Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Democrats Have No Soul: The Clintons, Neoliberalism and How the
'People's Party' Lost Its Way
________________________________________
The Democrats Have No Soul: The Clintons, Neoliberalism and How the
'People's Party' Lost Its Way
By Anis Shivani [1] / Salon [2]
April 13, 2016
Looking beyond the daily tussle between Donald J. Trump and the Republican
Party, or Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party, let's consider the larger
historical picture to see what the current election campaign tells us about
the state of the two major political parties and their future.
Over the last forty years both major political parties have been in a state
of terminal decline for a number of reasons, primarily the ideological
contradictions each has developed quite in sync with the other, driven by
the same economic trends. Both are in a death spiral at the moment, but this
being America, where political accountability is not as rapid or conclusive
as in Europe, it's likely that they will continue in more or less their
existing forms for the foreseeable future, further deepening the crisis of
legitimacy. Whatever the realities about their loss of credibility, we are
not likely to hear an announcement anytime soon that the Democratic or
Republican parties are dead, having ceased to serve the respective functions
for which they accumulated much legitimacy at different points in the
twentieth century.
It may seem, with stronger party identification over the last couple of
decades, that the parties are stronger than ever, but this would be
misleading on several counts. The fact most frequently cited in support of
the parties' strength is increased polarity in Congress, where in recent
decades members of each party have moved farther toward the extremes, which
means less bipartisan consensus [3]. The electorate has sharply divided,
with left and right divisions more pronounced, amidst the now familiar
phenomenon of the red state/blue state split which first became prominently
visible in the 2000 election.
But it would be a mistake to confuse ideological polarity with party
loyalty. In Congress, members have no choice but to support the party
closest to their ideological leanings, and likewise for the populace at
large [4]. Third parties have had a difficult time getting off the ground in
America-what should have developed into a breakaway anti-corporate party
after the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 and Ralph Nader's candidacy in 2000
never happened-so the lack of party choice at the national level creates the
illusion of strong party support.
The last time the establishment-both Republican and Democratic-publicly
bemoaned [5] the loss of legitimacy for government, which included the state
of the parties, was in the 1970s. This was a persistent theme throughout
that decade, after the landslide McGovern defeat in 1972, and the ouster of
President Nixon in 1974. An impression was perpetuated by the elites that
the U.S. was on the run against communism on all continents. After the 1973
oil embargo, and the stagflation that lasted throughout the decade,
Keynesian policy-the glue that had held the New Deal coalition together for
decades- swiftly unraveled. The crisis was deep and sustained, both
domestically and globally, and the parties and their allied establishments
seemed to have their days numbered.
Bizarre and illogical compromises began occurring at that time to preserve
the sanctity of the parties, and of the narrow liberal-conservative
identification, awkward arrangements that are bearing full fruit only today.
On the Democratic side, President Carter began nudging the party in the
direction of corporate, free trade, tight monetarist policies that were
later to find their most optimistic rendition during Bill Clinton's
administration. The recession of the early 1980s, which coincided with
President Reagan's first years, was actually launched by Fed chairman Paul
Volcker under a Democratic president. The invasion of Afghanistan by the
Soviet Union led the Democratic party down a renewed path of
militarism-although during the 1970s and 1980s often by proxy means rather
than direct intervention-that reached a crisis point in the late 1990s and
early 2000s.
But all this provided only a patchwork solution to the Democratic party's
crisis of legitimacy. Was it a pro-corporate (neoliberal) or pro-labor (New
Deal) party? The actual tendency was for the party to move firmly in the
former direction, while escalating rhetorical claims for the rights of
cultural minorities, at the same time as the Republican party moved swiftly
toward a neoconservative solution to its own crisis. Meanwhile, the
Democrats never really addressed the popular roots of dissatisfaction: in a
global economy with more dispersed power, both economic and political, how
was the standard of living of the American middle-class to be maintained?
The huge popularity of Bernie Sanders on the left today speaks to precisely
this dilemma, fundamentally unaddressed through four decades of deceit and
illusion to maintain elite power, as inequality continuously rose in that
period of time, the middle class became ever more diminished, and real
political power became confined to a vanishingly small elite group.
The Republican establishment, over the last forty years, pursued a parallel,
and often intersecting (especially in times of war and recession), path as
the Democrats. Although Ronald Reagan didn't make it all the way in 1976,
because the wounds from Nixon's ouster were still too raw, their own
patchwork coalition-nationalist and militarist, beholden to the myth of the
free market and personal responsibility, and committed to pulling back the
hard-won social and economic rights of the minorities and the poor-proved to
be a winning one for a long time.
It meant that the Republican elites had to put up with a lot of sound and
fury about cultural issues like abortion (to feed the evangelical beast),
while having a free hand to accumulate the same kind of power, economic and
political, within an increasingly smaller elite's exclusive grasp as was the
case with the Democrats.
In time, particularly with Bill Clinton's "new democrat" retreat from what
remained of the New Deal commitment, the gap between the two establishments
narrowed, often to the point of invisibility. Think, for example, of the
merger of sensibilities right after 9/11, when Democrats and Republicans
unified around reneging on civil liberties and authorizing illegal actions
in war and at detention sites. The same unification of the elites occurred
in the prelude to the Iraq war, and in the aftermath of the financial
collapse.
Barack Obama started off being open to a "grand bargain" to further deplete
the remaining social safety net in the name of fiscal responsibility, and
one can expect Hillary Clinton (like Jeb Bush, had he been the nominee) to
be on the hunt for similar grand bargains. Each crisis makes the uniformity
between the parties manifest, which riles up the populist base on either
side to even greater degrees of frustration.
Trump's heresy is to point out, as he did in a recent debate, that the Iraq
war was based on lies, and that George W. Bush did not keep us safe. These
are obvious facts, but they are not uttered in Republican elite circles. Jeb
Bush, as a result of the truth-telling, and the capacity of the failing
middle class to see through the establishment's fog of confusion, stood
discredited, as is increasingly the case with Hillary Clinton, whose every
defense of Bill Clinton's punitive neoliberal policies on crime and welfare
and civil liberties makes her husband's administration transparent as
thesordid hodgepodge of concessions [6] to corporate hegemony that it was.
The Republican party can no longer keep its disaffected constituents under
control either; under various guises-the silent majority, the Reagan
Democrats, the Tea Party, and now the Trumpheads-they have been making their
presence felt again and again, though for four decades the party has been
able to keep diverting the subject, particularly with national security
anxieties. Likewise, the Democrats cannot keep their old faithful on the
reservation, who also keep making their anti-corporate sentiments felt,
mostly recently with the Occupy movement and the Sanders upsurge.
They are the same ones who trusted that Obama would weaken the corporate
stronghold, but were quickly disillusioned when he did no such thing; and
the ones supporting Trump are generally the same kind of people who went
with Ross Perot in an earlier time as he raised hell about NAFTA's impact on
American industrial jobs, or with Pat Buchanan as he stoked white
nationalist resentments.
I suspect that if the half of the population that doesn't vote were to do
so, most of them would fall in line with either Trump or Sanders; these are
the ones who are so disillusioned, or disempowered, that they do not even
bother to participate. Both parties have long since left them. In this sense
too, the statistics cited on behalf of strong party identification, or
ideological polarization along strict party lines, are illusionary.
Again and again, the establishment has been able to paper over the
underlying crisis of legitimacy with artful means designed to hoodwink
people. Reagan's morning in America, Bill Clinton's new economy, George
Bush's war on terrorism, Obama's hope and change, and on it goes, with what
would have been-and perhaps still will be-Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz's new
social alignment (a further strengthening of the neoliberal wise on what
little remains of freedom in America, with a theological veneer in the case
of Cruz or rhetorical multiculturalism in the case of Clinton, but with the
same overall effect).
This time, however, the people, both on the Democratic and Republican sides,
can see through the strategy to divert attention from the hollowness of
American economic and cultural life. It's still a strong bet that the
establishment-outmaneuvering Trump and Sanders through the arcane
undemocratic operations of delegate allocation-will pull through, for yet
another eight years of war and economic misery and curtailment of freedom.
The crisis will only fester with more malevolent outpourings slated for the
future, until perhaps someone even more dictatorial than Trump comes along.
Had the elites chosen to be more democratic thirty or forty or twenty years
ago, both parties would have naturally evolved and reshaped themselves in
accord with shifting social and economic realities. Liberalism and
conservatism, in their authentic manifestations, would have continued
fighting the good fight, rather than the situation that has developed, where
economic anxiety is continually suppressed and allowed to manifest only in
twisted movements that have little chance of accomplishing any objectives
given the present distribution of power.
It is noteworthy that a great many among America's intellectual elite
support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, offering standard neoliberal
justifications, whereas those outside elite intellectual circles are more
likely to support Sanders; likewise with Trump and his antagonists and
supporters. What the establishment will not do is take either of them
seriously; meaning that they will not, as they haven't for forty years,
acknowledge the concerns of the constituencies they are supposed to
represent, and direct the very real anxieties felt on all parts of the
political spectrum toward positive resolutions good for the country and for
the rest of the world.
Anis Shivani is the author of several books of fiction, poetry, and
criticism, including, most recently, My Tranquil War and Other Poems [7].
His novel Karachi Raj [8](HarperCollins/Fourth Estate) was released this
summer. His next book is the poetry collection Whatever Speaks on Behalf of
Hashish [9], out in October.
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [10]
[11]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/democrats-have-no-soul-clintons-neolib
eralism-and-how-peoples-party-lost-its-way
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/anis-shivani
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/04/14/how-congress-beca
me-more-partisan-over-time-in-four-charts.
[4]
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
[5] http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
[6]
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bill-clinton-defends-hillary-superpredat
ors-comment-article-1.2592451
[7] http://books.nyq.org/title/mytranquilwar
[8]
http://www.amazon.com/Karachi-Raj-Anis-Shivani/dp/9351160815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U
TF8&qid=1442350624&sr=8-1&keywords=karachi+raj
[9]
http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/new-releases/whatever-speaks-on-behal
f-of-hashish-by-anis-shivani-424/
[10] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Democrats Have No
Soul: The Clintons, Neoliberalism and How the 'People's
Party' Lost Its Way
[11] http://www.alternet.org/
[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Democrats Have No Soul: The Clintons, Neoliberalism and How the
'People's Party' Lost Its Way
The Democrats Have No Soul: The Clintons, Neoliberalism and How the
'People's Party' Lost Its Way
By Anis Shivani [1] / Salon [2]
April 13, 2016
Looking beyond the daily tussle between Donald J. Trump and the Republican
Party, or Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party, let's consider the larger
historical picture to see what the current election campaign tells us about
the state of the two major political parties and their future.
Over the last forty years both major political parties have been in a state
of terminal decline for a number of reasons, primarily the ideological
contradictions each has developed quite in sync with the other, driven by
the same economic trends. Both are in a death spiral at the moment, but this
being America, where political accountability is not as rapid or conclusive
as in Europe, it's likely that they will continue in more or less their
existing forms for the foreseeable future, further deepening the crisis of
legitimacy. Whatever the realities about their loss of credibility, we are
not likely to hear an announcement anytime soon that the Democratic or
Republican parties are dead, having ceased to serve the respective functions
for which they accumulated much legitimacy at different points in the
twentieth century.
It may seem, with stronger party identification over the last couple of
decades, that the parties are stronger than ever, but this would be
misleading on several counts. The fact most frequently cited in support of
the parties' strength is increased polarity in Congress, where in recent
decades members of each party have moved farther toward the extremes, which
means less bipartisan consensus [3]. The electorate has sharply divided,
with left and right divisions more pronounced, amidst the now familiar
phenomenon of the red state/blue state split which first became prominently
visible in the 2000 election.
But it would be a mistake to confuse ideological polarity with party
loyalty. In Congress, members have no choice but to support the party
closest to their ideological leanings, and likewise for the populace at
large [4]. Third parties have had a difficult time getting off the ground in
America-what should have developed into a breakaway anti-corporate party
after the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 and Ralph Nader's candidacy in 2000
never happened-so the lack of party choice at the national level creates the
illusion of strong party support.
The last time the establishment-both Republican and Democratic-publicly
bemoaned [5] the loss of legitimacy for government, which included the state
of the parties, was in the 1970s. This was a persistent theme throughout
that decade, after the landslide McGovern defeat in 1972, and the ouster of
President Nixon in 1974. An impression was perpetuated by the elites that
the U.S. was on the run against communism on all continents. After the 1973
oil embargo, and the stagflation that lasted throughout the decade,
Keynesian policy-the glue that had held the New Deal coalition together for
decades- swiftly unraveled. The crisis was deep and sustained, both
domestically and globally, and the parties and their allied establishments
seemed to have their days numbered.
Bizarre and illogical compromises began occurring at that time to preserve
the sanctity of the parties, and of the narrow liberal-conservative
identification, awkward arrangements that are bearing full fruit only today.
On the Democratic side, President Carter began nudging the party in the
direction of corporate, free trade, tight monetarist policies that were
later to find their most optimistic rendition during Bill Clinton's
administration. The recession of the early 1980s, which coincided with
President Reagan's first years, was actually launched by Fed chairman Paul
Volcker under a Democratic president. The invasion of Afghanistan by the
Soviet Union led the Democratic party down a renewed path of
militarism-although during the 1970s and 1980s often by proxy means rather
than direct intervention-that reached a crisis point in the late 1990s and
early 2000s.
But all this provided only a patchwork solution to the Democratic party's
crisis of legitimacy. Was it a pro-corporate (neoliberal) or pro-labor (New
Deal) party? The actual tendency was for the party to move firmly in the
former direction, while escalating rhetorical claims for the rights of
cultural minorities, at the same time as the Republican party moved swiftly
toward a neoconservative solution to its own crisis. Meanwhile, the
Democrats never really addressed the popular roots of dissatisfaction: in a
global economy with more dispersed power, both economic and political, how
was the standard of living of the American middle-class to be maintained?
The huge popularity of Bernie Sanders on the left today speaks to precisely
this dilemma, fundamentally unaddressed through four decades of deceit and
illusion to maintain elite power, as inequality continuously rose in that
period of time, the middle class became ever more diminished, and real
political power became confined to a vanishingly small elite group.
The Republican establishment, over the last forty years, pursued a parallel,
and often intersecting (especially in times of war and recession), path as
the Democrats. Although Ronald Reagan didn't make it all the way in 1976,
because the wounds from Nixon's ouster were still too raw, their own
patchwork coalition-nationalist and militarist, beholden to the myth of the
free market and personal responsibility, and committed to pulling back the
hard-won social and economic rights of the minorities and the poor-proved to
be a winning one for a long time.
It meant that the Republican elites had to put up with a lot of sound and
fury about cultural issues like abortion (to feed the evangelical beast),
while having a free hand to accumulate the same kind of power, economic and
political, within an increasingly smaller elite's exclusive grasp as was the
case with the Democrats.
In time, particularly with Bill Clinton's "new democrat" retreat from what
remained of the New Deal commitment, the gap between the two establishments
narrowed, often to the point of invisibility. Think, for example, of the
merger of sensibilities right after 9/11, when Democrats and Republicans
unified around reneging on civil liberties and authorizing illegal actions
in war and at detention sites. The same unification of the elites occurred
in the prelude to the Iraq war, and in the aftermath of the financial
collapse.
Barack Obama started off being open to a "grand bargain" to further deplete
the remaining social safety net in the name of fiscal responsibility, and
one can expect Hillary Clinton (like Jeb Bush, had he been the nominee) to
be on the hunt for similar grand bargains. Each crisis makes the uniformity
between the parties manifest, which riles up the populist base on either
side to even greater degrees of frustration.
Trump's heresy is to point out, as he did in a recent debate, that the Iraq
war was based on lies, and that George W. Bush did not keep us safe. These
are obvious facts, but they are not uttered in Republican elite circles. Jeb
Bush, as a result of the truth-telling, and the capacity of the failing
middle class to see through the establishment's fog of confusion, stood
discredited, as is increasingly the case with Hillary Clinton, whose every
defense of Bill Clinton's punitive neoliberal policies on crime and welfare
and civil liberties makes her husband's administration transparent as
thesordid hodgepodge of concessions [6] to corporate hegemony that it was.
The Republican party can no longer keep its disaffected constituents under
control either; under various guises-the silent majority, the Reagan
Democrats, the Tea Party, and now the Trumpheads-they have been making their
presence felt again and again, though for four decades the party has been
able to keep diverting the subject, particularly with national security
anxieties. Likewise, the Democrats cannot keep their old faithful on the
reservation, who also keep making their anti-corporate sentiments felt,
mostly recently with the Occupy movement and the Sanders upsurge.
They are the same ones who trusted that Obama would weaken the corporate
stronghold, but were quickly disillusioned when he did no such thing; and
the ones supporting Trump are generally the same kind of people who went
with Ross Perot in an earlier time as he raised hell about NAFTA's impact on
American industrial jobs, or with Pat Buchanan as he stoked white
nationalist resentments.
I suspect that if the half of the population that doesn't vote were to do
so, most of them would fall in line with either Trump or Sanders; these are
the ones who are so disillusioned, or disempowered, that they do not even
bother to participate. Both parties have long since left them. In this sense
too, the statistics cited on behalf of strong party identification, or
ideological polarization along strict party lines, are illusionary.
Again and again, the establishment has been able to paper over the
underlying crisis of legitimacy with artful means designed to hoodwink
people. Reagan's morning in America, Bill Clinton's new economy, George
Bush's war on terrorism, Obama's hope and change, and on it goes, with what
would have been-and perhaps still will be-Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz's new
social alignment (a further strengthening of the neoliberal wise on what
little remains of freedom in America, with a theological veneer in the case
of Cruz or rhetorical multiculturalism in the case of Clinton, but with the
same overall effect).
This time, however, the people, both on the Democratic and Republican sides,
can see through the strategy to divert attention from the hollowness of
American economic and cultural life. It's still a strong bet that the
establishment-outmaneuvering Trump and Sanders through the arcane
undemocratic operations of delegate allocation-will pull through, for yet
another eight years of war and economic misery and curtailment of freedom.
The crisis will only fester with more malevolent outpourings slated for the
future, until perhaps someone even more dictatorial than Trump comes along.
Had the elites chosen to be more democratic thirty or forty or twenty years
ago, both parties would have naturally evolved and reshaped themselves in
accord with shifting social and economic realities. Liberalism and
conservatism, in their authentic manifestations, would have continued
fighting the good fight, rather than the situation that has developed, where
economic anxiety is continually suppressed and allowed to manifest only in
twisted movements that have little chance of accomplishing any objectives
given the present distribution of power.
It is noteworthy that a great many among America's intellectual elite
support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, offering standard neoliberal
justifications, whereas those outside elite intellectual circles are more
likely to support Sanders; likewise with Trump and his antagonists and
supporters. What the establishment will not do is take either of them
seriously; meaning that they will not, as they haven't for forty years,
acknowledge the concerns of the constituencies they are supposed to
represent, and direct the very real anxieties felt on all parts of the
political spectrum toward positive resolutions good for the country and for
the rest of the world.
Anis Shivani is the author of several books of fiction, poetry, and
criticism, including, most recently, My Tranquil War and Other Poems [7].
His novel Karachi Raj [8](HarperCollins/Fourth Estate) was released this
summer. His next book is the poetry collection Whatever Speaks on Behalf of
Hashish [9], out in October.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [10]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[11]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/democrats-have-no-soul-clintons-neolib
eralism-and-how-peoples-party-lost-its-way
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/anis-shivani
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/04/14/how-congress-beca
me-more-partisan-over-time-in-four-charts.
[4]
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
[5] http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
[6]
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bill-clinton-defends-hillary-superpredat
ors-comment-article-1.2592451
[7] http://books.nyq.org/title/mytranquilwar
[8]
http://www.amazon.com/Karachi-Raj-Anis-Shivani/dp/9351160815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U
TF8&qid=1442350624&sr=8-1&keywords=karachi+raj
[9]
http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/new-releases/whatever-speaks-on-behal
f-of-hashish-by-anis-shivani-424/
[10] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Democrats Have No
Soul: The Clintons, Neoliberalism and How the 'People's
Party' Lost Its Way
[11] http://www.alternet.org/
[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
