Thanks to author Benjamin Studebaker for his thoughtful piece on Bernie vs Hillary, some of which I share below after a couple of comments on our ongoing “war” here at DK.
It’s hard not to notice that some Clinton supporters here on DK are getting more and more belligerent towards us Sanders supporters. Some Sanders supporters continue to write wonderful diaries that help keep us abreast of our candidate’s activities without further annoying the Clinton supporters. While, others, like me, have been running around “with our hair on fire”, surely continuing to annoy KOS no end for not buckling to his bizarre Ides of KOS dictums intended to quiet us down.
We’re told its all over for Bernie and for our hopes and dreams for what we believe will be a better country. Why are we continuing to fight on for our candidate? It’s not just our candidate, dear people. It’s to fight to get us back to a much fairer New Deal set of policies that once rescued the working people of this country from the Great Depression over 85 years ago. IN 2008 THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY EXPERIENCED THE GREAT RECESSION WHICH CAME AT THE HANDS OF DECADES OF NEOLIBERAL POLICIES AND PUT US AT RISK FOR ANOTHER DEPRESSION. THIS RECENT CRISIS IS NOT OVER, IMO.
There’s something very important that Sanders voters (including Dems, Independents and Republicans) understand that Trump and Clinton supporters have not yet seemed to grasp.
I clearly have failed miserably in my shabby efforts to ‘splain my worries about Neoliberal and Neoconservative policies here. Others have done a far better job than me but our warnings have fallen on deaf ears. I’ve stated many times, without any effect whatsoever, that Noam Chomsky says that Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Chomsky says that Sanders is a “decent, honest, New Deal democrat”.
That truth, in a nutshell, explains why Bernie has attracted millions of Americans — Democrats, Independents, and, yes, lifelong Republicans, who are horrified by what their own party succeeded in dredging up for candidates. Chomsky’s short but honest and accurate description of Sanders as “a decent, honest New Deal Democrat” distinguishes Sanders from his opponent. And it calls attention to the timeliness of the Sanders’ candidacy given the precarious position that most Americans find themselves in given the predatory nature of 45 years of Neoliberal and Neoconservative policies.
But Clinton supporters seem obsessed (sorry but the angst is palpable) and fearful that Sanders policies would represent a dangerous revolution. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The truth is that the excellent New Deal policies that were supported and fostered by these Democrats — Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern — would once again become part of the fabric of the lives of Americans who have been struggling to get by.
When Bernie Sanders calls his policies a “political revolution” we Sanders supporters understand that what he means, as Noam Chomsky points out, is a return to a New Deal economy. Bernie has fought his whole life for these policies and it’s with a bit of wry humor and maybe even sarcasm that he refers to these common sense policies as a “political revolution” because the people of this country have sadly been slowly over 4 decades been conditioned to accept a radical shift away from the New Deal common sense policies.
The politicians who came after the New Deal Democrats have brazenly pushed for a radical shift away from these policies in order to get and hold power. FDR and the rest of the New Deal Democrats mentioned above would "never stop throwing up” if they came back and saw what has been going on.
In my perhaps quixotic effort to reach out to my fellow Hillary Clinton Democrats, I did a bit of googling and finally found a thoughtful young American writer who is pursing his doctoral degree in political science at Oxford University. Benjamin Studebaker has written articles on Huff Post and elsewhere and I think he offers the best explanation I have read why we feel our New Deal Democrat, Bernie Sanders, is the candidate who most Americans really believe can help us restore what has been taken from us over the last 45 years.
Here, dear readers, is a portion of what he wrote that may perhaps be of assistance to loyal Clinton supporters to help them understand how far the Democratic Party of the last 45 years has strayed from the beloved New Deal Democrats of earlier, happier years. I hope this may serve to explain to the Sanders’ critics that Sanders supporters are not crazed and dazed or delusional but very sensible in supporting Bernie, expecially since Bernie has also persuaded Independents and lifelong Republicans that if we work together we can restore what has been unfairly taken from us.
Mr. Studebaker in his own words:
Lately the internet has become full of arguments about the merits and demerits of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been discussing and pondering all the various views about this, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that most of the people engaging in this debate don’t really understand what is at stake in the democratic primary. This is in part because many Americans don’t really understand the history of American left wing politics and don’t think about policy issues in a holistic, structural way. So in this post, I want to really dig into what the difference is between Bernie and Hillary and why that difference is extremely important.
We were very close in 2008 to a repeat of the Great Depression that Studebaker writes about next:
The left in the 1930’s understood rising inequality as the core cause of the Great Depression. Because wealth was concentrating in the hands of the top 1%, the amount of investment steadily increased while the amount of consumption stagnated.
Sound familiar?
ok, what did the left do:
So what did the left do? As you can see in the chart, between the 1930’s and the 1970’s, the United States drastically reduced economic inequality. It redistributed wealth from the top to the middle and the bottom, resulting in consistent wage increases and consequently consistent consumption increases.
we got social security, etc
This was accomplished through a series of policies that if they were proposed today, would strike most Americans as socialist–Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, strong union rights, high minimum wages, high marginal tax rates on the wealthy (with a 90% top rate under Eisenhower), and strong enforcement of financial regulations and anti-trust laws.
Then under Jimmy Carter in the 1970’s we saw the beginning of the shift to massive deregulation and right wing economic policies benefitting the top and draining income from the working classes.
Starting with Jimmy Carter in 1976, the Democratic Party became something different, something that was no longer ideologically continuous with this. Even the Republican Party to a large degree acknowledged the need for these policies during this period–Eisenhower and Nixon supported and even extended parts of this system that kept investment and consumption in balance.
I’ve written about what happened in the 1970’s in detail elsewhere–the short version is that in the 70’s there were two oil shocks, in which the price of oil went up very rapidly (the OPEC embargo in the early 70’s and the Iranian Revolution at the end of the decade). Rising oil prices created stagflation, because they drastically increased the price of goods over a very short span of time. This reduced consumption, damaging economic growth, while simultaneously leading governments to increase wages in an attempt to prevent workers from rapidly losing purchasing power, creating inflation. To solve this problem, governments needed to stabilize oil prices or reduce dependency on foreign oil. They also could have allowed real wages to fall temporarily until that was accomplished (in tandem with a strong social safety net to protect those at the bottom of the wage scale).
Instead what happened is that the right co-opted the oil crisis to claim that the entire project of balancing investment with consumption was fundamentally mistaken, that the problem was that there was not enough investment and too much consumption. The right embarks on a political platform of reducing union power, reducing the real value of the minimum wage, cutting welfare spending, reducing taxes on the wealthy, and deregulating the financial sector. Inequality, which in the US bottomed out in 1978, began rising rapidly and during the new millennium has frequently approached depression-era levels, having the same harmful effects on consumption that it had in the early 20th century and creating the same endemic risk of bubbles and financial crises.
Many people think that it is the Republican Party alone that is responsible for this, but beginning in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party was captured by this same ideology, which in academic circles is often referred to as neoliberalism. It is now largely forgotten that it was Carter, not Reagan, who began deregulating the market. Indeed, during the 1976 democratic primary, there was an ABC movement–Anybody But Carter. Democrats who remained committed to the party’s egalitarian ideology rightly feared that Carter was too right wing and would effectively strip the party of its historical commitment to the continuation and expansion of the legacy of FDR and LBJ. However, they ran too many candidates against Carter, splitting the left vote and allowing Carter to win the nomination.
Bill Clinton took the party even further to the right. In 1992 he ran on the promise to “end welfare as we know it”, a total repudiation of the FDR/LBJ legacy. With the help of republicans, Clinton was eventually successful in drastically cutting the welfare program. Clinton also signed important deregulatory bills into law, like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Most economists blame one or both of these pieces of legislation with directly facilitating the housing crisis in 2008 (there is a robust debate about which one is more important, with economists like Paul Krugman leaning toward CFMA as the more important one while Robert Reich argues GLBA). Hillary Clinton supported these measures during the 1990’s and has in some cases continued to voice support for them. Bill signed all of this legislation into law. Bernie Sanders was against welfare reform and GLBA at the time (he voted for CFMA–it was snuck into an 11,000 page omnibus spending bill at the last minute).
The 2008 primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is sometimes billed as if it were a contest between two ideologies, but the most prominent difference between them was the vote on the Iraq War. On economic policy, there never was a substantive difference.
benjaminstudebaker.com/...
So Studebaker explains to us how we’ve been like frogs sitting in a dish whose “temperature changes” have over the last 45 years shifted us slowly from a comfortable New Deal well running economy to one that favors the powerful wealthy political elite who have achieved a clever way to siphon wealth out of the pockets of working people and into their own — not because they are smarter or contribute more ( Paul Volker pointed out that the only innovation from the banks over the last 30 years was the ATM machine) — but because they have succeeded in “reforming” the system to their advantage with the cooperation of their neoconservative and neoliberal elected officials.
pas bon