversing the trend towards greater income inequality? You didn’t just bury the lede here; you dropped it directly in a trench leading straight to the abyss.
Despite neoliberal apologia, income inequality isn’t just a measure of how much money gets filtered to the upper class. It’s a first or second-order effect to a laundry list of issues: violent crime, herrenvolk racism, class mobility, household debt, child poverty, elder poverty, deurbanization, dietary health, ingested pollution, political corruption, etc.
“It’s a first or second-order effect to a laundry list of issues…”
Not an effect. A cause.
Re: inequality. Yes. We need to tax the rich to pay for the welfare state, but as we are witnessing in real time with Brazil, winning elections and enacting your progressive reforms, including redistribution, isn’t enough. You have to break the rich. You have to make the rich poor. I didn’t always think that way, but my own thinking evolved as I witnessed events such as these. And they continue to happen with increased impunity where the rich simply ask “what are you going to do about it?” in the open.
Break the rich. Without breaking the economy totally? Hard to do, I fear, but a worthy idea.
How to do it? Tough question. I must admit that it has never occurred to me that “breaking the rich” is even a rational possibility. They are seriously in place; they are powerful, and short of a French Revolution-style massacre…absolutely impossible in this massively policed state, and look at what happened afterward…they are here forever. As some drop down and out, new rich climb up. It’s the way things work long-term in every system, apparently. Look at the Russian revolution. How long did it take for power-seekers…which is all that “the rich” really are, people who seek power through wealth and further wealth through power in a financial feedback system…to totally take over again?
About 8 years in Stalin’s case, and things move much more quickly now than they did then. Right back where they started. New names, new tactics, same result. That’s why they call them “revolutions.”
I support evolution rather than revolution. That’s why I see the Sanders attempt in such a good light. He’s really the first true “progressive” to effectively use the communication capabilities of social media to basically viralize his candidacy, and more power to him. The next one will do better. Bet on it.
Or…the whole structure will fall of its own internal rot before it can be evolutionized. That wouldn’t be much fun, I think.
Watch.
AG
…the rich simply ask “what are you going to do about it?” in the open.
Yep. Our devolution is almost there.
How does one expose a system that has been so carefully crafted for dysfunction, corruption, and extraction?
Is it impractical to think that, as candidate or as President, exposing the system itself could inspire unexpected engagement?
It cannot be done without a more informed and engaged electorate. Sanders is one hell of a lot more than a laundry list.
Yup.
Which is what is happening as we speak. The successes of both the Sanders and the Trump speak to that. Without years of expanded knowledge regarding the ongoing back-room hustles of the .01%, both of their messages would have been met with massive incredulity.
The Information age…provided it is not effectively shut down by the very people it tends to expose, a not-impossible idea…is shining lights in many, many dark corners, and even better, it publicizes those lights very broadly and very widely. The ongoing rise of public “dissatisfaction with our government?” What? That government hasn’t been crooked until just recently? Please!!! The information age has truly informed the public. That’s why it’s called “inform-ation.” It is itself too broad and too wide to be able to be censored or effectively controlled. Somebody living in their parents’ cellar using Twitter has the distinct possibility of reaching more people than those who read the New York Times in 1992.
Really.
“The times they are ‘a changin’ ” wrote the prophet Dylan in 1964.
Truer words were never sung. It’s just taking a little longer than we thought.
But it’s happening.
Bet on it.
AG
The key for the Sanders people will be to generate leadership at the local level. There are signs of this already – Sanders supporters are running for City Council in Salt Lake. I know a State Senate candidate in New Hampshire.
There is more than enough glue here: the Mid East, Tuition, Wall Street, Single Payer, 15 minimum wage.
There are some people who are linked to Bernie, and magazines like Mother Jones and the Nation are ready to take the charge since blogsphere has mostly sat this out.
Goldwater created a number of young activists who would go on to play a major role in taking over the Party. My hope is Sanders can do the same.
“The Democratic Party isn’t yet an ideological party, and many of its voters don’t put ideology or good-government reform at the top of their lists.”
One wonders if the author is even familiar with various governing ideologies. Perhaps his laundry list might have more significance to him if he were.
Neoliberalism is the modern context we live in. It claims only private industry generates wealth and public services do not. Public/private bastard kludges are the results. We can’t do anything right.
Or, worse, we fire sale public assets like parks, utilities and schools. Funds from rentier capitalism leave the state instead of becoming public revenues. Unaccountability comes with it, which is a feature, not a bug.
If you are curious about the context for some of the otherwise inexplicable behavior of our elites, like the TTIP and TTP, this essay really is the best I have seen…http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
We need a Godwin’s Law for ‘neoliberalism.’
Use the term, immediately lose the argument.
Same applies to Naomi Klein.
It’s not that there aren’t potentially valuable ideas and sources, but they’re never used to illuminate anything.
Or, to be more precise, they’re used to explain so much that they explain virtually nothing.
Try saying what you mean rather than leading on a term that’s very meaning is so contentious that it doesn’t advance any argument.
Yes, defining down deviancy is one method of removing something from the conversation, I guess.
If you are allergic, please do not read.
Communication.
How does it work?
As JB’s article proves, laundry lists without context do not illumine. If you want to deny the context, you want to turn off the light.
Imagining a hundred years ago, Martin would have been saying the Progessivism isn’t a real thing and he couldn’t stand the word and therefore, no need to figuire out what it was. Same with the New Deal which was a huge expansion of progressivism and added the critical theory that had been missing earlier, Keynesian economics.
Is why I linked the GM piece. Context for the reader. And that is not even the further reaches of the Social Darwinism that is implied. Or Foucault, for those still curious.
Guess I can keep linking anytime I use the term and he cannot complain. You do define them by their products, though, not the appellations they are willing to apply to themselves.
I’d probably add “the powers that be” and “the establishment” to the list as well.
They’re typically used in much the same manner.
Not quite.
The establishment or the powers that be are both terms that people immediately understand. The issue is causality, or explaining how this kind of power is exercised, or not. Often, people fail to explain this.
However, neoliberalism is a term that it’s hard to find two people to agree about its meaning.
There are Clintonistas who would self-apply the label, some ruefully and in the past tense, and others still proudly, but none of them would associate themselves with Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek, or even recognize themselves in that Guardian link that Mino provided.
Insofar as they may have inadvertently picked up on some their economic reasoning, they don’t share an ideological affinity. New Democrat wonks were (and are) a totally different kind of animal, and much more political than ideological. In other words, they’re heavily evidence-based but also highly practical, so they’ll change when the political environment changes, as it has.
The true economic libertarians never change and are not capable of changing their views for any reason.
You kinda know them by their works, don’t you?
Does it matter if they are yelling…NO LABELS!!
Booman writes:
Please Booman!!! Let’s get rid of all of the words about which there is no real consensus while we’re at it!!!
Jazz
Rock
Pretty
Fat
Democracy
Progressive
Conservative
Etc.
Ask a fish about water and it will say “Water? What’s that?” It’s just the environment in which the fish lives, birth to death. I think that you are living in such a “neoliberal” environment…in your own head as well as in your various employments and hobbies…that you can’t see the woods for the water.
I damned well know what the term “neoliberal” means.
It means this:
I also know what “neoconservative” means.
This:
And Permanent Government, too.
Are you familiar with the phrase “thick as thieves?”
Here is the accompanying illustration:
Thick as thieves except the accidental preznit, li’l Jimmeh. They got rid of him real quick, right? They won’t even include him in the group photo. Not really.
C’mon, Booman!!! You know better…
“Ye shall know them by their fruits,” said some other famous prophet of previous hustlers.
I am reminded of the phrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964…coincidentally (???), the same year Dylan wrote “The Times They Are ‘A Changin’ “.
Neoliberalism?
i know it when I see its fruits.
Stop being part of the…to misquote the immortal crook Spiro Agnew’s lick..part of the nattering nabobs of neoliberalism, Booman.
You know what it means, too.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
AG, having a strong opinion isn’t the same as making a case. And you haven’t made the case for the functional utility of “neoliberal” or any of the other terms in your laundry list. You’re using them as terms of abuse.
Hell, until a couple of weeks ago, AG thought the liberal in neoliberal meant that liberals were somehow involved in its development. He has zero clue about what the term means.
You’ve made this point before, about how supposedly nobody can agree what “neoliberal” means.
“Neoliberal” is an adjective referring to the economic doctrine of “free trade”, as it has been developed since the last quarter or so of the 20th century. Or, as a noun, someone who promotes that point of view.
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
Oh, almost forgot …
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2002/jun/24/globalisation
See, people do know what it means. There’s just a bit of controversy over whether it’s really the greatest thing since sliced bread.
If the abuse fits, wear it. I don’t care what you call the abusers.
Make up a new name. It’s still the same people.
George Harrison’s wonderfully laconic reply on being asked by a dumb reporter what he called the Beatle haircut:
It ain’t what you call it, it’s what it is that counts.
Nothing “has” a name. They are all made up. English speakers basically agree that the term “tree” refers to a certain class of ideas. Are an oak and an information tree the same thing?
Of course not. We have…those with a working rain…cooperated with one another to use a certain word in certain ways. Same same for “neoliberal.” Bet on it. Relatively uneducated people will not initially know what an “information tree” is, and truly stupid ones won’t be able to either find or use that information.
Ditto for the word “neoliberal.”
Like dat.
So it goes.
AG
Monboit conflates the definition for US purposes.
There are three uses of the word:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1983/8305_Neoliberalism.pdf
It is worth a read – because it really explains the Clintons. Neo-liberals were not anti-government. Unlike conservatives they would defend OSHA for example.
The debate between Bernie and Clinton is between liberalism and neo-liberalism of the Peters variety.
I was once a neo-liberal. I would have told you I believed as fervently in the cause of social justice but I believed that there were smarter ways to accomplish those objectives.
Looking back in large measure I was wrong. Neo-liberalism was wrong. Its prescriptions, whether in the classroom (merit pay), or welfare reform failed to appreciate the need for institutions that counter-balance the ability of market power to distort.
There is a great story to write that starts with the Peters article (whose influence is felt in the Democratic Party to this day). It isn’t really the Monbiot piece (though I like that as well).
I saw this short post today on Baseline Scenario regarding neoliberalism and the Monbiot article. Kwak cleared up some of the confusion regarding terminology.
https:/baselinescenario.com/2016/04/18/the-root-of-all-our-problems
American neoliberalism did take a turn that did not happen in Europe. Ours went totally supine to the magic of markets, while Europe, with Germany leading, never forgot checks and balances to capital. EU austerity is finally doing what neoliberalism could not–destroying labor and trade protections. The Brussels bureaucrat is supra-national.
But there is a core difference in the way American neoliberalism looks at its citizens. And it is not healthy.
Well, that article is kinda eye-popping. Wish everyone would refresh their memories of the DLC manifesto’s positions on the safety net.
Peeing in a cup to qualify for Social Security would not be out of the question for them. They embodied the change from “community values” to don’t be the slowest impala.
Will add your link to the Monbiot thread. It explains more of the social dimension of neoliberalism without going too deep in the weeds as to its foundations.
Thanks.
When someone says ‘neoliberalism’, they usually mean ‘a political philosophy and its policies which promote market solutions such as corporate tax cuts, competition, deregulation, free trade, privatization, etc. to implement the ideological goals of leftists’. Which, like it or not, has been the dominant philosophy of the Democratic Party for the last 25+ years. Just take a look at the TPP and ACA, why don’t you?
If it has a dirty, Godwin-like connotation that you don’t like, then that’s because it’s responsible for things that a lot of leftists don’t like.
Indeed, is more like…ignore the evidence….than… “heavily evidence-based” Or, prevent meaningful measurements of success/failure. Saw that right here on the blog as regards questions re ACA and maternal/infant mortality improvement.
And schools? Ye, gods.
That failure to measure is an increasing problem these days. So is paid science. Grrrr.
The ideological goals of leftists?
Where the fuck do you get that idea?
That’s a total distortion of the term. If you want to argue that Blair-Clinton embraced elements of neoliberalism, that’s fine, but it’s a hard right ideology.
This is what I’m talking about. If you can’t distinguish between Milton Friedman and anyone on the center-left then you haven’t explained much at all.
You’re just name-calling.
Say what you mean, and leave the ambiguity aside.
The ideological goals articulated by this famous emoprog:
Neoliberalism, especially as sold to the Democratic base via the New Democrats, sought to implement long-standing paleoliberal goals as articulated by the New Deal Dems such as UHC, primary and secondary education attain, economic growth and employment, and crime reduction through the use of market incentives.
I’m just amazed that you found the usage of the term like this ambiguous. I mean, neoliberalism also has a mostly non-overlapping foreign policy component, but that’s mostly used by non-Americans — was that where the confusion came from? Of course, liberal and progressive means different things outside of America anyway so c’est la vie.
So, you’re using a term that is more appropriately tied to Ronald Reagan and applying only to center-left accommodations to the ideology?
Bill Clinton was kind of neoliberal, but Reagan was 100% neoliberal.
You’re taking a term that means something and using it as epithet like “conservadem.”
And, you’re right, it means something very different in a foreign policy context where there’s less distinction between parties or presidents.
I don’t know why you are amazed, you can’t even use the term coherently when you have paragraphs to explain it.
Incremental triangulations get you there eventually. And his initial missteps were whoppers, showing to me a big buy-in to the commodification of just about everything, including humans. Winthrop Rockefeller WAS his mentor, no?
The Commodified Self is the true object of the Arne Duncans.
Imagine how YUUGE GDP will get once we commodify everything.
Carbon credits showing the way? lol
What do you mean, only center-left? Modern American conservatives (incl. fringes such as the alt-right) pretty much accept the ends of the Four Freedoms. That ship has long since sailed. Contrast this to Hooverian conservatism, which explicitly rejected the welfare state, international intervention, and government economic interference on their own terms.
What’s changed since then is that American conservatives champion free market mechanisms (monetarism, neoconservatism, supply-side economics, deregulation, free trade, shrinkage of national and state government, devolution, etc.) to implement the Four Freedoms. Yes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did not take the means of neoliberalism as far as W. Bush and Ronald Reagan would have wanted or did. But that was still the dominant economic and domestic paradigm of their administrations.
It might make you uncomfortable to realize that the means of Obama and Clinton weren’t that different in kind, merely degree, from Reagan and the Bushes but that doesn’t mean that the term neoliberalism doesn’t accurately describe this mode of thought.
Yeah, it can describe every president since Truman if you want it to. Or you can start with Carter. However you want to slice it.
If you want people to think you’re making no distinction between Reagan and Carter or Clinton and Obama, then say so. Most people figure you actually have some different point when you call someone a neoliberal.
This is what I’m talking about. If no one knows what the fuck you’re talking about, then just stop it and say something they do understand.
Clearly he doesn’t know what neoliberalism means. He thinks it must mean the renewal of Rooseveltian “liberalism”. It actually means the revival of 19th-century British-empire economic liberalism.
The word “liberal” comes from Latin, liber “free”. In its original meaning, liberalism referred to “free trade”, and all that implies.
You know this. I probably should have replied to him.
“Neoliberalism, especially as sold to the Democratic base via the New Democrats, sought to implement long-standing paleoliberal goals as articulated by the New Deal Dems such as UHC, primary and secondary education attain, economic growth and employment, and crime reduction through the use of market incentives.”
I think this is right, though I would add neo-liberals wanted a smarter government, not necessarily a bigger or smaller one.
Reagan sought smaller government as a virtue in and of itself. Neoliberals did not.
It’s not right, it’s totally wrong.
Neoliberalism is an economic doctrine — free trade, corporatism, etc. that was revived during the time of Reagan and Thatcher and has been with us ever since.
It has nothing to so with political liberalism, although there can be some overlap, which is evidently what’s causing all this confusion.
Bill Clinton certainly was a neoliberal. A comparstively moderste one, but a neoliberal all the same. Or don’t you remember what the DLC was all about? Republican lite?
The Koch brothers contributed to the DLC and sat on their Executive Council.
http://www.democrats.com/node/7789
http://americablog.com/2010/08/koch-industries-gave-funding-to-the-dlc-and-served-on-its-executive-c
ouncil.html
From what I understand, neoliberalism concentrates on free-market economics, whereas libertarianism advocates both free-market economics and socially liberal policies. Just my $.02
I didn’t mention libertarianism. Yes, I suppose that’s right. There used to be a definitions of “libertarian” like —
A libertarian is a conservative that’s gay.
Or
A libertarian is a conservative that smokes pot.
But what would you call somebody like Hillary Clinton? A neoliberal for sure. But not a libertarian — a liberal. I made the point a number of times on this thread that “neoliberalism” (economic) and “liberalism” (socio-political) are two completely different things. But they can overlap in the same person.
I do think, however, that the liberalism of a neoliberal has to be more words than reality. Like charter schools, for example. Supposedly good for minorities, but definitely good for the corporate bottom line. Or promoting “women’s rights” in the corporate boardroom while fostering financial deals that destroy women’s (and children’s, and men’s) lives in the third world. Stuff like that.
Agree with you. HRC is a neoliberal and so is the Dem elite. I don’t see anything truly liberal about neoliberalism and it’s a misleading term. I found a short post on Baseline Scenario referring to Montbiot’s use of the term neoliberalism. James Kwak helped clear up some of the terminology for me.
https:/baselinescenario.com/2016/04/18/the-root-of-all-our-problems
Reminds me of another 20th century struggle, identified by Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” as “”the problem that has no name.” Of course it had existed for a very long time by than and had previously been challenged in large and small ways, and defeated in many of the small ways, but somehow it kept returning in new guises. It still confounds us, but by naming it more broadly, more was attention was paid to the problem and more was accomplished in reducing it.
Agree. IMHO, at least 2 issues are still out there: (1) some women in positions of power playing the role of a damsel in distress; and (2) some women intentionally imitating the worst characteristics of men, rather than the best.
I thought the piece Marie linked to was pretty good, but one bit was a little confusing:
“One thing I’m not entirely on board with is the particular bundle of policies that Monbiot ties together, or the label “neoliberalism” that he applies. This is a complicated conceptual space that, portions of which have been labeled liberalism (that’s the word Hayek used in The Road to Serfdom, neoliberalism, libertarianism, Randianism (used by Hacker and Pierson in American Amnesia), or simply conservatism. After all, there isn’t much in the ideology that Monbiot identifies that every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan wouldn’t agree with.”
It is NOT such a “complicated conceptual space.” It’s just that there’s a lot of confusion about the terms used. If Hayek actually uses the word “liberalism” for what others call neoliberalism, libertarianism, Randianism, no wonder people are confused; because that is a usage of “liberalism” from the 19th century, and has NOTHING to do with the Rooseveltian political liberalism that was the core philosophy of the Democratic Party before the 1980s.
The writer doesn’t seem to realize this. The reason I do is that I’m from the baby-boomer generation — when I was growing up, Hayek’s 19th-century sense of “economic liberalism” was found only in history books, and the “liberalism” of the Democratic Party (and in those days there were even liberal Republicans) meant the very opposite of conservatism. There was no confusion, because the terms “neoliberalism”, “libertarianism”, “Randianism”, were not even in use.
As I got older, I discovered I had some philosophical reservations about “ideological” liberalism. But I never became anything like a political or economic conservative, or even a “Yuppie”. It seems that many of my contemporaries did. In their own minds they remained “liberals”, stuck with the Democratic Party, but followed the Clintonesque drift into neoliberalism. This is what we’re dealing with today in the Democratic Party. Bernie is NOT a radical. In terms of the history of the Democratic Party, he’s a conservative, in the Burkean sense — wanting to conserve the values he grew up with! Again, I think I can speak to this, having grown up in the same Jewish, working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, in the same era, having attended similar public schools, the same publicly-funded college, etc., etc.
I won’t get into the large black support for Hillary, except to say that I think it has more to do with the legacy of Obama, or a certain perception of it, than it does with the actual Clintons. I am just glad to see that Sanders has significant support among black voters, particularly youth, and certainly among other PoC.
As we rarely have a presidential candidate like Bernie, I’m really learning something from the present campaign. Since the days of Howard Dean, I have thought that Democrats can now begin to understand what’s happened to their party, and once they do they will also understand what to do to correct it, and will vote for candidates that are addressing those problems.
What I’m realizing now is that while (so far) half of Democrats nationally ARE responding in that way, along with many who are not, or have not previously been, Democrats, a very considerable portion of Democrats seem to be just fine with how things are; or, even if not — too intimidated or stepfordized to want to change them.
What I see is that Bernie and his supporters have explained very clearly, again and again, what is wrong with Clinton and all she represents. And what I see is that many Democrats don’t care, they are fine with it.
So that’s the way it is.
Correction: The link I refer to
https:/baselinescenario.com/2016/04/18/the-root-of-all-our-problems
was posted by Karl, not Marie.
Yeah, when those older writers used “liberalism” they are usually talking about Victorian liberalism. Social Darwinism. The “deserving” poor. Lot of similarities, thus the neo-liberalism, I suspect.
You and I are on the same page. I am a baby-boomer and was the first generation of my family to go to college. Bernie is an FDR Democrat, which was just a Democrat when I was born during Truman’s administration. We have some baby-boomer cohorts who are economically conservative and socially liberal. To me, this is the New Democrat, but that doesn’t fit my definition of Democrat. I’m a big Bernie supporter because to me he is a real Democrat and am happy that I got to vote for a real Democrat. The pendulum always swings and it’s time for neoliberalism and neoconservatism to bite the dust. Bernie Sanders has already made a difference in spite of the media blackout. For example, last night the NBC Nightly news discussed the high Unfavorables for Trump, Cruz, and Clinton. However, Bernie wasn’t mentioned. Why didn’t they discuss Bernie’s high Favorables from that poll? This primary has been an eye opener for me in so many ways. Thankfully, the media doesn’t carry the weight it used to and shouldn’t, since they do a pee poor job of reporting.
Yes, we are on the same page, I’ve been noticing that. I wasn’t literally the first in my family to go to college, but my father didn’t finish high school, let alone college, and my mother had one or two years of college before marrying my father; though many years later she went back and got a B.S. and eventually an M.S. in home economics; got her teaching certificate and taught in home eco in public schools and in college before being downsized from both — and never really got over that.
The carefully edited reporting the media do is, for them, not a bug but a feature.
Sorry, Karl — the link I said (in my reply below) that Marie had posted, actually you had posted.
No problem.
I’m with Booman on this. Since I began reading this blog, I’ve seen “neoliberal” used as more-or-less synonymous with “neoconservative”, and both terms used as terms of abuse rather than terms with actual explanatory potential.
The American term for neoliberalism is market fundamentalism, which is better known as free-market policies. Now that’s a term the average person understands because it has been constantly repeated for decades by the politicians, economists and media.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35668-george-monbiot-never-ending-growth-cannot-be-sustained-on-a
-finite-planet
So we are allowed to say the fish is wet, but not attribute that to water?
That is a known phenomenon that happens with a lot of words. Some people have heard that something is “bad” but they don’t really know what it is. So to them it just becomes synonymous with whatever it is they don’t like.
That’s not the word’s fault.
“I’ve seen “neoliberal” used as more-or-less synonymous with “neoconservative” . . .
The words are not really synonyms, but they stand for related attitudes that frequently coincide in the same person. Neoliberalism is free-trade-ism, market fundamentalism; neoconservatism is a belief in aggressive, interventionist foreign policy to promote neoliberal economic interests around the world.
I would say that Hillary Clinton is both, though ostensibly a liberal on social issues.
I would distill it down to three basic ideas:
There are two other parts:
Your first 1-3 are correct.
The next “1” is also correct. That’s because the major media have the same financial interests as all the other players, they are increasingly centralized into huge corporate empires with huge financial interests and they use their communicational reach to strengthen the system.
2 is a little different. Gay rights and abortion have little to no impact on the neoliberal system, and neoliberals do not oppose them and even support them. Voting rights, on the other hand, can represent a threat to them.
thanks for linking this article; I also highly recommend his article on epidemic of loneliness, linked in the first article
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us
whatever you think about the terminology, the process he describes goes a long way towards answering my question – what shredded the social fabric? both articles speak to what I am observing.
As far as post Sanders goes, first of all I would phrase it differently. how about “post primary” since Sanders isn’t going anywhere for a while, presumably.
also, initial steps must be to identify a problem/ problems and possible way forward addressing the problem[s], which, as I wrote, i would phrase as complete shredding of social fabric except for a few regions I’ve seen]. . gap between rich and poor is a symptom, as is drug epidemic. sometimes taking a few obvious steps clarifies the way forward.
my 2cents
“Does anything really unite progressives outside of wanting less money in politics?”
I still don’t think you understand the reason the dogs won’t eat the dog food. This movement that challenges the Clinton Dynasty is the absolute and complete open rebellion against neoliberalism.
I know you probably still think the only good reason or purpose for any of this was to move Hillary to the left. That was your idea, everyone else expects Hillary will take a more extreme turn to the right, if that is even possible since her foreign and economic policy is already to the right of Trump.
The abject failure of the Democratic Party is the embrace of DLC/Bill/Hillary neoliberalism. The defeat of the Clinton Machine is the real mission of this political revolution. If you contrast the issues in this light you can easily see which issues will continue to unite this movement.
This is probably the last time the Democratic Party will have the luxury of change from the inside. The Democratic Party has proved in vivid detail that it is simply too corrupt to be reformed from the inside. There is simply no room for Progressives within the current corrupt Democratic Party structure.
The best way to defeat the Clinton Dynasty and neoliberalism would have been and still is from the inside. The next best way to take down the Clinton Dynasty is for the Democrats to lose an otherwise winnable election preventing the Clinton Dynasty from completing the payoff bargain they made with Big Money. Winning this election will only make them more difficult to defeat in the future.
Next time the challenge will be from the outside as in a new competing Party probably starting with 2018. The era of the lesser of the evil is over.
Agree except for this: Winning this election will only make them more difficult to defeat in the future.
A Clinton restoration will make the neoliberals weaker. Not as easy to shove all that neoliberal crap onto the public as it was in the ’90s. Unlike Bill and Barack, Hillary will not get a pass when she throws an AA under the bus. The “I want a woman POTUS” female voters aren’t going to be happy when that turns into more wars, less funding for social/welfare benefits, and income/wealth inequality keeps increasing.
Wonder how many know Sanders is more absolutist about reproductive agency than Hillary is?
HRC hopes that number is zero among the pro-choice folks and enormous among those that aren’t anti-abortion with no exceptions. Planned Parenthood and NARAL gave HRC enormous cover with the first group but that cover may have limited her support with the second.
Saw this quote today…The status quo cannot be defined by the actions of one man or even a few men. The status quo has been defined by the inactions of all the other men.
The government that induces (facilitates and encourages) and seduces (incentivizes and justifies) increased income concentration is hardly the one that will fix all of the down sides later on.
You write:
I hope you are right, AustinSax
I really do.
We shall see.
I see the distinct possibility of a Cruz or Trump win and soon after a slide towards something resembling martial law, myself. The era of the greater evil.
I hope I’m wrong.
We shall see, soon enough.
Later…
AG
Hillary says vote for us, vote for more neoliberalism so we can destroy what’s left of the economy because…Republicans. That is voting for the lesser of the two evils. While the Republicans most certainly are the most evil, we refuse to make that choice. They must think of something else if they want our vote.
Some of us knew what was really going on but we had no way of doing anything about it, that is, until we finally had a real choice. Once we had that choice there was no going back. The message, “you don’t have to settle for the status quo” is probably the most power political statement I’ve heard in my lifetime.
When I say the era of voting for the lesser of two evils is over what I really mean is there is simply no going back. In the counter culture revolution of the late 60’s we called this becoming aware. Some of us called it becoming radicalized. We are now in open rebellion against neoliberalism. This is much more than merely choosing between two primary candidates.
Bottom line here is that when DLC/Bill/Hillary decided to embrace neoliberalism, the Democrats turned their back on the people to instead support the interests of Big Money. When FDR was insisting that his Vice President become Henry Wallace, he warned Democrats; you can’t have it both ways.
The Democratic Establishment listened to that warning then and made the right choice. Maybe, just maybe they will make the right choice once again.
Very well said, and that is indeed what we’re facing.
I just want to point out that for the Democrats lose an absolutely winnable election. would be an unmitigated disaster. The Clintons would be disappointed too. They’d cry all the way to the bank.
The question seems to be; what are we going to do with this open rebellion against neoliberalism? The most difficult part of that question would be the answer because that answer must come from the same Democratic Establishment that rigged the rules in its own favor. No one questions they gave themselves the power to push their flawed candidate over the top.
The rest of the Democratic primary contests will tell a lot if it turns out Hillary never wins big in any blue state but only wins big in red states that were already lost to the Democrats in the general. Also consider that Hillary’s negatives continue to rise as she shows her ass, so to speak, in an increasingly tense campaign.
With her deteriorating pledged delegate lead, a lead that was only made possible by DNC shenanigans, it becomes plain that the mood of the Democratic voters has shifted toward Bernie in the states that count. They also take notice that when Independent voters are included, turnout is historic and favorable to Bernie. The Democratic Establishment starts to worry about pushing such a weak candidate for the general.
Hillary thinks she can win without them but the Democratic Establishment starts to worry about how angry the reaction from Bernie supporters who already feel cheated by the actions of the DNC will be if they decide to push Hillary over the top in the above scenario. On top of that, the Democratic Establishment also starts to worry if the enthusiasm of all those Independent voters will transfer to Hillary. They also know they will need the enthusiastic support of both groups to avoid that unmitigated disaster you mentioned earlier. The people making this decision will not be in that group crying all the way to the bank. No, they will be the ones instead facing some very angry Big Money people who just had a lot of their money flushed for nothing.
The Bill Clinton has been smirking all the way to the bank for some time now, especially since Hillary became Secretary of State turning this whole thing into one gigantic cash cow. If Hillary manages to lose an otherwise winnable election, the Clinton’s will have everything except their influence and power. Obama may be the record holder for the number of national and state seats of government he lost during his neoliberal watch but this one will be the real prize; loss of the White House.
One thing is for sure, the most powerful incentive to have a Democratic controlled congress would be to have a Republican president from that latest crop. With this unmitigated failure of neoliberalism, maybe the Democratic Party will finally be ready for reform. The political revolution could proceed.
On the other hand, let’s say the Democratic Establishment sees the danger clearly enough that they begin to fear the Republicans more than they fear the Democratic Socialist. Bernie becomes the nominee. Hillary supporters do what they have been advising everyone else to do; they get in line. Enthusiasm explodes with the other groups needed for a winning coalition. Bernie wins in a landslide bringing the Senate, maybe even the House with him. At this point the Democratic Establishment is forced to view this as nothing more than a long overdue enema with a modern New Deal Democratic style party of the people waiting in the wings.
Bottom line is, this decision will be made by the Democratic Establishment. This decision could result in an unmitigated disaster or maybe they can squeeze out a victory with Hillary to kick the can down the road a bit but remember, neoliberalism has been losing since DLC/Bill/Hillary forced it upon the Democratic Party. Take your best shot but remember, it’s on you, Democratic Establishment. Don’t blame me for the forces unleashed by your bribed decision.
More people waking up – very slowly? The DEM progressive base is larger than it was in 2000.
Bradley was out of the 2000 race so quickly that very few people had the opportunity to hear anything that he was saying. Plus Gore was sounding a populist theme (that totally pissed on Bill Clinton). Still through the primaries/caucuses held on and before 3/7/00 (SuperTuesday), Bradley did receive 40% or more of the vote in many states. 3/7 wipe-out states for Bradley were:
CA – 18.2%
GA – 16.2%
OH – 24.7%
Too bad Gore’s yuuge primary wins in GA and OH meant nothing for him in the general election.
2004 was odd. Two fake liberals and one quasi-liberal. One war hawk, one reluctant warrior, and one that opposed GWB’s march to war. Progressive’s split. The party elites won that one easily.
IA 2008 was similar to 2000. Obama only received 1.4% more of the vote than Bradley had. In NH HRC beat Obama by 2%; whereas, Gore won by 4%. (After NH, race played too large a role in the DEM primaries to isolate the pure progressive vote that year, but Obama did get most of the progressive vote (without hope, progressives wouldn’t bother to vote at all).
2016. Less difficult for voters to sort out which candidate is the progressive and which isn’t. Still, there is the confounding variable (women that want a woman POTUS regardless if she’s a Thatcher soul-sister) and the AA vote splitting far further to the right than normal. Still it’s easy enough to recognize that DEM primary/caucus voters are now much further to the left than they were in 2000 and 2008 and now a majority. How large a majority is not yet known — it may be slight or it may be as large as 60%. That’s not going to disappear.
I think this trend basically reflects the widening gulf between the Democrats and Republicans. The overlap than used to exist when I was young, say, and which existed at least into the Reagan era, has been obliterated.
That old overlap was obliterated 46 years ago. Practically ancient history at this point. Guess you haven’t noticed the new overlaps that have emerged and developed in the decades since then. Maybe you should pay less attention to the GOP care and feeding of their religious and racist voting factions and more attention to the actual common ground between GOP and DEM politicians and wealthy elites and how those DEM politicians beat up and starve their their progressive bases to keep them in line.
OT:I’m still a little shocked by this. I don’t know why, but I am.
…………….
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 4/15/16
Indiana GOP stacks deck against Donald Trump before primary vote
Niki Kelly, reporter for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, talks with Rachel Maddow about the Indiana Republican Party choosing its delegates before there has even been a primary vote, and so far only one of 57 appears to be a Trump supporter regardless of who wins the primary.
Was this outside of a caucus or convention?
If a ‘movement’ or a ‘revolution’ cannot even post in an online thread without kicking and insulting the people they are supposed to be recruiting, they have absolutely no chance of ever successfully running anything, or even getting the chance, in real life.
Keyboard commandos.
.
exactly always more interested in bashing Democrats than building the party or the movement
And we see the opposite: that liberals would rather light themselves on fire than work with leftists. In other words, the liberals hate the left more than they hate the right.
Call our antipathy for liberals such as these as a reaction.
Add to that that the lefties have been trying to work with the DEM party since like forever and have basically been shit on since 1968.
Jon Chait is probably the best example of this behavior.
fixed link
The lefties have been trying to work with the DEM party since the Republicans and the Democrats institutionalize the two-party system through state legislation that made it difficult for other parties to get on the ballot. One suspects that one incentive for that was the large Socialist Party votes that occurred in the 1930s. Another was the rise of George Wallace’s American Independence Party after the Civil Rights Acts were passed.
The other parts of the “big tent” are just scared to death of lefties in American politics.
speaking for myself I don’t hate the left, I just don’t see how you’re going to get to your goals by saying everyone sucks – I would think the ultimate goal is to win, take power and achieve the goals you’ve set out to achieve.
It’s rarely good enough to just be right, you have to find a way to win and take power too.
I don’t have a problem with coalitions. I’m not even in the farthest part of the left of many political circles I inhabit!
I actually agree with you that should be the goal, but the problem arises in coalitions when we no longer have the same goals. Clinton lambasting single payer or free public college tuition are NOT attacking it from a point of unrealized power, but ideologically: she doesn’t want every day people to pay for Donald Trump’s kids to attend college. Fine. But that’s an ideological difference we have.
The coalitions and their respective lines are fracturing. We are simply asserting (or trying to) assert our power within that coalition. Keyboard commandos? Sanders wouldn’t have ~45% of the pledged delegates if that’s all he had. Ron Paul had keyboard commandos. Sanders has very visible and strong support within the coalition.
I didn’t use the term keyboard cammandos, I actually missed it until you just mentioned it.
The reason progressives/liberals/leftists (however you want to describe the group) don’t hold more sway or more power in the Democratic coalition is because they’re not reliable voters. The reason the Tea Party (I’m not comparing the groups just using them as an example) gained so much power over the GOP is that they always vote and if their chosen candidate didn’t win they still voted for the victor and tried again in the next election.
It takes sustained effort to move a party in any direction, there’s a lot of people in the Democratic party from all over the spectrum. If you want the party and the candidates to be more responsive to your goals and agenda you have to be a reliable voter otherwise the focus will be on those that vote in every single election.
Now most people on here do vote in every election, it’s those that support your goals that are outside of the super plugged in political junkies that don’t and that’s who you need to get more power within the party.
“because they’re not reliable voters. “
Yes, and the reason they’re not reliable voters is that they rarely have anyone they want to vote for.
It’s not symmetrical. The GOP figured out how to con a large segment of their base (the rest drifted away) into always voting for them. But that’s no longer working either (although they’re still being conned).
The Democratic Party used to be able to do that, too, but they’ve been losing that ability because too many (especially since Howard Dean) have figured out the con.
But Bernie takes the cake, he’s somebody they actually want to vote for. All of a sudden they’re a lot more reliable.
Until he does something that his people don’t like, probably if he gets to general using big money to try and win will be the first whiff of it.
Anyway, I don’t see why anyone thinks that withholding a vote is using your power it’s not. Candidates and parties listen to those that vote and those who vote every time.
If a group wants to be taken more seriously inside a party the easiest way is to be voters that the party can count on and put up candidates that represent the groups views. The reasons why Tea Partiers or Progressives vote or don’t vote aren’t really relevant in this part of the conversation what is important is that members of the Tea Party vote every time.
Also, I do not believe that Clinton’s support among the AA community is linked to ideology, which would imply that there is broad support for significantly more liberal candidates than are represented in Congress. All of which is particularly frustrating because supporters take cues from their leaders, and if Clinton operates in the WH I suspect that she will, we will have a regression in policies people support even if they’re ideologically the same.
You should also noticed that many people disagree with you on liberalness/progressiveness of Sec. Clinton.
It does the movement no good by basically telling people they’re stupid for not seeing what you see. You could be right, they could be right, but like I said it’s rarely enough to just be right.
That’s not what I’m saying. In fact, please note I pointed this out February 28th that South Carolina voters did not see Sanders as “the most liberal”.
In fact, that just reinforces my point: AA community is one of the most (if not THE most) liberal in the entire country.
There’s only so much $$ to go around. Granted the Fed and the financial wizards have created “$$”, but IMHO there is a limit. Otherwise, one will need a wheelbarrow of $$ to buy a potato. Who’s growing potatoes in their back yard now? Where is the $$ going to come from? The Regular Jo? He/she is sick of this trickle-up economics. $$ are limited; greed is not, and Jo sees it. Knowing the DNA of the American people, I have faith that they will figure it out. The number of political independents is growing as we speak. You can’t keep ’em down on the farm anymore because there is no farm. And many people who are involved in the political process are supporting anti-establishment candidates. Either the 2 parties change or bye-bye.
Krugman’s piece on the Robber Baron Recession talks about the unhealthy state of our market. Warren Buffett has repeatedly explained that what he looks for in companies are those that have insulated or protected market positions.
The Economist has noticed.
“Perhaps there is mounting evidence that the all-time high of the profits and margins of many sectors in the economy is not representing a healthy economy but rather the growing market power of many companies and their ability to raise prices.”
https:/promarket.org/are-we-all-rent-seeking-investors
> Post-Sanders, What Binds Progressives Together?
fear and loathing
There is no “post-Sanders” until the contributors who have been supporting him and voting for him stop doing that to the point that he is compelled to withdraw. The Clinton strategy of trying to shove him to the exits has become very visible in its coordination of message. Not a helpful move at all.
What binds progressives together? An interesting question given the Democratic Party’s concerted moves to purge the movement from its ranks.
First of all, it should be clear that what binds the current crop of progressives is wanting to change this relationship:
Corporations –> Government –> People
into this relationship:
People–>Government–>Corporations(?) — It would be an easy enough legislative move to revoke all corporate charters under current law and and reissue them under more restrictive law. It would be an easy enough legislative move to not recognize charters issued by other jurisdictions, state or federal.
Maybe this particular action would not unite progressives, but restoring the relationship between people and government would.
If that’s too idealistic, then the core values that inspired allegiance to the United States of America are now corrupted beyond repair. And there is nothing that individual citizens can do but wait for the inevitable social collapse or inevitable nuclear war started by the United States. (The USS Donald Cook incident is most serious folly since the Tonkin Gulf incindent. Threatening Kaliningrad is as serious as threatening Sebastapol for Russia.)
What is becoming apparent is that the Democratic Party has run on false promises of progress for quite some time, quite possibly going back to the New Deal era itself. It is also quite possible that the government of the United States is locked into and endless war on terrorism and an endless police state that effective has suspended in practice the promised Bill of Rights. Realizing that and resisting that reality is increasingly what binds progressives together. And increasingly, it looks shoved outside the electoral system completely. So the American eagle is flying once again with only a right wing. And like several previous times when that condition occurred in order to keep “order”, the result will be flying in ever decreasing counter-clockwise circles until the bird flies up its own bunghole. Whether the crash will be of the economy again or of a catastrophe of our most expensive military in the world that has very little to do but look for more things to do remains to be seen. But the future looks as bleak as I have ever seen it.
Cultural nihilism seems to captured the Boomers in a nuclear Armageddon death wish that drives the non-Sanders campaigns disguised as “being strong”.
One other attitude seems to unite progressives — seeking actual solutions instead of yet more pragmatic expediency. Pragmatic expediency very soon will start claiming lives as global climate change starts to affect not just Oceanic seacoasts but places where we live as well. More pragmatic expediency of costs and benefits will leave them to drown or starve or die of exposure just has pragmatic expediency has left the citizens of Flint MI in a state of continued deprivation of the infrastructure for which they paid taxes and fees and in poisoning without accountability of reparation. Democratic silence is amazing on many things, but most of all this. Because white Michiganders don’t see it as a problem. “They shoulda paid their bills.” When crass monetary relations sap compassion and corrupt a culture of community, what name should we give to that form of thinking?
Very good. You mentioned Flint. So Snyder figured he could save money and therefore taxes, a noble neoliberal goal no doubt. We sure can’t have big government, especially when private enterprise does it so well. And now we have thousands of children and other sentient citizens poisoned and harmed for life. And, yes, where are the progressives and white citizens in all this? Not their problem, especially if you mention the words taxes and big government. And Snyder is still governing and walking free. Makes me wonder. That’s all, just wonderment. I’m sure there is a pragmatic solution to it all. And no one else will face this.
Some other GOP governors will figure out how they can punch minority communities and get rewarded too. Takes punching hippies to a new level and converts de facto punching down on communities into policies.
The key is Democratic silence.
Handing out water bottles while the press is around…
Yes, I have been thinking that corporate death penalties should become a tool.
And constriction of the latitude of “limited liability”.
By “corporate death penalties” I assume you mean revocation of corporate charters? Since corporations (despite what you sometimes ear) are not people and are not alive, but their “life” is in their legal existence.
Indeed this would be the logical solution. Legally, it should be possible, but practically it’s, er, not so easy,
Anyway, here’s some basic info:
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02oct-nov/oct-nov02corp1.html
You have said what I was trying to say with better precision and clarity.
None of the commenters here with the exception of Booman think there is any place for progressives within the Democratic Party. OK, fine. So which party will y’all being joining and working with to gain ballot access, at a minimum?
And ballot access does what for progressives? That’s the hard reality that progressives are facing even as their numbers are increasing. “Centrist” bona fides are being established by candidates slapping down the left wing instead of slapping down the right wing. And what is clear about the phenomenon is that it is not being demanded by voters but by well-heeled donors.
And those donors are exactly and precisely buying denial of ballot access to the left end of the political spectrum.
Progressives began to notice this tendency as it became more and more blatant and as investigative media online began documenting the who, what, where, when, and how.
Playing around with when and how people vote and how the votes are counted only made the game more obvious. Election procedural reform should be on the agenda after this election but likely won’t because it advantages incumbents. And the story is that only incumbents are electable.
Your fellow WaMo colleague’s article about Sanders success compared to past insurgents is a good read. Read it at the Atlantic.
An affinity for internecine warfare.
An interesting tangent to this discussion:
David Graeber, Le Monde: La Nuit Debout against Le Panama Partout
Unlike 1968, US politics is no longer seen within its global context because we now have isolationist Wall Street media.
The end of Treaty of Westphalia nation states. A product of these trade agreements.
“What was the alter-globalization movement of the turn of the millennium, after all, than the first social rebellion against this emerging planetary bureaucratic system? As a participant in some of its most notorious battles–in Washington, Quebec City, Genoa–I can attest this is exactly how we saw ourselves. What was being billed as “globalization,” as a kind of natural and inevitable process driven by “free trade” and the internet, was really created and maintained of endless grey functionaries, working for bureaucracies public and private, or even more, in an indistinguishable grey zone in between: the IMF, WTO, TTIP, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Standard & Poors, or Bechtel, with the ultimate purpose of maintaining the wealth and power of a tiny elite. What we’ve now learned is just how much members of that elite considered it a point of principle that those with the power to impose laws on the rest of the world should not be bound by laws themselves.”
Is the point here that Sanders has ownership over the “progressives,” and so there would be a question of where they go when he exits the stage? I’m sure that some who do not support him would consider themselves progressive.
I assume that global warming, equality, women’s and family rights, progressive taxation, and improving working conditions will continue to be standard issues for large segments of the Democratic Party, whatever they choose to call themselves.
And there are market solutions for many of them…carbon tax/offsets is eagerly awaited by Wall Street. What could go wrong?
Nothing!
“but progressives are making incremental progress across the board in nearly every area except reversing the trend towards greater income inequality.”
You omitted global warming. By the time that it becomes a unifying issue, it will be too late, however.