#clintonism

This ties in nicely with an old (ongoing) post/philosophy of mine that I have discussed here numerous times: “Means Testing is a conservative canard; a disingenuous red herring”:

In 1993, Vice President Al Gore took part in an unusual debate about trade: He went on Larry King’s CNN show to spar with Ross Perot—the third-party candidate President Bill Clinton had beaten in the previous year’s election—over the impending North American Free Trade Agreement. During the campaign, Perot had warned that NAFTA would create a “giant sucking sound” as high-paying manufacturing jobs drained out of the country. About a year later, Clinton was trying to push it through, and so Gore was dispatched to debate NAFTA’s most high-profile opponent.

Most observers concluded that Gore won handily. But he didn’t convincingly put away Perot’s arguments; instead, he took his opponent down with a lot of cheap rhetorical tricks—most especially, baiting Perot’s notorious temper by constantly interrupting him. Perot’s peevish “Could I finish?” was turned into a punch line by comedian Dana Carvey, and that was that. It was a tactical success for Clinton, who wanted to build a new base for his party among the executive and financier class and high-income voters. NAFTA was eventually approved by the Senate and signed into law by Clinton on December 8, 1993.

In the end, however, Perot turned out to be more right than wrong about NAFTA—and not only on economic but on political terms. While NAFTA’s overall effects weren’t that large, there were far bigger losses after Clinton signed another trade deal, this time with China, in 2000, and the wreckage left by the outsourcing and deindustrialization that followed would come back to haunt his wife in the 2016 election. The Democrats’ embrace of free-market policies, which reached its apex under Clinton, may have helped rejuvenate the party in the 1990s and early 2000s, but that embrace has now crippled it. Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump—whose signature economic pledge was to reverse the “bad deals” of the past few decades—simply highlights a generation of Democratic Party politics that has now come crashing to an end.

Two new books help fill in the details of the rise and fall of Clintonian economics and politics: Bill Clinton, a short biography by Michael Tomasky, and Shattered, a narrative account of Hillary’s 2016 election loss by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. These demonstrate neatly how Clintonism—a politics of triangulation in a neoliberal age—eventually undermined itself.

As its title suggests, Tomasky’s volume—an entry in the Times Books series on American presidents—is a brief, crisp, and overly sympathetic telling of Bill Clinton’s story. It covers, with aplomb, his early career as Arkansas governor, his long-shot campaign for president, and his later career as a globe-trotting philanthropist. At the center of the book, however, is not only the tale of a president from a town called Hope but also the outlines of how Clintonism, as an expression of post-welfarist liberalism, came into being.

Early in his presidency, Clinton developed what would become the key feature of his politics: Recognizing that the New Deal coalition between Southern Democrats and the Northern working class had fallen apart, he set out to win over those people who voted for the GOP. This required triangulation, especially in a context in which the free-market right had won a near consensus over the perceived failures of the welfare state. As Tomasky argues, Clinton was genuinely concerned with improving the lot of working-class Americans. Yet all of his policies to that end were hemmed in by a neoliberal framework that had been embraced by both sides of the aisle by the 1990s. Sometimes this was against his wishes—when discussing his first budget, Clinton famously complained, “You mean to tell me that the success of my economic program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” But it also became a central feature of Clintonism.

This economic straitjacket was the result of a fight that had started decades before. After the Great Depression and the Second World War, classical laissez-faire economics had been profoundly discredited, and the Democratic Party had come to accept that strict controls on the markets and protections for workers—in the form of pro-union legislation, the regulatory state, antitrust policy, and so on—were needed to moderate the ruthless swings of capitalism.

But many still hated the New Deal—and that included a faction within the Democratic Party. When, in the mid-1970s, the United States suffered the twin problems of high inflation and high unemployment—or “stagflation”—these anti–New Dealers pounced. Blaming the problem on New Deal structures, they insisted that only deregulation, union-busting, and tight money would restore growth and stabilize prices. Under the direction of Al From and his Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), of which Clinton was a charter member, this group of “New Democrats” consolidated in the 1980s and gradually rooted most of the old New Dealers out of leadership roles in the Democratic Party, and eventually out of the party altogether.

Me:

Henry Kissinger's victims:

3 million + Vietnamese

2.5 million + Cambodians

200,000+ Laotians

3 million + Bangladeshis

10,000+ Indians

10,000+ Pakistanis

15,000+ Egyptians

3500+ Syrians

6500+ Cypriots

40,000+ Chileans

30,000+ Argentinians

10,000+ Zimbabweans

60,000+ Mozambiqueans

900,000+ Angolans

11,000+ Guinea Bisseauans

300,000+ East Timorians

1,000,000+ Indonesians

20,000+ Western Saharans

1,100,000+ Iraqis

and so so many more

“…it is very possible that Henry Kissinger has played a role in the mass murder of more people than anyone else in human history.”

Henry Kissinger was a vile, evil man through and through. And while good people are justifiably rejoicing at his long overdue death, please never forget that his evil brand of warmongering, unending “defensive” wars, and colonialism lives on in far too many media pundits, Hollywood + media influencers, and powerful politicians.

Sorry if you’re a liberal sycophant, but EYE am not here to blow sunshine up Biden’s ass. We must hold truth to power. Biden was as disastrous for social justice and democracy as Bill Clinton was, and in fact, history will show that Biden governed as a somewhat “moderate” conservative Republican, similar to Bill Clinton.

And that’s without even getting into how Biden, who valued following norms above achieving justice, ignored all norms and international human rights laws to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. That’s without even getting into how Biden changed immigration laws for the worse, and required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until our immigration system gets around to them—sometimes years or decades later. That’s without getting into Covid and how Biden blocking the Wellstone Act and siding with Gilead Sciences helped make life-saving medicines unaffordable. That’s without even getting into how Biden sued to continue using Trump’s immigration laws that were harder on Haitian refugees (see Title 42).

“Better than being in a car accident” is a shit metric for nominating our political leaders.

This is not rocket science. Democrats competing with Republicans for white conservative votes, while both parties shit on leftists and progressives, is stupid. Republican voters are n-e-v-e-r going to pick a Republican-lite candidate over an actual Republican!

If you disagree, then think about how, under his leadership, Democrats lost all three branches of government to openly racist politicians, many of whom are sexual predators and abusers. Why does the Democratic Party even want the votes of people who lionize racists and rapists?? The very best thing that the DNC could do would be to exorcize all traces of Clintonism and Bidenism, and stop trying to “triangulate” with conservatives.

On MSNBC, Luis Jordan says, quote, “The progressive era has to end if Democrats want to win again.”

We have Harris surrogate, Lindy Lee, a member of the DNC National Finance Committee and Pennsylvania Commissioner told Fox News, quote, “People are wondering tonight what would have happened had Shapiro been on the ticket. And not only in terms of Pennsylvania, he's famously a moderate. So that would have signaled to the American people that Harris is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump said she was. But she went with someone actually to her left.”

Chuck Todd on MSNBC said the night of the election that perhaps John Fetterman should be the North Star of the Democratic Party and points to his over-the-top loyalty to Israel as a main reason. Seth Moulton, who is a liberal in Congress, quote, “Identity politics hurt Democrats. I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I'm supposed to be afraid of saying that.”

This is all after the election outcome, by the way.

New York Congressman Tom Suzy, quote, “Democrats have got to stop pandering to the left. I don't want to discriminate against anybody, but I don't think biological boys should be playing in girls' sports.”

An anonymous House Democratic Party aide, quote, “AOC is toxic to the Democratic Party. Her primetime DNC speaking slot played directly into the narratives that lost us this election.”

Truly impressive what Minnesota accomplished with only a one seat majority

“…in addition to having a one-vote margin, this was not a radical left-wing legislature! There are plenty of moderate Dems here.

But the moderates, unlike (centrist) Dems elsewhere, still wanted to get stuff done and saw progressives as partners in making that happen.”

Rather than looking at the November numbers result and imposing some kind of self-limiting narrative about the scope of their mandate, MN Dems looked at their priorities and said "How much of the list can we get done?"

Turns out the answer was, "Almost everything."

Republicans did not worry about appeasing the sensibilities of Democratic voters when they rammed through Trump’s unqualified Supreme Court Justices, and then gutted Roe v. Wade.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS, whenever Dems have political power, instead of performatively agonizing about “reaching across the aisle” to compromise with Fascistic Republicans, or pontificating over & worrying about what Republican voters might think, they need to focus on one thing and one thing only: accomplishing ALL the good they can while they still can. Like Minnesota just did.

Dems need to be bold, and press through their base’s policies whenever they have the opportunity, not finger wag and tell us why the things we want are impossible and won’t ever happen.

“Pragmatically” “triangulating” and waiting for the “right” time, or waiting for a “better” time to do what is right only helps Republicans buy more time to entrench.

Time is a luxury that most poor and marginalized people simply cannot afford. Democratic politicians need to understand what MLKjr meant when he spoke of being wonderfully maladjusted, and the fierce urgency of now! and why he scornfully viewed moderate (centrist) whites as an even greater threat to progress than the KKK.