Sorry if I scared you, kids, but I’m talking Walter Mondale here, not George Orwell. It’s a sad commentary on contemporary liberalism that going “left” in 2015 consists of embracing the Democratic platform of 1984, the year in which the Democratic presidential ticket won precisely one state, the worst drubbing in Democratic history.
Hillary’s domestic policy—denouncing free trade and charter schools as work of the devil—can best be described as “union suck-up.” I know that Hillary is being driven “left” by Bernie Sanders and is trying to win enough endorsements from the Democratic establishment that she’ll be able to roll over Sanders once she gets past the all-white electorates in Iowa and New Hampshire, but I hope someone in the Clinton campaign has noticed that in 2013 only 11.3% of the American workforce was unionized, the lowest since 1916. Just for the record, back in 1983, 20.1% of American workers were union members, which didn’t help Walter much in 1984.
I also hope someone is aware that 1) free trade is an essential element of a prosperous global economy that benefits everyone, not just American workers1 and 2) you are not doing America’s kids a favor by assuring teachers that they’ll be able to go back to the good old days when they didn’t have to worry about, you know, competition and, you know, being judged on their performance as, you know, teachers!
Of course, Hillary also has a foreign policy: I love Israel! By embracing Israel so fervently, Hillary is essentially committing herself to an “interventionist” policy in the Middle East that is likely to be even more costly, and less productive—and more counter-productive—than the Obama Administration’s bloody bumbling.2
So what’s a good Democrat to do? Well, one can always pray for cynicism.
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The case for the “Trans-Pacific Partnership”, which Hillary is opposing, is not overwhelming, but neoliberal economist Brad DeLong does a good job pointing out the weaknesses in fellow neoliberal economist Paul Krugman’s arguments against the TPP. As Brad says, Krugman’s principal complaint against the Obama Administration’s championing of the TPP is that it alienates the unions. ↩︎
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The always passionate and often accurate Glenn Greenwald delineates Hillary’s numerous links to the “liberal neocon” establishment. Even though there’s substantial evidence that younger Jews (and some older ones) are moving away from that AIPAC/Netanyahu view of the world, at 69, Hillary isn’t listening. ↩︎
