As the primaries shuffle their
way across the republic toward the D-Day of Super Tuesday, it may be worth
recalling the political soil from which Democratic contestant Hillary Clinton
emerged. Not when she was a Goldwater conservative. Not when she was a
governor’s wife in Little Rock.
Not when she arrived in the
Senate or in Barack Obama’s Cabinet. But rather when she rode her husband’s
quisling charm into the Oval Office. She frequently seconded Bill’s opinions
and—like any good spouse in a political marriage—campaigned on his behalf. That
was the key moment when the Democratic Party finally secured its special place
in hell, nestled inside the devil’s pantheon of world-historical sellouts.
But before it can climb atop
its fiery plinth, it must die. Now, as a party of the people, the Democratic
Party is already interred. But it has found new life as a party of the one
percent. And looking at it now, one has to wonder—has it ever been healthier?
That depends on whether Hillary can connive her way into office and secure the
black flag of neoliberalism for the party. You know, that banner her husband
hoisted over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the misty dawn of our
demise?
Nowhere Else To Go
The reason we breathe the
political air we do has everything to do with the presidency of Bill Clinton.
He was the corporate revolutionary that brought the Democratic Party back from
the irrelevance of Mondale and Dukakis. After 12 years of Republican elitism
masquerading as supply-side wisdom, Clinton’s genius was to simply become a
Republican in Democratic cloth, guiding
the party of labor into the cigar-scented embrace of big capital. He adopted
the neoliberal strategies of the Reagan era, recasting them in the counterfeit
clothing of progressive populism.
Rather than challenge the
power of money in politics, he embraced it. His strategy of triangulation
proved the perfect model for unlocking conservative streams of wealth and
simultaneously putting the conservative party on their heels. Imagine a simple
triangle. On the bottom left is a liberal opinion. On the bottom right is a
conservative opinion. At the apex of the triangle—well, that is your policy.
Smack in-between the progressive left and the conservative right. That meant,
in practice, moving right on key issues. In response, the Republicans have
carved out a new homestead along the frontier of anti-government extremism. No
surprise, really. After all, here was some Arkansas arriviste pilfering their
positions and passing them off as his own. Clinton lifted their ideas, pimped
out his platform to their donors, and somehow convinced his base not to burn
down the Democratic Party. How else could they react?
In the end, this Janus-faced
Machiavelli had it both ways. On one hand, he maintained a rhetoric of empathy
for the poor, the blue-collar worker, the paycheck-to-paycheck laborer, and
never hesitated to express his sympathies on his whistle-stop tours. Tears
crept into the crow-footed corners of faces in the crowd. He felt our pain. On
the other hand—or with the other hand—he palmed check after check from large
corporate interests, assuring them, in deed if not word, that his rhetoric was
little more than a ruse to retain the progressive vote.
In office, Clinton pursued
Republican objectives. He launched a prison-building empire, gutted welfare,
deregulated the financial markets, produced astonishing tax
breaks for the rich, passed a trade bill that destroyed American
jobs and wrecked Mexican agribusiness, and decided there was no good reason to
maintain a wall between the unscrupulous capitalist investor and unwitting
depositor. After all, as the Nineties refrain went, banks can police
themselves. All the while, of course, he continued to peddle his sincerest
sympathies to Main Street.
America hasn’t been the same
since. Not least because the very deregulatory policies Clinton approved gutted
the global economy in 2008. From an electoral perspective, the Democrats need
only shade slightly left of the Republican insurgents to appear like
even-keeled moderates and win the liberal vote. This is the platform and plan
of Hillary Clinton, too. Another neoliberal corporate presidency. Obviously the
Clintons think their strategy can still prevail. After all, as Bill Clinton
gleefully said of disillusioned progressives he knew would eventually return to
the fold, “They have nowhere else to go.”
Rising Xenophobia
This is also why today vulgar
populists like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz prey upon the thinly veiled prejudices
of their nervous congregations. They tell terrible tales around the nightly
campfire, conjuring spine-chilling scenarios that read like passages from the
Book of Revelation. Those fears were nicely approximated by writer Rian Malan
who, in Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums, described the fear of Afrikaners in South
Africa’s Cape Town after the notorious Pass Laws were dismantled in the
mid-Eighties:
“…it was if a distant dam had
broken, allowing a mass of desperate and hopeful humanity to come flooding over
the mountains and spread out across the Cape Flats. They came at the rate of
eighty, ninety families a day, and built homes with their bare hands, using
wooden poles, tin sheeting, bits and pieces of trash rescued from landfills and
plastic garbage bags to keep out the rain. Within two years, the sand dunes had
vanished under an enormous sea of shacks and shanties, as densely packed as a
mediaeval city, and populated by fantastic characters—bootleggers, gangsters,
prophets, Rastafarians, gun dealers and marijuana czars, plus almost a million
ordinary working people.”
This is the apocalypse that
has schemers like Cruz and Trump promising a new separation wall along our
southern border—to the furious applause of jittery nativists. It’s why rightwing
nationalists are setting up encampments across
Europe. Anti-immigration is de rigueur, and the right predictably uses
immigrants as scapegoats for the crimes of their party.
A Special Place In History?
Against this backdrop of
bi-partisan desolation, the Democrats’ first-woman-in-the-white-house narrative
rings hollow, especially so coming from a Clinton. Because some Millennial
women are stumping for Sanders, she had to unearth veteran supplicant Madeleine
Albright to rehearse her bona fides. Albright promptly condemned to hell women
that didn’t help each other, i.e., elect Mrs. Clinton. But would Hillary really
be a boon for her gender? Boomer women seem to think so, but should it be any
truer for women than for African-Americans? Did black people prosper under
Barack Obama? The great unifier presided over the worst economic period for
African-Americans in recent history. Thanks to predatory lending, mortgage
fraud, and other innovative forms of white-collar crime, black people lost half
their net worth from the Great Recession. After the social advances of recent
decades—endlessly enumerated in the corporate media—black people still on
average have a handful of pennies for every crisp dollar in the calf-skinned
wallet of a white man. (A 2014 PEW study
had the average white household worth almost $142,000 and the average black
household worth $11,000, the worst inequality between the two in a quarter
century. Not to mention blacks have a higher poverty rate, higher unemployment,
lower workforce participation, and plenty more.)
In 2008 some 95 percent of
voting African-Americans cast votes for Barack Obama. One of them was Cornel
West. His support had given Obama a patina of black progressivism that let the
Illinois Senator affect a more appealing image before his base. Once in office,
he gave nothing back. West ended up anointing Obama as Wall Street’s “black
mascot.” Harsh but richly deserved. There’s one photo of the two that is
particularly compelling. In it West reaches across a swarm of Obama sycophants
to clutch the President’s hand. In West’s face one might read a poignant mix of
honest enthusiasm, a kind of brittle anxiety, and the idolatrous glow of the
duped. Holding West’s outstretched hand, Obama maintains his cool, but turns
his head as though admonishing the too-hopeful West not to make “the perfect
the enemy of the good.” In like manner, one can almost hear Hillary’s own
shrill falsetto brushing aside Bernie Sanders’ naïve idealism and reminding the
world that she’s “a progressive who gets things done.”
Getting Things Done
But gets what done, exactly?
Positive change for women? Stable free-market democracies across the Arab
world? To find out, one can consult Hillary’s record as Secretary of State,
recently tabulated by Diana Johnston in her excellent Queen of Chaos.
Then ask yourself, was Hillary a good Secretary of State for women? Are women
better off in the now-dismembered Libya? Are they better off in the bloody
steppes of Syria? In the amputated statelets of Iraq? The former senator had a
hand in all of these cataclysmic injustices visited on poorly defended
populations. Imagine the fury of powerless brown-skinned Arab mothers watching
this gloating child of white privilege rehearse her moral certainties on the
international news.
Moreover, Hillary has shown
little understanding that her work as Secretary of State was a catastrophe for
the Middle East. Her public statements seem to be a combination of mendacity,
compartmentalization, and ignorance. For instance, she implied
the Obama administration lacked an “organizing principle.” She knows very well
it has an organizing principle, based on the neoconservative roadmap crafted by
Paul Wolfowitz and others back in Bill Clinton’s heyday. But this was nothing
more than political expediency. (Destabilized by the Sanders campaign, she now
sees the Obama era as a crutch rather than a liability.) Clinton also said not
intervening earlier in Syria led to the rise of ISIS. It may be possible she
believes this, having fully absorbed the appropriate talking points for a
secretary of state of an aggressive expansionist empire. But reality is the
exact opposite—our intervention produced the expansion of ISIS power and the
broader calamity of the proxy conflict.
Johnston also provides a
succinct description of the neoliberal program that Hillary fronts across the
domestic and international arena, as did her beloved Bill:
“…a world tied together by the
universal penetration of financial markets in every sector of each national
economy, thus allowing international capital to shape production, trade, and
services via their own investment choices.
This has radical political
implications. In their efforts to attract mobile capital, nation-states are
expected to lower dissuasive taxes and provide widened investment possibilities
by privatization even of the most vital national activities, such as education
and basic utilities. This leaves the national government without resources to
ensure public welfare, to develop industry and farming, to redistribute wealth
through public services. The gap between rich and poor widens radically.”
Radical Privilege
Hillary and her clan of faux
progressives represent an isthmus of privilege in a proletarian sea. If she
wins, Hillary will doubtless confirm a few piteous maxims about the human race:
any color, creed, or gender is capable of being as cruel as any other and, in
the end, greed is our greatest vice.
Celebrated author Ta Nihisi
Coates, who penned the insightful Between the World and Me and now graphs for The
Atlantic, gets to the heart of the problem in a recent essay
on Hillary. He points out what real radicalism is, in contrast to Clinton’s
“evasion.”
“So ‘divisive’ was Abraham
Lincoln’s embrace of abolition that it got him shot in the head. So ‘divisive’
was Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of civil rights that it fractured the Democratic
Party. So ‘divisive’ was Ulysses S. Grant’s defense of black civil rights and
war upon the Klan, that American historians spent the better part of a century
destroying his reputation. So ‘divisive’ was Martin Luther King Jr. that his
own government bugged him, harassed him, and demonized him until he was dead.”
Risk is not a term in the
Clinton clan’s tiresome lexicon of accommodation and aggrandizement. Hillary
would rather sit on her isthmus, sipping a cocktail in the sun, watching her
imperial charges bludgeon their way across Eurasia. There’s a certain sense of
superiority that comes from duping the masses. Just ask Bill.
Or ask Henry Kissinger, of
whom Hillary wrote so affably in a recent review
of the war criminal’s latest parcel of wisdom. Now 92, Henry doesn’t mince
words. Just close your eyes and listen to that soothing baritone rippling with
gravitas remind us that, “It’s not a matter of what is true that counts, but
what is perceived to be true.” You couldn’t sum up the Clinton political
strategy any better. To be sure, if Hillary wins the nomination, it will be
because we have read our Krugman and our Brooks, and have endorsed the lie that
it isn’t meet to ask for what we want, but rather to settle for an ersatz
replica of something we once believed in. Rather than waste a vote on the
“unelectable,” we ought to elect a charmless political lifer with a handbag of
bootless pledges and a mountain of dirty money.
Jason Hirthler is a veteran of
the communications industry and author of The
Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City
and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
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