Follow up on Clinton

Let me be brief.

One of the fascinations in the current presidential election campaign is that both parties are being challenged by relative outsiders. Let’s set aside just how ‘outside’ some of the challengers are, and focus on why this challenge is getting the traction it is.

From my point of view it is quite obvious: neither party is delivering, or has delivered, what its base or core voters want.

One the one side Republicans are being challenged because they have failed to bring about the downfall of large scale government. This is a serious flaw for their more committed right wing supporters. Not only this, but those supporters must surely feel badly betrayed since none of their efforts, going all the way back to Reagan, have accomplished the goal of slashing government programs. Worse: those programs have not only survived, but in some cases have been augmented by Republicans – e.g. Bush and the expansion of Medicare, not to mention the failure to overturn Obamacare.

I don’t want to dwell on the Republicans because they have had vastly more success than the Democrats have since 1980, but I can easily understand why some of their more vocal supporters are at their wits end. We don’t have a ‘small government’, and are highly unlikely to have one any time soon: modern complex and democratic economies need a mix of public and private action, not just one or the other.

Now this Republican failure is not because of the Democrats. Why? Because, with the exception of Obamacare, the Democrats have stuck with their own variant of neoliberalism since the 1980’s. Look at the legislative record rather than at the rhetoric. After the Reagan revolution the Democrats have had two successful eight year presidential administrations during which they could have pushed back against the neoliberal intellectual edifice and prevented the further rightward drift we ended up experiencing.

They didn’t try. Indeed Clinton simply tracked a little to the left of wherever the Republicans were and advocated policies that are, in retrospect at least, more moderate Republican than moderate Democrat. Free trade treaties, financial deregulation, absence of support for unions, and welfare reform could all be characterized as right of center. They certainly are not part of an effort to reverse Reaganism.

The Obama years promised more, and the adoption of Obamacare is a small step towards a better health care future, but the bitterness of the partisan opposition since 2009 engulfed that promise and left the country tired and angry at the lack of progress. At least when viewed from a left of center perspective.

So both parties have failed their core constituencies. No wonder this election is so contorted.

Which brings me to Hillary herself.

Her supporters, which include pretty much the entire Democratic party establishment, are in a bit of a huff because she polled so badly amongst younger voters. Her performance was pitiful. She has been completely unable to create a message that resonates with younger people.

One story I have heard her supporters tell is that this is because she has been at work in the ‘progressive’ cause so long that all these younger folk weren’t around to see it. Her efforts on health care and family issues are cited as being sufficient to earn her progressive credibility, but the young are simply too young to know about it.

Or not.

And this is what the establishment is missing.

The United States lags a long way behind the kind of progress that most western nations have made on exactly those issues that Hillary has supposedly been beavering away at all these years. So, we can surmise, her efforts have either been inept or insufficient. Why, then, would younger people give her their support? She ranks as failure not as a success. Forty years of incrementalism is hardly a rallying cry for the future. But that’s what Hillary offers. It’s what her friends and supporters offer.

And I find that decidedly uninspiring.

In many ways Hillary represents her age cohort perfectly: technocratically gifted; ambitious but in a bureaucratic way; policy wonkish and thriving on detail; willing to compromise endlessly to achieve minor victories; willing also to drift wherever the tide goes; and, crucially, lacking a grand vision to provide coherence to her work. She is the perfect insider. The perfect technician. The perfect empathetic articulation of small scale effort.

What she is not is a leader.

She has no post-Reagan vision. She cannot envisage America as a social democracy. So she cannot lead us there. Yet social democracy is the antidote to Reagan. It is the cure to neoliberalism. Without this vision Hillary is trapped and can offer only pragmatic resistance within a framework she accepts as irreplaceable, but which offends her sense of right. She is conflicted and worn down by her inability to rally behind post-Reagan notions of society, so she, instead, plods along tinkering with Reaganism rather than replacing it.

And younger people want to replace it.

She and her supporters in the Democratic party establishment ought not patronize the young. Embittered by the decades of infighting and social schism that is the experience of her generation, she and they ought listen to the young.

For there is another way.