So what? Go talk to the ones who aren’t, then. I’m not responsible for answering for everyone you have a problem with, especially when the extent of their error is being self-righteous and defensive, instead of, you know, wrong.
Thomas Frank, author of the classic What’s the Matter with Kansas?, wrote a book last year about the Democrats called Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? It deconstructs rich liberal culture and is critical of the Democrats for abandoning working people which allows the right’s false populism to take root, with Trump’s ascendancy being an obvious example.
It recounts how neo-liberalism, the DLC, the Clintons, and Obama screwed over the little guy, so if that’s an unfamiliar concept to you it may be both eye opening and infuriating. What I found more interesting was the cultural analysis. He portrays rich liberalism as a sort of religious meritocracy based on education and going to the right schools and how it always justifies and rationalizes inequality, similar to the just-world philosophy of the right. He says the party has cast the white collar professional class as their cultural heroes, that is to say the winners of the new economy, like Wall Street financiers and Silicon Valley tech giants. They view blue collar workers as dinosaurs who believe in horrible things like protectionism.
I tended to think Obama and the rest of the Dems let Wall Street perform an all out assault on the American homeowner because they’re bought and paid for, but Frank thinks they’re engaged in class solidarity. Obama didn’t think those complicated financial instruments were red flags for fraud, they’re signs of the genius and financial innovation of the creator class who must be protected from the ignorant masses. You don’t want to take the sledgehammer of anti-trust laws to Silicon Valley monopolies, you want them ascendant so they can improve the whole world. Liberals like Clinton and Obama and anyone else from the establishment are true believers, as are the corporate journalists who breathlessly cover them.
Also, apparently years ago it was revealed Bill Clinton had a secret agreement with Gingrich to partially privatize Social Security, but it was abandoned after the Lewinsky scandal. Get that woman a medal.
I don’t have a cite for this, but I suspect that one big problem with liberal education (and also conservative education) is that students are being taught this:
- “Know” that you are right, and your cause is good
- Learn persuasive/argumentative skills to communicate your view that you are right
- Put those skills to use in politics/society, to persuade people that your view is right. And be persistent, until you finally win.
The problem is that students are not being taught to question the premise of 1# itself. What if, in fact, the student’s views are *not *correct? But that part doesn’t enter into the minds of many modern students, or their thinking process. Rather, their mindset is, “I am right, and I must persist in haranguing people until they accept my rightness.”
Yeah, all of this sounds patently bizarre to me. The white-collar wall street guys are the cultural heroes of the democrats? Where does that leave the republicans, exactly? This sounds less like an honest interpretation of how things work and more like a blind acceptance of the republican line that the democrats have abandoned the little guy. Which party passed Dodd-Frank, and which party fought tooth and nail against it? Which party pushed for a higher minimum wage, and which party fought tooth and nail against it? Which party considered Occupy Wall Street its own, and which party sneered at and mocked it? I really have no idea how these conclusions are reached. They seem patently bizarre.
The difference between Bernie and Hilary is not political correctness (which is another issue entirely), but that Hilary is a neoliberal.
This is a difference in economic approach mainly, not in cultural issues.
It’s not that white collar Wall Street guys are cultural heroes to Democrats. It’s that Wall Street(and Sillicon Valley) have taken precedence over blue collar Americans for Democrats as long as *Wall Street creates wealth, taxable income, bubbles and artificial GDP growth. * We saw the exact same in the UK during New Labour. Im fairly confident Democrats and New Labour are very similar in regards to their respective attitudes to the financial sector.
That the Democrats have been captured by corporate interests is basically the starting point for progressive politics in modern America.
Most Republicans wouldn’t agree with the premise that Democrats were ever for the little guy. They loved when Bill Clinton passed NAFTA, gutted welfare, deregulated Wall St. and the telecoms, and passed the crime bill.
Here’s Thomas Frank on Democrats rebranding and identifying themselves as the party of the professional class, 20:43-30:10. Frank is a lefty New Dealer, most of his books are about criticizing Republicans. What’s the Matter with Kansas? made quite the splash and I’d recommend it for his thorough deconstruction of right-wing backlash culture. If you think he’s been fooled by right-wing talking points, I don’t know what to say.
Both sneered and mocked, even so called “left” corporate news media such as MSNBC and CNN. Witness even this very website, where several self-styled liberals still insult Sanders and his supporters.
That Democrats are better than Republicans is taken for granted, but the corporatization of the Democratic Party is both important and interesting. If you want to smash the empty populism of the right you need actual populism from the left, not bromides about the inevitability of free trade or a stalwart defense of the pharmaceutical industry to gouge American consumers.
That’s a functional answer, and correct of course, but it doesn’t get at the psychological rationalization or how these people view themselves. Like if you ask why people have sex the functional response is reproduction and forming pair-bonds, but that’s not usually what’s going on in people’s heads. These people go to the same schools, travel in the same social circles, and care about similar things. Another little example, more recent, is how Obama went kitesurfing with billionaire Richard Branson. Not exactly a shock this guy let Wall Street do whatever they wanted.
To the extent that Sanders supporters demonized Clinton as the equivalent of a Republican and made it possible for Trump to win, and still defend letting that happen, they still deserve scorn. To the extent that they still behave as if the whole Wasserman Schultz issue was something worth weakening the party over, they still deserve mockery.
Populism is a dangerous tool in anyone’s hands and inevitably leads to extremism that must later be repaired. What we need is not a populism of the left but an effective message of rational liberal policy making. As well as a recognition by all in the left that politics is about what you can achieve under the circumstances and doing it smartly and effectively. And compromising where and when you need to do so.
It’s this kind of silly personalizing of issues that will continue to make the left hysterically ineffective. The fact that Obama went kitesurfing says nothing about what his intentions were as president or how effective he was.
As president, Obama was the most effective liberal in a generation. To the extent he fell well short of liberal goals is the fault of the entire left for failing to build political strength throughout the country at all levels.
Say Sanders had been elected president, an event I would have been perfectly happy to see. Even then I doubt he would have been more effective or even as effective as Obama at holding the lines against a Republican Congress.