Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Speech

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Hillary Clinton gave a foreign policy speech in San Diego a couple of days ago that got some good reviews. Indeed, her supporters seem to think it was the greatest  foreign policy speech since Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” address, assuming they know about Churchill and the Iron Curtain.

The speech largely consisted of calling out Donald Trump for being an idiot.  In her next appearance she’s going to go for broke and shoot some fish in a barrel.

If you read the speech, most of it is pretty banal.  Here’s a representative sample:

Trump says over and over again, “The world is laughing at us.” He’s been saying this for decades, he didn’t just start this year. He bought full-page ads in newspapers across the country back in 1987, when Ronald Reagan was President, saying that America lacked a backbone and the world was – you guessed it – laughing at us. He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now – and you’ve got to wonder why somebody who fundamentally has so little confidence in America, and has felt that way for at least 30 years, wants to be our President.

The truth is, there’s not a country in the world that can rival us. It’s not just that we have the greatest military, or that our economy is larger, more durable, more entrepreneurial than any in the world. It’s also that Americans work harder, dream bigger – and we never, ever stop trying to make our country and world a better place.

I’m so done with the American exceptionalism rhetoric. Rah-rah doesn’t fix the potholes.

I can’t argue with anything she says about Trump. It’s when she wanders into her own ideas that she gets into trouble.

Steve Chapman wrote for the Chicago Tribune,

Hillary Clinton has been wrong on one foreign policy issue after another, from the war in Iraq to the war in Libya to the war in Syria. She is secretive, averse to transparency, habitually deceptive and arguably corrupt. She is a risk to lead us into another messy conflict.

Donald Trump has said some things that don’t sound bad. He recognizes the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Libya as mistakes. He vows to refrain from nation-building. He says he’d make our allies do more to defend themselves.

So let me be clear: If I had only these two choices of whom to be in charge of U.S. foreign policy for the next four years — or five minutes — I would pick Clinton in a heartbeat.

Clinton is a bad option, in the way that Salisbury steak at a roadside diner is a bad option. Trump, however, resembles a tuna sandwich left out on the counter for days: definitely harmful and possibly fatal.

Yeah, pretty much sums it up.

I also like these comments by Ian Bremmer in Time:

First, her remarks were intended for the foreign policy establishment, the people who care about foreign policy details and America’s role in the world. These are not the people she needs to reach. She must speak directly to those who feel globalization has stolen their livelihoods and don’t see why Americans must carry heavier and more expensive burdens than others do. Some of those people are persuadable.

Second, she spent too much presenting herself as the plausible alternative to disaster. Her own foreign policy record is not sterling. She was an active secretary of state, but President Obama didn’t deliver his finest foreign policy accomplishments—striking the Iran nuclear deal, lifting the embargo against Cuba, negotiating the Transpacific Partnership—until Clinton had moved on. She deserves credit for helping to bring Iran to the nuclear negotiating table, but it fell to her successor to complete the deal. Her attempt to “reset” relations with Russia was a farce from start to finish. The “pivot to Asia” and agreement on the Transpacific Partnership were her biggest successes, but she has backed away from both while running for president. In short, Clinton is long on foreign policy experience, but short on foreign policy successes.

But she’s so qualified! And she has all those accomplishments (that few can name if you put them on the spot to name any)!

Patrick Smith wrote at Salon:

Clinton’s people advised the press beforehand that, major or not, this presentation was not intended to break any new ground—no new positions, no new policy initiatives or ideas. This hardly had to be explained, of course: Hillary Clinton has no new ideas on American foreign policy. That is not her product. Clinton sells continuity, more of the same only more of it because it is so good. In continuity we are supposed to find safety, certainty and security.

I do not find any such things in the idea that our foreign policy cliques under a Clinton administration will simply keep doing what they have been doing for many decades. The thought frightens me, and I do not say this for mere effect. In my estimation, and it is no more than that, the world is approaching maximum tolerance of America’s post–Cold War insistence on hegemony. As regular readers will know, this is why I stand among those who consider Clinton’s foreign policy thinking, borne out by the record, the most dangerous thing about her. And there are many of us, by the evidence.

The critique that most needs to be read, though, is by William Astore at Huffpo.  (Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, blogs at Bracing Views.) Really, read the whole thing. Here are the juiciest bits:

1. The speech featured the usual American exceptionalism, the usual fear that if America withdraws from the world stage, chaos will result.  There was no sense that America’s wars of choice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. have greatly contributed to that chaos.  …

2.  Hillary mentioned we’re electing “our” next commander-in-chief.  No, we’re not.  The president is a public servant, not “our” commander-in-chief.  The president serves as the civilian commander-in-chief of the military, and the military alone.

3.  Hillary mentioned the US has a “moral obligation” to defend Israel.  Why is this?  Sure, Israel is an American ally, but why is Israel the one country we’re “morally” obligated to defend? There’s only one country we’re morally obligated to defend, and that’s the USA, assuming our government is actually honoring the US Constitution.

4.  The speech had no new ideas.  It was a laundry list of neo-conservative principles about making America stronger, safer, and so on.  As a friend of mine put it, “Nothing that I heard her say deviated in any way from her hawkish record of recommending bombing at every opportunity.”

And here is the grand finale:

Hillary Clinton reminds me of the grey leaders in the USSR before Gorbachev.  She’s like a Brezhnev or an Andropov. A cookie-cutter product of the system with no fresh ideas.

For many people who are leery of a Trump presidency, Hillary’s hawkish and colorless conformity to the Washington system is more than enough to qualify her.  If she wins the presidency, she will be much like Brezhnev and Andropov, senior apparatchiks of an empire in denial of its own precipitous decline.

Wow. Hammer, nail, head.

But according to Clinton supporters this was a brilliant speech, and it got very good reviews in a lot of the media. Rave reviews, says Business Insider. I’ve said before that she got lucky with Trump as an opponent. The polls don’t reflect it now, but she’s going to take him apart like a cooked crab. And media will have so much fun watching her do it she’ll get a pass on her own record and policies.

History Challenge: Who Was the Most Qualified Presidential Candidate EVER?

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I’m not asking who was the best POTUS, mind you. Just which candidate for the office had the most impressive resume. He wouldn’t have had to be elected, even.

I ask because of this exchange on Facebook, which I repeat here word for word.

Some Guy: Have you been listening to the media know-nothing pundits and Hillary Clinton detractors critical of her foreign policy speech, denouncing her lecture as more of an attack on Con man Trump’s total lack of any qualifications to be President.

Well, Any sane person would know she is correct, Trump is not even fit to visit the White House much less live there.

Hillary was outstanding and proved without any doubt that she is indeed the best qualified person to ever seek the Presidency.

Me://the best qualified person to ever seek the Presidency.// EVER seek the Presidency? (No sir, no cult of personality here, sir.) Seriously, her qualifications beat Trump’s by several miles, although you could say the same thing about an order of french fries. But best qualified person EVER? Don’t you think that claim is a tad overboard?

Another Person: No – her education and experience make her the best qualified candidate in history. That’s resume – not personal, partisan opinion.

Some Guy: Barbara, Who would you say was better qualified than Hillary and why????

Me: Just as an example, there was another POTUS who was a U.S. senator from New York and who was re-elected, but then resigned before the second term ended to become governor of New York. He also served as Secretary of State, and achieved some notable diplomatic successes. He also served a term as Vice President of the United States before being elected President. I’d say that guy was qualified up the wazoo. And that guy was Martin van Buren, one of our more mediocre presidents.

Some Guy: Okay, So what was his record for service to the community before he went into public office, anything close to Hillary’s involvement.

Me: Having beat the socks off you in the resume department already — he was an attorney with an active law practice in his early career, and then worked his way up in local and state politics before running for the U.S. senate. He was a “surrogate” or probate court attorney, then New York State attorney general, then a New York state senator. Clinton’s resume can’t hold a candle to this guy’s. But they didn’t do “community service” in the early 19th century.

Another Person: how does a mediocre president beat a candidate was on the editorial board of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action?

Worked on Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee researching migrant labor?

Was a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law?

Is a former civil litigation attorney?

Served as the director of the Legal Aid Clinic at the University of Arkansas School of Law?

Was the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation which helps ensure everyone has equal access to justice under the law, despite inability afford it?

And first female partner at Rose Law Firm.

Co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families?

Was named twice as one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal?

(Btw – such an honor is rarely bestowed upon criminals or incompetents. Just sayin.)

That her entire career has been spent as a strong advocate for families and solid track record includes leading a task force that reformed Arkansas’s education system as First Lady of Arkansas?

That – as FLOTUS – she was instrumental in the creation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act?

Or who – with her husband – has spent the years since she was FLOTUS – establishing the Clinton Foundation – a non profit whose mission is to help the poor and disadvantaged around the world realize their potential and build better lives.

They also work to improve global health, reduce preventable diseases, create economic opportunity and growth, help communities deal with the impact of climate change – and to increase opportunity for women and girls.

The Clinton Foundation is recognized and highly respected around the world and here in the US – even – grudgingly – by the GOTP -as a tireless and powerful advocate for the vulnerable.

It receives donations from

DONALD TRUMP

Bill and Melinda Gates

The Rockefeller Foundation

The Coca Cola Company

The Elton John Aids Foundation

Anheuser Busch

Hewlett Packard

The Kingdom of Norway

The Commonwealth of Australia

The Government of The Netherlands

The Government of Sweden

To name just a few…

Or who – as Secretary of State – has a solid track record in international relations and policy?

Played a key role in finding and taking down Bin Laden – and authored the agreement that brought the Iranians to the negotiating table for the deal that the entire P5+1 endorsed, along with most of the rest of the world?

Or who is respected and admired around the world – as this illustrates:

http://youtu.be/ECNQDqMoAjw

Don’t like her policies? Fine.

But anyone running around snarking about not trusting her, claiming she’s a RHINO – after 20+ years of being the target of relentless, hateful Republican bs – is either not paying attention or too dumb to vote.

Name ANYONE else – in EITHER party – with a resume even close to hers.

Just ONE.

Take all the time you need.

Me: Pad it all you like — and most of that is padding, especially the stuff about the Clinton Foundation — but Martin Van Buren’s resume at the time he became POTUS was a hell of a lot more impressive than Clinton’s. And his record as Secretary of State is a lot better, I’d say. No coup in Honduras, no stupid intervention in Libya. He did some good stuff that helped folks gain peace and prosperity. I assume you can google and find that for yourself. However, the Yale Law Review didn’t exist until after he died, and like most attorneys of his time he became an attorney through self-study and apprenticeship. It was a different world.

And my point, of course, is that while Van Buren’s resume was outstanding, he was a very middle-of-the-road POTUS who served only one term. And that was just one guy I picked at random.

Some Guy: Barbara, You just cited his professional record, good, but was he opposed to slavery, did he reach out to women, children, the middle-class and the poor or was he just another white male President who ignored the great sin of slavery and just went along to get along. Now, to me, any one who turned his/her back on human slavery can do no good, but you have a right to your heroes.

Me: I already said he was a mediocre POTUS. And he’s no hero of mine. I am just pointing out that, on paper, his resume at the time he became POTUS was simply outstanding. Successful lawyer, state senator, state attorney general, state governor, U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state (and a pretty good one), vice president of the United States. Those are just the high points; there are some other jobs/appointments he had here and there as well. His political views, some of which which I consider fairly awful, are beside the point. We’re just talking qualifications — as (Another Person) said, “That’s resume – not personal, partisan opinion.”

The fact is, if you take the time to go back and look a the details of his many offices held and what he did in them, van Buren really did have an astonishing record of accomplishments before becoming one of the most average presidents in U.S. history.  (See his Wikipedia page)

Now, if you’re talking about a guy with a sterling background in doing charitable acitivism stuff, Herbert Hoover is your man. He was internationally known for his humanitarian relief efforts.  A great many other presidents have had amazing records of accomplishment before they became POTUS, which is sorta kinda how you become POTUS.  I’d have a hard time finding someone who was a total deadbeat and became POTUS, actually.

As I’ve said  before, this is cult of personality stuff. It’s not “normal.”

Update: Thinking about it, Abraham Lincoln’s resume wasn’t that great. He’d been a lawyer and U.S. Representative. He’d been a militia captain in the Black Hawk Wars and said later most of the action he saw involved swatting mosquitoes. He got noticed because of his debates and speeches more than anything else. The guy was a slacker.

The “Neos”: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism

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As long as we’re defining terms — see Liberal, Neoliberal and Progressive: What Words Mean — here’s a really interesting article by Corey Robin called “When Neoliberalism Was Young: A Lookback on Clintonism before Clinton.”

Now, neoliberalism, of course, can mean a great many things, many of them associated with the right. But one of its meanings—arguably, in the United States, the most historically accurate—is the name that a small group of journalists, intellectuals, and politicians on the left gave to themselves in the late 1970s in order to register their distance from the traditional liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society. The original neoliberals included, among others, Michael Kinsley, Charles Peters, James Fallows, Nicholas Lemann, Bill Bradley, Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart, and Paul Tsongas. Sometimes called “Atari Democrats,” these were the men—and they were almost all men—who helped to remake American liberalism into neoliberalism, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

I confess I don’t remember hearing the term “neoliberal” before the Clinton era. This is from “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto” by Charles Peters, published in Washington Monthly, May 1983:

We still believe in liberty and justice for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

Third Way, anyone? I haven’t read it yet, but I understand that Peters and his Manifesto are called out in Thomas Frank’s new book Listen, Liberal. And not in a good way.

Robin continues,

In the hands of neoliberalism, it became fashionable to pit the interests of the poor not against the power of the wealthy but against the working class that had been made into a middle class by America’s unions. (We still see that kind of talk among today’s Democrats, particularly in debates around free trade, where it is always the unionized worker—never the well paid journalist or economist or corporate CEO—who is expected to make sacrifices on behalf of the global poor. Or among Hillary Clinton supporters, who leverage the interests of African American voters against the interests of white working-class voters, but never against the interests of capital.)

What comes through clearly in Robin’s piece, and also in this 2006 interview of Charles Peters by Ezra Klein (reading between the lines, anyway) is that the main thrust of neoliberalism was and is to throw the working class under the bus in favor of investors and entrepreneurs. The original neoliberals were, above all, anti-union, especially public sector unions. Weirdly, they seemed to think that union members had become too advantaged and were somehow hurting people on the lower rungs of the ladder. But then they also turned around and wanted Social Security to be means tested.

It’s difficult to make sense of what truly drives this contradiction, whereby one liberalism is criticized for supporting only one segment of the population while another liberalism is criticized for supporting all segments, including the poor.

It could be as simple as the belief that government should work on behalf of only the truly disadvantaged, leaving everyone else to the hands of the market. That that turned out to be a disaster for the truly disadvantaged—with no one besides themselves to speak up on behalf of anti-poverty programs, those programs proved all too easy to eliminate, not by a Republican but by a Democrat—seems not to have much troubled the sleep of neoliberalism. Indeed, in the current election, it is Hillary Clinton’s support for the 1994 crime bill rather than the 1996 welfare reform bill that has gotten the most attention, even though she proudly stated in her memoir that she not only supported the 1996 bill but rounded up votes for it.

The neoliberals were and are devoted to an ideal of pragmatism:

Note the disavowal of all conventional ideologies and beliefs, the affirmation of an open-minded pragmatism guided solely by a bracing commitment to what works. It’s a leitmotif of the entire manifesto: Everyone else is blinded by their emotional attachments to the ideas of the past. We, the heroic few, are willing to look upon reality as it is, to take up solutions from any side of the political spectrum, to disavow anything that smacks of ideological rigidity or partisan tribalism.

That Peters wound up embracing solutions in the piece that put him comfortably within the camp of GOP conservatism (he even makes a sop to school prayer) never seemed to disturb his serenity as a self-identified iconoclast. That was part of the neoliberal esprit de corps: a self-styled philosophical promiscuity married to a fairly conventional ideological fidelity.

Robin also discusses another self-identified neoliberal, Marty Peretz, who for many years was owner of The New Republic, another allegedly liberal publication. Robin points out that Peretz’s positions often seemed to be plucked from the Republican Party platform, including his adamant Zionism. Which allows us a nice segue into the other neos, the neoconservatives.

A little appreciated fact about neoconservatives is that the founders of the movement were mostly liberals and Democrats. Yes, liberals and Democrats. New Deal, Cold War Democrats. I understand a few of them were even ex-Trotskyites.

Neoconservatism began in the 1960s and 1970s in part as a reaction to the New Left, particularly the Marxist and antiwar factions of the New Left and the candidacy of George McGovern in 1972. They also opposed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs even though they were supportive of the older New Deal programs.

Make of that what you will.

The core membership of the original neoconservatives were a group of Jewish intellectuals who worried the U.S. would grow weak on defense, particularly against the threat of Communism. This was not atypical of Cold War liberals. One not-Jewish founding neocon was Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, something of a prototype of the Cold War Democrat. He was a good New Dealer and supporter of unions, civil rights and social welfare programs. He was also pro-military buildup and was a big promoter of military action against Communism, such as the Vietnam War. A number of neocons have cited Scoop Jackson as an influence. These include two of his former Senate aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. (See also Andrew O’Hehir’s comparison of Scoop Jackson and Hillary Clinton.)

By the 1980s, most neocons had become Republicans, inspired by the tall-in-the-saddle rhetoric of Ronald Reagan.  And as the threat of Global Communist Domination faded away, the neocons came to be obsessed with the threat of Global Islamic Domination, or something.

How do we define “neoconservative” now? I like this discussion by Jack Hunter in The American Conservative.

The “neocons” believe American greatness is measured by our willingness to be a great power—through vast and virtually unlimited global military involvement. Other nations’ problems invariably become our own because history and fate have designated America the world’s top authority.

Critics say the US cannot afford to be the world’s policeman. Neoconservatives not only say that we can but we must—and that we will cease to be America if we don’t. Writes Boston Globe neoconservative columnist Jeff Jacoby: “Our world needs a policeman. And whether most Americans like it or not, only their indispensable nation is fit for the job.” Neocon intellectual Max Boot says explicitly that the US should be the world’s policeman because we are the best policeman.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) heartily champions the neoconservative view. While virtually every other recognizably Tea Party congressman or senator opposes the Libyan intervention, Rubio believes the world’s top cop should be flashing its Sherriff’s badge more forcefully in Libya—and everywhere else. …

… Rubio’s flowery rhetoric is worth noting because neoconservatism has always been sold through the narrative of America’s “greatness” or “exceptionalism.” This is essentially the Republican Party’s version of the old liberal notion promoted by President Woodrow Wilson that it is America’s mission to “make the world safe for democracy.”

If you think about it, this really is an extension of older, pre-Vietnam liberal ideas about foreign policy. It goes back to the great Teddy Roosevelt, who wanted to make the U.S. a great global power and increase its influence and prestige in the world. It goes back to Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership in World War II. You could argue it has ties to the Truman Doctrine and John F. Kennedy’s attempts to push back Communism.

You could also argue that in neoconservatism the American exceptionalism thing has morphed, or maybe metastasized, into a caricature of itself. Instead of coming from a place of noble intentions, in the neocons it comes from a place of bigotry and fear. I’ve argued in the past that neoconservatism is pro-active isolationism, attempting to use force to spread American hegemony so the world won’t be so scary and foreign. This is nothing like the Roosevelts, or Truman, or JFK. But you could see how those earlier liberal presidents might have inspired it.

If, in the end, it sometimes seems the neolibs and the neocons are as much alike as different, it’s because they are both weeds that grew out of the same pot. so to speak. They both originated on the Left or Center-Left. Both movements were reacting to events in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Both movements moved right and either adapted Republican ideas while remaining in the Democratic Party (the neolibs) or else they just flat-out became Republicans (the neocons).

Somewhere in his seminal work The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr argued that political ideologies shouldn’t be thought of as just lying along one axle, from left to right. It’s more like a circle. Taken to extremes, extreme Left and extreme Right meet each other and end up in totalitarianism.  Similarly, I say that neoconservatism and neoliberalism are not at all polar opposites, but rather like two sides of the same coin. They aren’t identical, but neither are they all that different, and it’s not at all impossible for the same politician to be some of both.

The Can’t-Do Nation

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Recently I’ve seen a lot of essays and comments on the glories of pragmatic, incremental change. I’ve even seen social media commenters saying that the U.S. has always been a nation of slow, incremental change.

Which, of course, is bullshit. If anything we are a nation that does things in fits and starts. We will sometimes ride the status quo for awhile, but then when we take a notion to change, we can create big change pretty durn fast.

Or, at least, we used to.  We’ve been in something of a long rut of can’t-do, I admit. But it’s nonsense to say that’s always the way things have been in the U.S.

Let’s just look, for example, at the Progressive Era, which began in 1890 with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Along with massive amounts of business reform that accelerated when Teddy Roosevelt had anything to say about it, this era also saw the rise of labor unions. Congress passed the first Food and Drug Act in 1906, created the Department of Labor in 1911, and ratified the Sixteenth (income taxes) AND Seventeenth (direct election of Senators) Amendments in 1913. The Eighteenth (prohibition) and Nineteenth (women’s suffrage) Amendments were both ratified in 1919. And those were just the high points. There were countless other laws and regulations passed on both state and national levels that impacted just about everyone in fundamental ways. And while this was going on people were switching over from horses to automobiles and acquiring electricity and telephones.

The Prohibition thing didn’t work out so well, but it was a lot of change — in government, in culture, in technology. Of course many of the laws, such as the antitrust laws, were revised over time, but the initial laws were not exactly tweaks. Many of these changes were transformative, not incremental, change. I talk about the difference below.

Do we need to review the stuff that happened during the New Deal? Do we?  And then think about the 1950s and 1960s. We went to the freaking moon, people. The Civil Rights movement brought about massive changes in our culture pretty quickly because people stood up and said, we gotta change. Not, we gotta change some day.

It seems to me that from the mid-1970s on, we shut down and decided we couldn’t do big change any more. The single Big Thing that has happened is computers and the technology that flowed from that. The Cold War ended, for which some of us took credit, but it really wasn’t our doing, exactly.

In the 1930s we built the Hoover Dam. Now we can’t even fix potholes. Atrios wrote last week,

Infrastructure price tags always sound like huge unthinkable numbers. ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS. And it is true that it is hard for state and local governments to come up with that kind of money. For the federal government it is chump change, even leaving aside some more creative ways of paying for it.

Once upon a time the US really was ahead of basically every other country in the world. It was shiny and new. We had shiny new highways, our cities weren’t bombed out by wars (though we did a pretty good job subsequently at destroying them ourselves), lower middle class people had things like refrigerator/freezers and cars, and potable water coming out of the tap was the norm. Things were clean. We had nice affordable hospitals. It was an understandable symbol of progress, of modernity.

Now much of the world has those things, along with in some cases some things are more humane and appealing. I don’t think Trump is really talking about BUILD MORE SUPERTRAIN TUNNELS when he says “make America great again,” but it is the case that the country isn’t shiny and new like it was. The Reagan era made nice things, even fixing nice things, unpossible for going on 40 years now. Something has to change.

 Lots of stuff has to change. Oh, but we’re not supposed to do BIG all-at-once change. We have to pragmatic little baby-step change. And while baby steps are better than nothing, there’s nothing inherently virtuous about baby steps. Baby steps are what you do from a position of weakness. Baby steps are what you do when there’s resistance and you lack the means to do big steps.

But we actually have the means to do big steps. We just don’t have the will.

What’s the difference between transformative and incremental change? A definition of transformative change is change that takes us in a new direction, and isn’t just a new variation of what was already happening. One article I found  used music as an example — the invention of musical recording was a transformative change that impacted behaviors like concert attendance and the piano and sheet music industries. However, the invention of cassette tapes over vinyl was an incremental change.

Another article defined incrementalism as a kind of resilience. These are changes that allow us to adapt to conditions as they are. Transformative change, of course changes the conditions.  I think that’s important. It’s not just about whether the change is fast or slow, or whether it’s done in stages or all at once. Is it adapting to prevailing conditions, or is it changing prevailing conditions?

For example, since the 2008 crash nothing transformative has happened to the financial sector. All that was done was just to allow us to survive and adapt to the  monstrosity the financial sector has become. Global climate change calls out for transformative instead of incremental, but so far we’re barely managing incremental. The ACA works, yes, but it’s another example of a mostly incremental change rather than a transformative one. We can say it’s a BIG incremental change, but it’s mostly an adaptation that allows more people to get insurance rather than a real transformation of our health care delivery system.

Incremental change is sometimes just foot dragging. It’s making things work just a little longer, until it can’t be made to work any more. It’s used to keep us placated so the transformative change we really want can be postponed.

Sometimes adaptations to conditions are fine; if conditions are not that bad, or are probably temporary, maybe a few tweaks are all we need. But we’ve gotten into a rut in which we’re told all we will ever get are tweaks.  That’s been doing on way too long.

Liberal, Neoliberal and Progressive: What Words Mean

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Much of our current political discourse suffers because so many people are using words without fully appreciating what they mean. For example, some use progressive and liberal as synonyms, although they really aren’t (although there’s a lot of overlap). There’s also confusion about the difference between liberal and neoliberal. And there’s tons of confusion about socialist.

Note that what follows are standard definitions; I am not making these up. However, this is just a brief overview. I don’t have time to write a book. So if I’ve left out a detail you think is important please just add it to comments.

Liberal. The meaning of liberal as a political term has changed over time, and in the United States it came to have a slightly different meaning from how it is used elsewhere.  But let’s review:

Classical liberalism, which originated in 18th century Europe, emphasized civil liberties — the old Rights of Man — and political freedom. Classical liberals were also the original free market capitalists.  Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand were classical liberals.

Social liberalism, which evolved later, is classical liberalism with the added belief that government really needs to address poverty and joblessness and that sort of thing rather than wait around for the Invisible Hand to fix it. This is basically the European view of social liberalism.

FDR took American liberalism in a different direction, basically injecting a whole lot of American progressivism into it (see discussion of progressive below). I recommend this essay by Eric Alterman, “How Classical Liberalism Morphed Into New Deal Liberalism.”

European liberalism is essentially a centrist political philosophy, but under FDR it was pulled leftward, putting it somewhere between social liberalism and European socialism as it existed at the time. And, of course, FDR pretty much kicked the free-market, laissez-faire aspects of classical liberalism to the curb. By steering a course between pure European liberalism and pure socialism, FDR found a way to maintain capitalism without allowing it to become oppressive and exploitative of the people. Well, of a lot of people.  FDR liberalism was very much about making robust use of government to give working people a hand up so they could make a better quality of life for themselves, with the acknowledgment that nonwhites were left out of much of this, to appease southern politicians.

In the 1960s, liberalism took up the cause of equal rights for all people, and in doing so sometimes worked against New Deal liberalism. Much of the New Left was against unions, for example, because of racial discrimination by unions, and New Deal liberalism was very pro-union.  Although some of the leftie-leftie fringe of the New Left was Marxist, most new leftie liberal 1960s-era hippies weren’t that tuned into economic issues, as I remember it.  Equal rights and civil liberty, yes; Vietnam, no.  And marijuana. That’s about it.

Until Vietnam there had been nothing intrinsically anti-war about liberalism, note. FDR certainly hadn’t been anti-war.  Indeed, a lot of Cold War liberals were on the hawkish side, promoting a robust military buildup to fighting the threat of global communist takeover. Democratic party insiders were opposed to nominating the anti-war McGovern in 1972, and when he lost big– partly because he got little help from his party — the lesson Democrats took from that was that pacifism is for losers.

But one of the ghosts of the Vietnam era a lot of us still have clanking about in our heads is that liberalism is pacifistic and conservatism is militaristic, and while that might be true most of the time these days, that’s a relatively recent development. And a ghost clanking around in the heads of many American conservatives is that liberalism is communism, which is nonsense on steroids.

Neoliberal. Neoliberalism is a reactionary sort of liberalism that repudiates social liberalism and tries to go back to something like classical liberalism. As Europeans use the word neoliberalism, Ronald Reagan was a neoliberal. See especially this essay by George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism — the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.”

American neoliberals tend to be social liberals but economic conservatives. They’re fine with equal rights and civil liberties for individuals, but they lean toward conservative and libertarian ideas about economies and markets.  It is argued that a neoliberal’s commitment to civil liberty is entirely for the individual and ignores social reality. Basically, neoliberals are people who champion your right to live your life as you wish while they favor trade policies that will devastate your community and ship  your job to China.

Another way to put this is that neoliberals are liberal but not necessarily progressive. So let’s look at progressivism.

Progressive. Progressive as an American political term was born in the late 19th century. The original progressive reform movement focused on three foundational positions:

  1. Getting the corruption of money out of politics, especially in regard to political machines and bosses.
  2. Getting more people directly involved in politics; making political processes more transparent. For example, the direct election of senators (17th Amendment, ratified 1914) was a progressive accomplishment.
  3. Using government regulation to protect the people; for example, enacting child labor laws and providing for safety regulations for food and drugs.

Progressivism in America from the start tended to go hand in hand with social liberalism. Women’s suffrage was a progressive cause. The Great Migration was encouraged by progressivism. But while white progressive reformers called for putting a stop to lynching, I’m not aware they did much to address segregation or racism generally. Maybe they did, and I missed it.

Teddy Roosevelt, one of the original patriarchs of American progressivism.

 

Teddy Roosevelt was both a product and a patriarch of the original Progressive Movement. Teddy worked to get the corruption of money out of government, you’ll recall, and he also worked to protect the environment and was opposed to the business monopolies that he saw as blood-sucking parasites. A lot of Teddy’s ideas were folded into FDR’s liberalism. Those Roosevelt boys did a lot of good for America.

But while, in America, progressivism and liberalism tend to run in the same circles, they aren’t exactly the same thing. In America, traditionally, liberalism is mostly about equal rights and civil liberties, while progressivism is mostly about social and government reform and economic justice. As we see with the neoliberals especially, a person can be all in favor of your rights to an abortion or the right to get a cake made for your same-sex wedding, but still not be particularly progressive.

Socialism. While we’re at it, I might as well bring up the “s” word.  The word socialism refers to a whole range of political-economic ideas; I don’t think there is any one form of “socialism.” There are, instead, a bunch of different socialisms.

American right-wingers will never get beyond the abecedarian (yeah, that’s a word; look it up) notion that socialism is the same thing as communism, and of course all communism is Marxism. This is right up there with saying dogs are mammals, so all mammals are dogs. Tell that to a wingnut, and he’ll assume you mean all mammals are dogs. But I digress.

Because of right-wing idiocy we haven’t been allowed to have a sensible conversation about socialist views and policies since about, well, ever. The Big Lie we’ve been taught is that socialism is all about central control of the economy, which of course is the road to totalitarianism, per the Austrian School economists. But most socialisms don’t advocate central control of the economy. And most socialists are fine with democratic representative government and with civil liberties and personal freedom and all that. But, as I said, there are many socialisms.

Even if you pull out the “democratic socialists” from the rest of the “socialists,” there’s still a continuum. While Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, some political scientist types says he’s really not, but more of an FDR-era Democrat Party liberal. See “What Does Sanders Mean by ‘Democratic Socialism?'” and “Bernie Is Not Socialist and America Is Not Capitalist.” So there’s that. But at least he’s helping to take the stigma out of the “s” word so that we can have conversations about it.

I’m bringing this up because I keep seeing people use these words very sloppily. In particular the conflation of liberalism and progressivism covers a lot of sins, since it’s very possible for a politician to score high by standard liberalism measures while being weak on progressivism. This is basically where we are with the mostly neoliberal Hillary Clinton. Sanders is both liberal and progressive. Trump is neither. So let’s try to keep this straight.

Stirring Up the Pro-Israel Status Quo at the DNC Convention

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Proof that perhaps the Sanders campaign has not been in vain, whatever the outcome:

A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.

Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee,Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government. They said they would try to get their views incorporated into the platform, the party’s statement of core beliefs, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.

According to a contributor to Juan Cole’s site, Sanders “will be allowed to name five members to the 15-member committee that writes the platform at the Democratic Party’s national convention in late July in Philadelphia even if he is not the nominee. Clinton will name six.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz will name the other four members, who no doubt will be Clinton sycophants. Although the DNC will deny that.

So the Sanders appointees will be outnumbered. But they aren’t going to be quiet. The New York Times continues,

The presence of Dr. Zogby and Dr. West on the 15-member panel, which also has six appointees of Hillary Clinton and four from the party chairwoman, does not guarantee their views will prevail. But it raises the prospect that one of the party’s most sensitive issues will be open to public debate while Mrs. Clinton is in a fight to unify her party and appeal to voters turned off by Donald J. Trump.

It also laid bare a steady shift in the Democratic Party, whose members have been less willing to back Israel’s government than in years past. According to a Pew Research Center survey in April, self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.

Clinton surrogates, on the other hand, vow that the platform will reflect the Secretary’s views, which appear to be to allow Bibi Netayanhu to dictate our foreign policy.

Although Cornel West is a bit too much of a provocateur for my taste, I hope that at least some Dem insiders wake up to the fact that their slavish whatever-Likud-wants position is growing increasingly unpopular with Democratic voters. And if so, somebody should memo Chuck Schumer.

The Fuse that Fizzled

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The big news today was that the State Department inspector general issued a sternly worded report critical of Secretary of State’s email use. Paul Waldman explains this about as well as anybody. In short, yeah, she broke rules; no, it doesn’t appear there were any harmful consequences. The report didn’t include any new bombshell information.

And this is about what I’ve expected from the email thing. I’m not seeing the word “criminal” in any news stories. I expect the report to be the end of it. Well, as far as the government is concerned. Politics are something else.

Some Sanders supporters are still eagerly waiting for the indictments that will never come. And, of course, Republicans will be all over it. The problem is that there really isn’t any new information here, I don’t believe, and unless there are unexpected further developments I doubt they can keep the public interested in the emails all the way until November.

Pub Quiz

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“The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.” — Mark Twain

I like to check in with British news sources like The Guardian and The Financial Times because sometimes they actually do a smarter job of figuring us out than we do.  FT content is behind a subscription firewall, alas, but sometimes I get lucky and find a usable link.

Anyway, because we’re all burned out, or at least I am, and to lighten the mood, see how well you do on this Pub Quiz created by the Brits at FT. I only got a couple of them right.

I’ll add some more questions. Eventually I’ll put the answers in a comment.

1. Which Republican candidate said “Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet”?

(a) Ted Cruz (b) Ben Carson (c) Rand Paul (d) Carly Fiorina

2. Bonus: What the hell does “Obamacare for the Internet” even mean?

3. At one point Jeb Bush was criticized for saying “Look, stuff happens.” What was he referring to?

(a) Global warming (b) Gun violence (c) That his brother George endorsed him (d) That his mother didn’t

4. Ben Carson recently was un-appointed from Trump’s vice president search committee. According to rumors reported at The Daily Beast, this was because …

(a) He nominated himself. (b) He nominated Sarah Palin. (c) He nominated Jesus. (d) He was vetting candidates by examining “the fruit salad of their life.”

Your turn.

Clash of the Unpopular Titans

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Or, what if they gave an election and nobody voted?

It says in the Washington Post:

Never in the history of the Post-ABC poll have the two major party nominees been viewed as harshly as Clinton and Trump.

Nearly 6 in 10 registered voters say they have negative impressions of both major candidates. Overall, Clinton’s net negative rating among registered voters is minus-16,  while Trump’s is minus-17, though Trump’s numbers have improved since March.

It takes some real talent for our two major political parties to  (presumably) nominate two people most voters don’t like.

At this point, the two candidates are in a statistical dead heat among registered voters, with Trump favored by 46 percent and Clinton favored by 44 percent. That represents an 11-point shift toward the presumptive Republican nominee since March. Among all adults, Clinton holds a six-point lead
(48 percent to 42 percent), down from 18 points in March.

This data about the close race between Clinton and Trump have gotten a lot of attention, but as many rightly point out, these numbers are likely to shift significantly before the election and don’t mean that much now. I still think Clinton will beat him.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has given Clinton a stiff challenge in the contest for the Democratic nomination, enjoys the most positive rating of the three. Among registered voters, Sanders is net positive — 49 percent to 41 percent — and has seen his image improve steadily the longer he has been a candidate.

He needed more time and public exposure to introduce himself to people before the primaries started. The Democratic establishment and mass media denied him that.

But what I really want to write about is, it appears the general election campaign will be between two unpopular candidates. How did that happen? And what does that say about the status of democracy in America?

First, this tells me the political system is being played, and not by the people. An honest competition actually decided by the people ought to have given us more popular candidates. What we’re seeing is a symptom of managed democracy, a term usually aimed at Vladimir Putin’s Russia but which, many argue, describes the United States.  In a paper about managed democracy in Russia, we find,

According to Tretyakov’s definition, managed democracy is a democracy (as there are elections, voters have alternative options, there is media freedom, leaders are changing), but it is corrected by the ruling class (or rather that part of it that holds power).

Put another way, this is why we can’t have nice things. We aren’t really in charge.

See also Ted Morgan in Salon, “This Isn’t How a Democracy Should Work.”

But the managing is happening in different ways in the two parties. If anything, Trump is a management failure.  He is not the guy the ruling class wanted. The faux populism the Right has cultivated so well all these years got out of control; thus, Trump.

Clearly, the Republican Party also has lost control of the nominating process; they barely controlled it in 2012.  Relaxed campaign finance laws allowed any clown into the race who could talk a few wealthy people into bankrolling him. Candidates on the Republican side more or less were independent franchises who didn’t need the RNC.

However, it’s also the case that the guy with the biggest fundraising chops, Jeb Bush, couldn’t sell himself to voters. One does wonder if he would have done much better with fewer, and saner, competitors.

With Hillary Clinton, we’ve got the candidate the Democratic Party elite chose over a year ago, and as I’ve said many times already, if she loses in the fall, that’s on her. And on them. She is a monumentally unwise choice. Not only is she unpopular, but as Queen of the Status Quo she is just plain wrong for the public mood. Her only advantage in this election is Trump; she may be wrong for the times; she may be a bad choice; but he’s absolutely appalling.

I hope the lesson the Democrats take from this is that competition is good. In the future, please don’t presume to choose the candidate for us. Give us a slate of candidates, and let us choose.

Misreading Data and the Damage Done

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Now they tell  us …

After Bernie Sanders crushed Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary last week, the national media was ready with an explanation: the white working class.

The New York Times and The Atlantic, for instance, both attributed Sanders’s win to his strength among low-income white workers. “White Working-Class Voters in West Virginia Pick Sanders Over Clinton,” read NPR’s headline.

This trope has become the conventional wisdom in the media, with the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, The Huffington Post, and a host of other outlets (including me at Vox) stating as fact that downscale whites have formed a crucial piece of Sanders’s base.

This interpretation makes for an interesting narrative, but it’s missing the real story. Sanders’s victories aren’t being powered by a groundswell of white working-class support, but instead stem from his most reliable base since the start of the primary: young voters.

This is what  you get when data are broken out in isolation of other data. If you look at income, it looks as if Sanders gets the working class vote. But this is skewed because young people make a lot less money than older people. Older lower-income people prefer Clinton.

If you look at race it seems Clinton owns the “black vote.” But Jeff Stein writes, “several polls have put Sanders ahead of Clinton among young African-Americans; in the Reuters polling data, for instance, Sanders beats Clinton by 25 points among black voters aged 18 to 29.”

I bolded that last line because I’m very tired of being told that Sanders is the candidate of privileged white people.

Polls suggests that Clinton does better among women, but all the data I’ve seen says that young women prefer Sanders in even larger percentages than young men prefer Sanders.

The framing of Sanders as the white guys’ candidate has hurt his candidacy, I think, and now it turns out not to be true. It was just everybody not looking carefully enough at the numbers.

I swear, news media these days couldn’t report on making toast.