I think the party leaders would scuttle the party before they let that happen.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, August 9, 2016 2:38 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] A Republican Workers' Party?
Taibbi writes: "The new Republicans would no longer be the party of
'business and the privileged,' but the protector of a disenfranchised
working class. This was unplanned. If it happens, it'll be a change that
takes place not because conservative leaders ever wanted it, but because
voters demanded it."
A Republican debate in Detroit, Michigan. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Images)
A Republican Workers' Party?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
09 August 16
Democratic incompetence has made the previously unthinkable possible:
Republicans are reimagining themselves as a labor party
A horrifying article appeared in The New York Times last week, entitled
"They Want Trump to Make the G.O.P. a Workers' Party."
In it, conservative intellectuals say they disavow Donald Trump, but also
see in his rise a reason to shift their party's focus.
The new Republicans would no longer be the party of "business and the
privileged," but the protector of a disenfranchised working class.
This was unplanned. If it happens, it'll be a change that takes place not
because conservative leaders ever wanted it, but because voters demanded it.
Basically, large numbers of working-class voters, particularly white
working-class voters, long ago abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of
the Republicans.
A few conservatives saw this coming. Chin-stroking New York Times columnist
Ross Douthat, whom Esquire's Charles Pierce once described as a
"god-bothering newsboy on his best day," along with National Review editor
Reihan Salam, claim they saw the writing on the wall.
In their 2008 book, Grand New Party, Douthat and Salam argued that the
Republicans needed to reshape themselves, and admitted "the policy elite of
the Republican Party" is "out of touch with the majority of Republican
voters."
They also noted, in a recent Times editorial, "A Cure for Trumpism," that
the Republican Party has "increasingly depended on mostly white
working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly
unresponsive to working-class voters' problems."
All of this soul-searching is happening now because the maniac Trump has
hijacked a portion of the Republican base and is driving it off an electoral
cliff. (He will clutch his own hand all the way down in the inevitable
Thelma & Louise crash ending.)
Republican propaganda for decades pushed magical-thinking concepts like
"trickle-down economics" that asked lower-income voters to accept present
sacrifices for theoretical bigger payoffs down the road.
Until this year, Republican voters mostly bought it. But Trump was their way
of telling their leaders they're done waiting. They want their piece of the
pie now, even if it means unleashing the Trumpinator to get it.
People have been conscious of the defection of working-class voters to the
Republican Party for years, but this has always been dismissed as the
consequence of skillfull propaganda. It's the What's the Matter With Kansas?
creation story, i.e., that the white working class has been hoodwinked into
going against its own economic interests thanks to cynical/backward appeals
to race, religion and culture.
But that isn't the whole story, as some leading Democrats are beginning to
realize. Joe Biden went on Morning Joe a few weeks ago and admitted that
"the Democratic Party over all hasn't spoken enough to [working-class
voters]," the "ordinary people busting their necks."
Biden's admission is a massive understatement. If we're going to be honest
about what's happened in the last 30 or 40 years, the new iteration of the
Democratic Party has embraced hocus-pocus neoliberal theory that is not much
different from trickle-down economics.
The Democratic Party leaders have been fervent believers in the
globalization religion since the late Eighties, when the braintrust at the
Democratic Leadership Council made a calculated decision to transform the
party from one that depended largely on unions for financial and logistical
support to one that embraced corporate objectives, in particular free trade.
When he signed NAFTA into law in 1993, Bill Clinton laid out a utopian
vision of how free trade would work. "We have the opportunity to remake the
world," he said, boldly.
More trade agreements, he said, would create a world that would not only be
more prosperous all over, but freer and more able to serve as a market for
our exports.
"We will press for workers in all countries to secure rights that we now
take for granted, to organize and earn a decent living," he said.
Critically, Clinton promised that free-trade agreements would emphasize new
environmental standards, would expand the rights of workers in signatory
countries, that we would not trade with countries that employed subsidies or
tariffs against us, and that displaced domestic workers would eventually see
gains after being retrained and redeployed for new jobs that would
eventually appear to replace the lost ones.
"To the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes,"
Clinton said, "the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too."
It was never articulated this way, exactly, but the basic promise of free
trade was that the American middle class would experience temporary losses
that over time would be balanced out by increased growth worldwide.
It was trickle-down economics, only repackaged with an international spin:
After a long trip around the world, the wealth eventually gets back to you.
Twenty-three years later, we see how all of this has turned out. There have
been some improvements in the economic condition of foreign workers.
But we never excluded politically oppressive regimes from free-trade deals,
never made sure that trade partners weren't also massive human rights
violators, never seriously worried about environmental enforcement. Mostly,
we just made cheap, un-free foreign labor available to Western
manufacturers.
Even a onetime die-hard NAFTA cheerleader like staunch Clinton supporter
Paul Krugman, who once compared free trade's critics to the
anti-evolutionist followers of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey
Trial, now admits that the case for "ever-freer" trade is a "scam":
"The elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest: false claims of
inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions!), vastly
exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of
protection, hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what
standard models actually predict."
Like Marxism, globalization is a borderless utopian religion. Its adherents
almost by definition have to reject advocacy for the citizens of one country
over another. Just as "Socialism in One Country" was an anathema to classic
Marxists, "prosperity in one country" is an anathema to globalists, no
matter what their politicians might say during election seasons.
If you bring up the destruction of the American middle class,
pro-globalization adherents will point to facts like the rising fortunes of
those hundreds of millions of Chinese workers who are now supposedly above
the World Bank definition of poverty, making more than $1.90 a day.
That those same workers still have virtually no rights or benefits and on
occasion have to be housed in factories with safety nets to keep them from
killing themselves at an astronomical rate is immaterial to True Believers.
They want even American voters to focus on the good news of incrementally
increased wages abroad, forgetting that American workers never signed up for
a plan to disenfranchise themselves so that workers in China or India could
earn a few quarters more per day. Moreover, they certainly didn't elect
leaders to push such policies.
The problem with all of this is that the Democrats went so far in the
direction of advocacy for the global religion that they made something as
idiotic as the rise of unabashed nativist Donald Trump possible.
Worse, Trump's rise will give the Globalist Faith Militant an automatic
argument for more time. They will decry any criticism of free trade or
globalization as racist Trumpism, and Trump is such a galactic jackass that
this will work, his vast inventory of offensive bleatings discrediting even
the legitimate economic concerns of his voters.
But expecting American politicians to advocate first and foremost for their
own constituents isn't isolationism. It's just rational self-interest, which
neoliberals only seem to disbelieve in when it pertains to labor. Moreover
we didn't call movements to disinvest from South Africa or the Soviet Union
"nativism." We called that idealism.
We haven't shown much of that in the last decades, as huge majorities of
Westerners buy cell phones, clothes and other products increasingly likely
to have been made by abused sweatshop workers or even children (like the
Indonesian eight-year-olds recently found harvesting tobacco sold to the
West).
As Krugman explained earlier this year, the question of what to do about any
of this is a very hard one. He even called the Bernie Sanders campaign "a
bit of a scam itself" because it hinted that anything at all can be done
about the vast inequities and injustices of globalization.
Krugman claimed the maze of trade agreements is so entrenched by now that
chaos would ensue from any attempt to undo them. A Trump might try, he said,
but only as part of a "reign of destruction on many fronts."
Maybe that's true, and maybe it isn't.
But to deny that something needs to be done, and to ask American voters to
keep having faith in this "we'll all see gains in the end" fairytale that so
far has very conspicuously only delivered gains to a tiny group of very
wealthy people in this country, will do nothing but drive more workers into
the Trump tent.
And maybe the next strongman those voters pick to lead them out of the
wilderness won't be quite as huge an idiot, or as suicidal a campaigner, as
Trump. Sooner or later, failing to deal with these questions is going to
come back and bite all of us.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
A Republican debate in Detroit, Michigan. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Images)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/a-republican-workers-party-w43
3295http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/a-republican-workers-party
-w433295
A Republican Workers' Party?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
09 August 16
Democratic incompetence has made the previously unthinkable possible:
Republicans are reimagining themselves as a labor party
horrifying article appeared in The New York Times last week, entitled "They
Want Trump to Make the G.O.P. a Workers' Party."
In it, conservative intellectuals say they disavow Donald Trump, but also
see in his rise a reason to shift their party's focus.
The new Republicans would no longer be the party of "business and the
privileged," but the protector of a disenfranchised working class.
This was unplanned. If it happens, it'll be a change that takes place not
because conservative leaders ever wanted it, but because voters demanded it.
Basically, large numbers of working-class voters, particularly white
working-class voters, long ago abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of
the Republicans.
A few conservatives saw this coming. Chin-stroking New York Times columnist
Ross Douthat, whom Esquire's Charles Pierce once described as a
"god-bothering newsboy on his best day," along with National Review editor
Reihan Salam, claim they saw the writing on the wall.
In their 2008 book, Grand New Party, Douthat and Salam argued that the
Republicans needed to reshape themselves, and admitted "the policy elite of
the Republican Party" is "out of touch with the majority of Republican
voters."
They also noted, in a recent Times editorial, "A Cure for Trumpism," that
the Republican Party has "increasingly depended on mostly white
working-class support, even as its policy agenda was increasingly
unresponsive to working-class voters' problems."
All of this soul-searching is happening now because the maniac Trump has
hijacked a portion of the Republican base and is driving it off an electoral
cliff. (He will clutch his own hand all the way down in the inevitable
Thelma & Louise crash ending.)
Republican propaganda for decades pushed magical-thinking concepts like
"trickle-down economics" that asked lower-income voters to accept present
sacrifices for theoretical bigger payoffs down the road.
Until this year, Republican voters mostly bought it. But Trump was their way
of telling their leaders they're done waiting. They want their piece of the
pie now, even if it means unleashing the Trumpinator to get it.
People have been conscious of the defection of working-class voters to the
Republican Party for years, but this has always been dismissed as the
consequence of skillfull propaganda. It's the What's the Matter With Kansas?
creation story, i.e., that the white working class has been hoodwinked into
going against its own economic interests thanks to cynical/backward appeals
to race, religion and culture.
But that isn't the whole story, as some leading Democrats are beginning to
realize. Joe Biden went on Morning Joe a few weeks ago and admitted that
"the Democratic Party over all hasn't spoken enough to [working-class
voters]," the "ordinary people busting their necks."
Biden's admission is a massive understatement. If we're going to be honest
about what's happened in the last 30 or 40 years, the new iteration of the
Democratic Party has embraced hocus-pocus neoliberal theory that is not much
different from trickle-down economics.
The Democratic Party leaders have been fervent believers in the
globalization religion since the late Eighties, when the braintrust at the
Democratic Leadership Council made a calculated decision to transform the
party from one that depended largely on unions for financial and logistical
support to one that embraced corporate objectives, in particular free trade.
When he signed NAFTA into law in 1993, Bill Clinton laid out a utopian
vision of how free trade would work. "We have the opportunity to remake the
world," he said, boldly.
More trade agreements, he said, would create a world that would not only be
more prosperous all over, but freer and more able to serve as a market for
our exports.
"We will press for workers in all countries to secure rights that we now
take for granted, to organize and earn a decent living," he said.
Critically, Clinton promised that free-trade agreements would emphasize new
environmental standards, would expand the rights of workers in signatory
countries, that we would not trade with countries that employed subsidies or
tariffs against us, and that displaced domestic workers would eventually see
gains after being retrained and redeployed for new jobs that would
eventually appear to replace the lost ones.
"To the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes,"
Clinton said, "the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too."
It was never articulated this way, exactly, but the basic promise of free
trade was that the American middle class would experience temporary losses
that over time would be balanced out by increased growth worldwide.
It was trickle-down economics, only repackaged with an international spin:
After a long trip around the world, the wealth eventually gets back to you.
Twenty-three years later, we see how all of this has turned out. There have
been some improvements in the economic condition of foreign workers.
But we never excluded politically oppressive regimes from free-trade deals,
never made sure that trade partners weren't also massive human rights
violators, never seriously worried about environmental enforcement. Mostly,
we just made cheap, un-free foreign labor available to Western
manufacturers.
Even a onetime die-hard NAFTA cheerleader like staunch Clinton supporter
Paul Krugman, who once compared free trade's critics to the
anti-evolutionist followers of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey
Trial, now admits that the case for "ever-freer" trade is a "scam":
"The elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest: false claims of
inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions!), vastly
exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of
protection, hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what
standard models actually predict."
Like Marxism, globalization is a borderless utopian religion. Its adherents
almost by definition have to reject advocacy for the citizens of one country
over another. Just as "Socialism in One Country" was an anathema to classic
Marxists, "prosperity in one country" is an anathema to globalists, no
matter what their politicians might say during election seasons.
If you bring up the destruction of the American middle class,
pro-globalization adherents will point to facts like the rising fortunes of
those hundreds of millions of Chinese workers who are now supposedly above
the World Bank definition of poverty, making more than $1.90 a day.
That those same workers still have virtually no rights or benefits and on
occasion have to be housed in factories with safety nets to keep them from
killing themselves at an astronomical rate is immaterial to True Believers.
They want even American voters to focus on the good news of incrementally
increased wages abroad, forgetting that American workers never signed up for
a plan to disenfranchise themselves so that workers in China or India could
earn a few quarters more per day. Moreover, they certainly didn't elect
leaders to push such policies.
The problem with all of this is that the Democrats went so far in the
direction of advocacy for the global religion that they made something as
idiotic as the rise of unabashed nativist Donald Trump possible.
Worse, Trump's rise will give the Globalist Faith Militant an automatic
argument for more time. They will decry any criticism of free trade or
globalization as racist Trumpism, and Trump is such a galactic jackass that
this will work, his vast inventory of offensive bleatings discrediting even
the legitimate economic concerns of his voters.
But expecting American politicians to advocate first and foremost for their
own constituents isn't isolationism. It's just rational self-interest, which
neoliberals only seem to disbelieve in when it pertains to labor. Moreover
we didn't call movements to disinvest from South Africa or the Soviet Union
"nativism." We called that idealism.
We haven't shown much of that in the last decades, as huge majorities of
Westerners buy cell phones, clothes and other products increasingly likely
to have been made by abused sweatshop workers or even children (like the
Indonesian eight-year-olds recently found harvesting tobacco sold to the
West).
As Krugman explained earlier this year, the question of what to do about any
of this is a very hard one. He even called the Bernie Sanders campaign "a
bit of a scam itself" because it hinted that anything at all can be done
about the vast inequities and injustices of globalization.
Krugman claimed the maze of trade agreements is so entrenched by now that
chaos would ensue from any attempt to undo them. A Trump might try, he said,
but only as part of a "reign of destruction on many fronts."
Maybe that's true, and maybe it isn't.
But to deny that something needs to be done, and to ask American voters to
keep having faith in this "we'll all see gains in the end" fairytale that so
far has very conspicuously only delivered gains to a tiny group of very
wealthy people in this country, will do nothing but drive more workers into
the Trump tent.
And maybe the next strongman those voters pick to lead them out of the
wilderness won't be quite as huge an idiot, or as suicidal a campaigner, as
Trump. Sooner or later, failing to deal with these questions is going to
come back and bite all of us.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
