February 26, 2016
Capital is Lord over all, but,
even in a globalized neoliberal world, elections sometimes have non-trivial
consequences. The ridiculously long election seasons that we Americans endure
when the White House is up for grabs can be consequential too.
There has been one humdinger
of a consequence already: the House of Bush has fallen, and all the money that
the plutocracy had poured into Jeb Bush’s coffers, technically the coffers of
the PACs supporting his candidacy, might just as well have been flushed down the
toilet! Hallelujah!
Perhaps there is a God, after
all.
Well, no so fast: the strange
goings on this election season seem more like the doings of the mischievous
gods of the mythologies of polytheistic religions. How else to explain the
success of that buffoonish Caudillo wannabe, Donald Trump? “Behold I am the
Donald, destroyer of the GOP!”
And does not the very
existence of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we
are playthings of mean-spirited divinities with uncanny powers and bizarre
senses of humor?
Remember too that, unlike the
Bushes, the Clintons are still with us. We must therefore also give the Devil
his due.
Notwithstanding the ravings of
liberal fear mongers on cable news channels, neither Trump nor any other
presently active Republican candidate stands a chance of winning the White
House this year; not unless God, the gods or the Devil Himself causes the moral
and intellectual level of the American electorate to fall off a cliff.
Therefore, the Clintons –
Hillary in particular — are the clearest and most present danger now.
***
By “Clintonism,” I mean
neoliberalism, combined with liberal imperialist foreign and military policies,
plus support for socially liberal domestic policies that most people already
favor.
The Clintons themselves are
also given to courting African American and Hispanic leaders, while neglecting,
and even harming, the constituencies they represent.
[…]
At first, I thought that the
Bernie Sanders campaign was a non-starter too – not because his anti-austerity
message wouldn’t be wildly popular, but because, for obvious reasons, he was an
unlikely rock star; and because the only way to defeat the Clinton juggernaut
was with rock star charisma and money. I was wrong; it turned out he has plenty
of both.
I was also wary of how Hillary
would play the “glass ceiling” card; I didn’t realize that the younger the
target audience, the less effective it would be.
And so, I thought, until
December or so, that if anybody had a chance to defeat Hillary on
anti-neoliberal grounds, it was Elizabeth Warren. But I was sure too –
correctly, it turns out – that she meant what she said when she said that she
wouldn’t run.
The situation was therefore
glum. A pointless electoral exercise was about to suck up all the political
air; and, in the end, we would be left with Hillary Clinton.
At that point, my view of Sanders’
candidacy resembled the thinking of the fox in the Aesop fable who, seeing that
he could not reach the grapes that he coveted, convinced himself that those
grapes were sour.
I was not the only one to go
sour grapes on Bernie; many others were doing the same; some still are.
The temptation was – and still
is – hard to resist because, in his case, sour grapes are so easy to spot.
Sanders’ “democratic socialism” – actually, old-fashioned New Deal-Great
Society liberalism – is better than Clintonian neoliberalism by orders of
magnitude, but his views on foreign and military policy are not much better
than the average Clintonite’s. Webb had him beat there. So did Ron
Paul; and, on a good day, even his son Rand did too.
But then, as the Iowa caucuses
and the New Hampshire primary came into view, Bernie’s prospects started to
look better and Hillary no longer seemed quite so inevitable. Money flowed into
the Sanders campaign – not from Super PACs or plutocrats but from ordinary
people. The sour grapes were becoming sweet again.
Even corporate media started
paying attention. Before December, they ignored Sanders almost as thoroughly as
they ignored Webb or as they currently ignore the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
But once it started to look
like Bernie could cause Hillary grief, the regime’s propagandists could no
longer pretend that his campaign wasn’t happening. Their pro-corporate ideology
didn’t change at all, but they could no longer ignore a story line that
promised to boost ratings, and therefore advertising revenue. In their world,
the bottom line is all.
The same thing had happened
with Trump months earlier. Media moguls didn’t care for him either – they still
don’t — but he has been a godsend for their bank accounts. Bernie could be too.
This has come to seem less
likely, however, after the Nevada caucuses and with the South Carolina primary
looming. The Clintons called in their chits, and the deep, institutional
Democratic Party has been more than happy to respond: Harry Reid, Jim Clyburn,
John Lewis, the whole sorry crew.
The result: Hillary “won” in
Nevada; not by a lot, but by enough for media pundits to say that Sanders has
lost momentum; “the Big Mo,” as the first George Bush famously called it.
Of course, it’s not over,
‘till it’s over; there could be major surprises still– especially if more
African Americans and Hispanics come to the realization that the Clintons are
not exactly on their side.
Don’t count on that, however.
Even if the grapes don’t start souring again, the Clintonite party, with corporate
media in tow, is ready and able to fight Bernie tooth and nail.
And so it is again looking
like Hillary, unloved and even unliked by nearly everyone falling in line
behind her, is the inevitable candidate – and therefore the inevitable
President as well.
A glum state of affairs
indeed!
***
It is not time, however, to
abandon all hope, or even to abandon hope in Bernie. Not yet.
Bernie’s prospects could
revive; and, even if he craps out, there are still ways to imagine Clintonism’s
demise.
No one knows yet how the deep,
institutional Republican Party will deal with Trump; it is not impossible that
what they do will cause him to bolt, taking his voters with him.
Neither is it impossible that
Michael Bloomberg will decide to run as an independent. If he does, it is hard
to see how Republican establishment types could prefer Marco Rubio or even John
Kasich to him. Many of them might therefore defect from the GOP as well.
Please, O God or gods or the
Devil, let it come to pass! The GOP “as we know it” is finished, thanks to
Trump, but if, in addition, the party splinters apart, its fall will be
magnificent to behold.
It would be nearly as
wonderful if the Democratic Party would fall apart too. But, unlike Trump,
Sanders will not bolt. That is unimaginable.
Indeed, a major problem with
his candidacy all along — right up there with his Clintonite foreign policy
views — has been that he is soft on Hillary. He has said, from Day One, that,
if and when the time comes, he’d back her a thousand percent. There is no
reason to doubt his word.
However, if some sizeable
chunk of his supporters would bolt nevertheless, all kinds of possibilities
would open up. Lesser evilists think that no greater disaster is imaginable. In
truth, however, nothing could be better – for the country and, given Hillary’s
warmongering predilections, for the world.
Having been Clintonized for so
long, the Democratic Party is probably by now beyond redemption. Let Bernie
try; and, if he succeeds, more power to him. But the chances are not only that
he won’t succeed, but that no one could. The Democratic Party has been part of
the problem for far too long to somehow become even a modest part of the
solution.
What could Sandersnistas sans
Bernie do on their own? The obvious answer is: join forces with the Greens.
The Green New Deal program
offers everything Bernie does and more; and Green foreign policy views are what
Bernie’s sour grapes critics, myself included, fault Bernie for not sharing.
But how to get from here to
there? That is what used to be called the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
The problem is that the Greens
are not now, and never have been, a pole of attraction in American politics. I
voted for Jill Stein, the Green candidate, in 2012, but whenever I tell anyone
who is not already interested in “third party” politics, the inevitable
response is “Jill who?” I would give a hundred to one odds that, if asked, this
is what many, if not most, of the people now “feeling the Bern” would say about
her today.
By running as a Democrat,
Sanders avoided that fate, notwithstanding the media’s determination to pretend
that his campaign didn’t exist. Had he not run as a Democrat, he could never
have gotten anywhere near to where he now is.
But there may be a limit to
what anyone, opposed to any significant part of the Clintonite agenda, can
accomplish, running as a Democrat.
Perhaps Sanders has reached
that limit already. I hope not; I hope that ever-wider swathes of the
electorate will still rally to his cause. The jury is still out.
But if and when the
institutional Party succeeds in running the Sandersnistas into a wall, how
wonderful it would be if Sanders’ supporters would turn away from the
Democratic Party altogether, and do for the Greens, what the Greens could never
do on their own. It is far more likely that they will fall into the Hillary
camp for lesser evil reasons, but what I am imagining is not out of the
question.
Perhaps my hopes are again
leading my imagination astray, as happened last spring when I reflected on the
merits of Jim Webb’s campaign for the nomination. Perhaps.
But remember, first, that
neither Trump nor any of the loony tunes competing against him stands a chance
of winning, even running against such an inept campaigner as Hillary Clinton.
The allegedly unelectable Bernie Sanders would be a more formidable opponent,
but the Republican brand is, by now, so damaged that even Hillary would be a
sure winner.
It won’t, but this ought to
make the lesser evil temptation less compelling than it would otherwise be.
There is another consideration
that ought to have a similar effect, but won’t: that it is not as clear as is
widely assumed that, running against Trump, Hillary Clinton would actually be
the lesser evil.
It goes without saying that
Trump’s express views on Muslims and Hispanics put him beyond the pale –
whether or not he really believe what he says. I doubt that he does – I think
that he is only working his marks – but it hardly matters. A vote for Trump is
a vote for unmitigated vileness.
However, on many pertinent
issues – among others, coddling banksters and corporate profiteers, trade
policy, overseas interventions, job creation through public works, health care,
the provision of social services, and even U.S. policy towards Israel and
Palestine – Trump’s views, compared to Hillary’s, are not all that bad.
Again, this doesn’t trump
Trump’s racism, nativism and Islamophobia; not by any means. But it does
provide yet another reason why even the most fretful lesser evilists should
realize that it would not be quite as awful as they think if, running against
the Donald, Hillary per impossibile were actually to lose.
Were Sandersnistas and Greens
to join together, the American political scene would be a far, far better
place.
But because Sanders still has
a chance, and because, despite everything, he is a force to be reckoned with in
national politics while the Green Party is practically unknown, the time for
that is not now.
However, if and when Sanders
gives up and folds his campaign into Clinton’s, the time will be right as can
be. We will have nothing to lose but the Clintons and the political
culture they have foisted upon us.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior
Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE
AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL
KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in
political philosophy. His most recent book is In
Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor
(philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor
(philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a
contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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