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Sunday, April 17, 2016
Weekend Roundup
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.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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