The Guardian is widely considered a left-wing newspaper:
Guardian Cover Shot
When the election results first became clear, I pointed out that Thatcher’s real victory was not the policies she had put in place or the changes she had made to the UK, it was that the main opposition party had become neo-liberal as well. This meant that her project would continue, no matter who was elected.
Neo-liberalism is successful because it is the only alternative to itself; there is no other option but neo-liberalism. Of course, you can choose between flavors of neo-liberalism (“How fast should we do this project?”, “How cruel should we be to poor people?”, and “How quickly should we divest the public sector and the population of their income and wealth and give it to the rich?”), but all you’re choosing between is how quickly the neo-liberal project (which includes austerity as its logical late form) will proceed.
Other than the process of how actual material circumstances turn into ideology, which then turns into action, nothing is as important as controlling the acceptable matrix of options.
What the Guardian is doing here is attempting to make sure that in response to its loss, Labor becomes even more right-wing, even more dedicated to neo-liberalism. One can equally and easily make the case that Labor was not left wing enough, and that’s why Scotland went SNP (which was more left-wing than Labor); and that’s why left-wing voters didn’t turn out to vote. But that’s not what The Guardian has chosen to do. The Guardian chose to put, on their front page, the assertion that Labor lost because it was not right-wing enough.
Note that most people read only headlines and that the most important headline is the one on the front page. Yes, The Guardian has published articles suggesting that labor wasn’t right-wing, but most people will never read those articles. In “journalism,” as in real estate, the three most important things are location, location, and location.
Do not think that The Guardian’s editors do not know this, or do not understand the consequences of what they are doing. This is their business, and they are good at their business. The conclusion which should be drawn, absent strong evidence otherwise, is that if they are taking an action likely to push Labor right, they know they are doing it, and they want to do it or they wouldn’t do it. (Since, again, writing the opposite article would be easy enough.)
Now note that this system is breaking down on the peripheries. The Scots voted for the SNP, which was very left-wing by current standards. Albertans recently voted for the Canadian New Democratic Party, the most left-wing party in Canada, which the establishment never thought stood a chance of winning, and which ran on (among other things) increasing the corporate tax rate.
These are glimmers: sparks and little more. But they and the rise of other third parties, including ones I would argue are failing (like Syriza), indicate that the establishment is losing control of the democratic process; their framing is not sufficient.
Given an opportunity to vote for what appears to be a real alternative to the status quo (as opposed to a fake alternative like Labor under Millibrand), many people are starting to do so. This isn’t limited to the left-wing, mind you. UKIP, the anti-immigrant, essentially-fascist party in the UK got over 10 percent of the vote.
In Scotland’s independence referendum, the young voted for independence–it was the pensioner class that kept Scotland in the union.
The winds are shifting, and opportunities are arising. Many people in the core nations know that their lives are getting worse, and they are looking for political options to change that. Note that many of them aren’t that fussy–as in the 1930s, this doesn’t have to head towards anything good. A man on horseback who promises jobs and security and to stop bailing out bankers could easily take power in many countries.
Nor is the time quite here yet for major change, I think. Give it five to ten years, for simple demographic reasons. The new generations must rise, the old generations must get older, and in many cases, die, in order for change to be possible beyond the margins.
Nothing lasts forever: no regime, no form of government, no ideology. Neo-liberalism has gone from middle-aged to old, but still clings to power with an iron gauntlet. But concealed beneath that gauntlet is a shaky hand.
The time is soon. The young, even most of the middle-aged, will see it. Whether that time leads to a better world, or a worse one, is yet to be determined. Pick your sides.
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Jeff Wegerson
Some paper, maybe the Guardian, made the mistake of using an old version of this ploy. The headline read, “Labor Needs to Move Back to the Center.” In that version of things, the so-called center was always to the right of Labor. But now Labor is so far to the right that, especially people like me, and very possibly a lot of ordinary people recognize that the actual center now resides to the left of Labor. So my initial gut reaction to the headline was, yes that’s correct. Then I asked myself, but why would the Guardian, in my view pretty right wing, suggest that? Oh, yeah, someone there is still using old tropes.
Tom W Harris
Judging by the sudden (if temporary) TPP derailment, the system may be breaking down here in the USA as well. As well it should.
During every election the Democrats move to the right. Then for the next election, they examine prior results. If they previously won, they say, “See? Ya gotta move to the right.” So they move to the right.
But if they previously lost, they say, “See? We didn’t move far enough to the right.” So they move to the right.
Funny how that works. That is, funny for them, and profitable too. For the rest of us, not so much.
ibaien
anecdote, not data: my partner and i are both nearing 30, children of the upper middle class, well-educated and not carrying any student loan debt. we’re also grossly underpaid, overworked, and nowhere near feeling confident enough in the future to think about having kids. virtually all of our cohort is in the same boat – the few who ‘made it’ are the grade-grubbing, single-minded strivers (they’re financially doing ok, but miserable and generally single – no time for relationships). neither party is offering anything close to a compelling narrative of how we’re going to afford raising children, let alone educating them, let alone our own retirement. if a fascist rode up and promised to allay those fears, i’d be tempted to listen – and i was raised a red diaper baby. it’s getting grim out there.
EmilianoZ
The power of neoliberalism resides not so much on its power to frame itself as the only option as on its power to punish countries that stray from it. That was the lesson of France 1981. France elected Mitterrand in 1981. He started implementing real left-wing policies we would now find completely inconceivable (such a nationalizing banks). He even put a few communists in his government. But France soon received such a lashing from the Forces of the Market that within a year or two Mitterrand had to change course. At the time the French called it “rigueur” (rigor). We would now call that “austerity”. The lesson was not lost on left-wing parties in other western democracies. Even if we were able to elect some hypothetical real left-wing party in power, the main question would remain. How are you gonna prevent the Forces of the Market from destroying your economy?
subgenius
ibaien
if a fascist rode up and promised to allay those fears, i’d be tempted to listen
Then you are an entitled jerk, and part of the problem.
Grow some balls.
ibaien
grow some balls and what, exactly? go out and start ripping up cobblestones to throw at riot police? it’s real easy to shout aux barricades! on the internet… look, i understand your sentiment, but i also understand that there is a really fundamental human need for stability – especially when you get old enough to start thinking on a raising-children timeframe. i’ll be thrilled to vote for bernie in the primaries, and equally sad when his campaign crashes and burns.
subgenius
It’s not up to me to decide for you, but if you come up in support of fascists that make YOUR personal existence better, don’t be surprised if somebody with more humanity takes you down hard.
subgenius
Also, it smacks of idiocy to believe that anybody offering solutions in that vein actually offers solutions.
Empower yourself. Learn to grow, heal, fight, and get by with less.
Plus face it, having kids is running a high chance of dooming them to a life of strife – so WHY do you want them? Because “it’s time” ? WHO is it time for? Your own self-centered view of what YOU want? Not a defensible position.
ibaien
*shrug* we can’t all be as selfless as you, i guess. my only point, which ian already covered, is that the left really needs to do a better job of guiding us out of this mess or they’re going to lose a generation.
Mandos
Yep, it’s a question of governance. It’s the tightrope that e.g. Syriza has been attempting to walk. In a world where governments are self-bound by neoliberal chains, with steep price tags for trying to break them, how do you find a large enough population willing to pay the price? If France can’t do it in the 80s, then who can?
Ian Welsh
The US certainly can. China is now at the point where it could. A coalition of a few countries could do it. The EU almost certainly could, if there was agreement (nor is Britain’s agreement necessary, really just Germany France and a couple of the northerners.)
Also, you have to plan for the resistance and backlash. We now know what they will do to try and fuck you up in a way that Mitterand did not. It wasn’t necessarily easier in the 80s, because in the 80s the penalty for NOT doing it was less.
While Argentina and Venezuela have been hammered for not cooperating, the same is not true for all South Am. countries, including, I might add, Cuba, which has a remarkable standard of living for a country which is under massive embargo and which has no natural resources to speak of.
(That’s not to say Cuba is great, but given all their disads, their relative success suggests that more is possible than many claim. A country with more resources could do better. Multiple countries could do even better if they worked together.)
All systems end, the people who can’t see the weaknesses of neo-liberalism are as blind as those who can’t see its strengths and enforcement systems (and the former are far more numerous than the latter these days.)
BDBlue
In that way, I guess, TPP can be seen as a good sign – that they are trying to lock in the mechanisms for reinforcing neoliberalism beyond country borders out of fear that sovereign governments might at some point turn against it. Of course, if it passes, then that potentially is a huge set back for sparks of progress ever actually catching flame (unless it’s so draconian that it actually triggers a significant backlash in countries that can effectively revolt).
BDBlue
Adding to my last comment, the two things that seem to be true about most of our elites are that they are – 1) stupid; and 2) mean. While that mostly sucks, it also means that they often overreach and are probably bound to screw up so badly that they can’t recover, which would be good news, assuming we survive it.
kj1313
TPP isn’t dead yet since they are trying reach an agreement letting a bunch of corresponding bills get an up and down vote. I do agree with Ian that the masses knows something is rotten with the state of affairs but whether they can build a sustained political movement is something that remains to be seen. If not things will continue to break down until there is a flash point.
larry
Neil, you are wrong. There Is an Alternative. It is known as MMT aka Modern Monetary Theory. It is a well-worked out macroeconomic theory that can be substituted for the neoclassical economic paradigm. MMT actually describes how the economic system we live in really works. It has an illustrious history, building on the work of Robert Malthus (effective demand), Keynes, Abba Lerner (functional finance), Wynne Godley, Georg Knapp, Mitchell-Innes, Hyman Minsky, and others. It shows exactly where and why the neoclassical econoic paradigm must fail economically, even though it might be propped up via political and other means.
One of the centers of this paradigm is UMKC. Another is Bill Mitchell’s research group in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Tehir respective blogs are New Economic Perspectives and Billy blog, respectively.
“Neo-liberalism is successful because it is the only alternative to itself; there is no other option but neo-liberalism.”
Neoliberalism, the political wing of the neoclassical economic paradigm, has been so successful because it forms part of what could be called the Revolt of the Elites, topics covered by the late historian, Christopher Lash, in his posthumous The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, and the macroeconomist, John Smithin, in his book subtitled, The Revenge of the Rentiers and the Threat to Democracy, both published in 1996. The argument could be summarized in a pithy phrase: they see themselves, not necessarily consciously, as taking back what was once theirs, which they feel had been illegitimately taken from them.
Irrespective of lash’s and Smithin’s arguments, There Is a Viable Alternative and it is MMT.
David
Che Guevara is reported to have said that the 1954 CIA backed coup
against Arbenz in Guatemala was what convinced him that peaceful
change was not possible in Latin America. Similarly, I wonder if the experience
of Syriza will convince others like Podemas that honest negotiation with the EU
is not possible.
markfromireland
@Ian
Mandos
Via a comment thread on CT, I come across this interesting Guardian CiF piece:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/14/working-class-tories-are-not-just-turkeys-voting-for-christmas
So yes, fine, this article is about mourning the failure of Labour, and a lot of you are well beyond that. But its core point in general I think is quite valid. The English-speaking left-wing — the economic left, at least — has lost the ability to talk in emotional terms, about what people get from conformity, from status-seeking, etc., based on a belief that merely having an expressing correct ideas, based on a calculation of material self-interest of working classes, is what suffices to get ballot box mobilization.
And when it doesn’t work…
Mandos
Please note that I am not saying that Labour did that. But the only party that succeeded that had a (comparatively) left-wing agenda, SNP, did so by explicitly creating solidarity around the feeling that the English voters were hopelessly hostile to Scotland. ie, they cracked the emotional code.
mm
@subgenius
“Plus face it, having kids is running a high chance of dooming them to a life of strife – so WHY do you want them?”
Having kids is a essential human thing to do. Asking someone to justify having kids is questioning their basic humanity. Some genius you are.
Mandos
I do not believe s/he claimed to be a genius, but rather a subgenius.
subgenius
@mm
Pull the wool over yout own eyes & relax in the safety of your own delusions
Z
I believe that our rulers’ control over the political landscape is decreasing.
I don’t believe that the UK newspaper headline is proof of that though. The media has been trying to push the population to accept neo-liberal/neo-conservative choices for a long time now … at least as long as I’ve became politically aware. And just because they are trying to manipulate us is not necessarily a sign of their desperation. They’re just using the same tactics that they’ve been successful utilizing before.
The proof will be in what the people do, not what they want us to do. We know what they want us to do: obey.
Z
DD
@mm Then by all means keep popping out kids. Have fun watching your kids and grandkids fighting over the few resources that are left in 40 years.
markfromireland
Read in full: It’s vital to know why Labour lost – yet more so to know why the Tories won | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian
Ian Welsh
I don’t think it is surprising that Conservatives voters think of themselves as good decent people voting for good decent politicians (or, at least, more decent than the alternatives).
I would be shocked were it otherwise.
I mean, most Dems who voted for Obama think he is a good, decent man who shares their values.
Most people do not think of themselves as villains, whether they are or not.
Mandos
But the point of MFI’s posted article (and the one I posted above) is not that Tory voters think that they’re good, decent people, it’s that they consciously choose the consciously-presented center-to-far right imperialistic tendency for positive, optimistic, forward-thinking reasons. They don’t think of themselves as the good, decent people standing athwart history shouting “stop”, they think of themselves as the good, decent people who are voting Cameron-for-PM for a brighter, fairer, more positive future, which is what they see in the conservative platform and self-presentation.
The woman in the article I posted mentions that her working-class Tory mother thought that she “was against everything”. Most people are not interested in voting for the harbingers of outrage, until they are personally outraged, on their own.
Ian Welsh
The voters for Thatcher thought essentially the same thing: that they were creating a new country. They were right. The same is true of Harper in Canada, or Reagan in America “Morning in America”.
The simplest cross-tab on the post-election polling was that voting Conservative correlated most strongly with how well people were doing economically. This isn’t rocket science: for most of the people who voted for Cameron, Cameron’s policies are working.
Because of First past the post, Cameron does not need to be good for the majority of the people, only enough to get a majority.
I am not quite sure exactly what it is people are arguing about. Do I need to write a post on minimum working majorities or creating constituencies or disempowering opposition?
I suppose I do.
Mandos
I think that might start a good discussion, actually.
What I’m arguing with is what I’m always arguing with, and what I was arguing with in one of the previous threads: a tendency among leftists to think that what is missing a straightforward presentation of the Desiderata in terms of (obvious, of course) class self-interest. But then we are confronted with the spectacle of “turkeys voting for Christmas”. And become frustrated — and start looking for pied pipers. (The latest to face the accusation is Syriza — I find the attitude really frustrating, that their difficulties and, yes, missteps at best make their electoral victory worse than useless and, not far from that, the accusation that they were class traitors all along…)
CMike
Mandos,
Syriza ran on the fanciful promise of achieving debt and austerity relief, staying in the EU, and maintaining the Euro as the currency which meant if they could not deliver an ultimatum Greece was going to stay in the EU and keep the Euro but there wasn’t going to be anywhere near the necessary debt relief. Now if Syriza had sounded too rad it probably wouldn’t have come to power this year. If Tsipras et al. had staked out the position of debt and austerity relief or Grexit, however, Syriza would have been poised to come to power and when that day came the leadership might have been able to address the crisis through negotiation with the Brussels/Frankfurt (the CB) seats of EU power or by exercising the conditional mandate for withdrawal it would have won.
The Anglo-American left needs to stake out a bold position in defiance of neo-liberalism, the free coinage of silver, say. Well maybe scratch that one as slightly anachronistic. Instead, how about the left gets behind something like a Universal Basic Income (i.e., one for all citizens, one with the NHS/Social Security/Medicare as its template), be willing to lose with it in the short run but introduce it to seep into the the consciousness of the body politic all the while developing and advancing economic and moral justifications for it.
You can see how powerful the threat of a $15/hr minimum wage movement has been on the corporate elite with the recent Walmart concession and that without any Democratic leadership supporting it. Obama tried to short circuit any meaningful progress on that front by arguing for a $10.65/hr minimum by some distant day. The left must embrace an actual and meaningful policy to rally around.
Bernie Sanders’ domestic agenda may be bold and explicit enough to serve as a rallying point- at least if he can get it down to three to five bullet points. What will be crucial is when his candidacy goes down will his followers stick by the agenda and ignore Sanders call for unifying behind the winner of the Democratic nomination without the eventual nominee making explicit commitments to adopt his policies and then, in following election cycles, make the adoption of that agenda a condition of their support for candidates in Democratic primaries and general elections .
I’m just not getting why you think “a straightforward presentation of the Desiderata in terms of (obvious, of course) class self-interest” is not Step One toward winning over the public. I will grant you it might not be the way to get a stable full of Democratic party careerists elected in the next election, but I don’t know why those of us on the left keep getting suckered into adopting that as an overriding objective.
markfromireland
For what passes as the “left” to have any hope of surviving let alone suceeding they would first have to find out what the people whose interests they purport to have at heart actually want. They would then have to take that information on board and act upon it.
Fortunately that’s not going to happen.
mfi
markfromireland
Ian to my surprise I find myself agreeing with Mandos. I know plenty of people who vote (small ‘c’) conservative precisely because they believe that doing so will achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. I happen to think that in the UK at least that that desire is likely to be thwarted not least because the party that calls itself the Conservative Party is in fact a radical right-wing party intent upon drastic social change rather than a conservative one. If you look at Cameron’s stated agenda it’s far more radical than anything that Keith Joseph who was the fons et origo of most of Thatcher’s policies ever dreamt of.
mfi
JustPlainDave
Where did you see cross tabs for the exit polls? I’ve been looking everywhere but haven’t found them. A link would be much appreciated.
Ian Welsh
I’ll see if I can find it later today. Came up on my twitter stream during the period after the election, but I didn’t save it. (Should have, but I try and keep my favorites (which are my “saves”) to a minimum so I can actually find stuff later on.)
Cross tabs is probably an overstatement: but there were a lot of correlative questions and that one really stood out as predictive.
Ian Welsh
Yes, MFI, but that doesn’t describe the Conservatives in the UK, as you yourself pointed out.
I am hardly unfamiliar with the mindset: before the merger of the Canadian Alliance with the old Progressive Conservative party, I was a Progressive Conservative. I doubt Mandos ever was. Shit, I am a constitutional monarchist, not a Republican.
I have a good deal of sympathy for what we call Red Tories (largely extinct.)
My point is simply this: if there is no left wing party regarded as viable to vote for, people will not vote. The data on this is clear: the more left-wing people are in places like the US and the UK, the less they vote. There is no party which aligns with their value.
The idea that the left doesn’t know what left-wing voters want has some validity, but all of that depends on who you’re classing as left-wing. Hilary Clinton and most Democrats don’t qualify in my books, for example.
In Canada now we’ve had two wave elections where the NDP (the third party) did far better than expected. They were available, they were left wing. When people decided they wanted what the NDP wanted, they were there. In Alberta, as I pointed out, they ran on raising taxes, and they won.
If you don’t have anyone available to vote for, you don’t capture any potential energy which becomes expressed.
SNP in Scotland, according to the SNP’s own leader, did not win because people wanted Scottish independence, it won because they were far more opposed to austerity than Labor was. Now just winning the SNP seats wouldn’t have stopped Cameron, but you can’t tell me Labor wouldn’t have been FAR happier. And there is reason to believe that had they been more left wing more English left-wingers would have gotten off their asses and voted for them.
If you want to compete for the conservative vote, fine. But perhaps left-wing parties should be trying to mobilize the left-wing vote (and some “centrists”), not people who would vote for someone like Cameron?
I spent over a decade of my life studying electoral politics and the demographics thereof. I have a good idea what left-wing people want, and I know that the key to a left-wing victory is getting people who usually don’t vote to vote.
I am also aware that major parties in many democracies are completely captured by monied interests and I know why. I studied this in depth. I am familiar with how media consolidation has narrowed the acceptable spectrum of opinions: I know what happened to members of the media who were, for example, foolish enough to oppose the Iraq war.
Oligarchical societies make it very difficult to even have a viable left-wing party because oligarchs use their money to take it over. This is very much in the interests of the officials and candidates of the party, in cold-hard ways that any conservative should understand. (You will have more money during your career and after your career. Your family and friends will be taken care of. This cannot be credibly disputed, the data is rock solid.)
Mandos operates within the acceptable policy matrix created by this system. My long term argument has been that success requires not accepting the ground rules set by people who are, in essence, our enemies.
As for the left vs. the right: your actual ethics are not served by what passes for the right in the Anglo world, or increasingly, in much of Europe. You are not being offered Red Toryism: you are being offered neo-liberalism and neo-imperialism: interventionism, war and economic stagnation for huge minorities of your population. That causes social pathologies within your own societies (remember the Swedish riots? I do) that no small-c conservative should want.
Poverty and hopelessness are a scourge. A small-c conservative does not want them. They want people out there, working, raising families, convinced that there is a place for them in society. Conservatives I have respect for, which includes people like Bismark, understood that.
And small-c conservatives despise unearned wealth minus noblesse oblige.
Mandos
CMike:
Samaras said something very interesting (and appalling) recently:
http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/04/25/nd-leader-samaras-exit-from-the-crisis-still-possible-without-any-sacrifices/
There’s no good way to interpret this statement, and while it was very revealing, hardly anyone remarked on it. How could it possibly be the case that Greece could “exit from the crisis” without any sacrifices? What he is saying is that he would have enabled the extend-and-pretend to continue, while bending the targets with the tacit collusion of the IMF and the ECB and the Eurogroup.
That is, what he is saying is that he would have obtained more flexibility to submerge Greece’s crisis into the larger structural problems of the Eurozone, in the manner that Spain and Portugal are being given temporary reprieves by some tinkering-around-the-edges, in order to save their political establishments from getting immediately Pasokked. He would have been able to do so, because he would have been able to give the “institutions” political cover.
The election of a genuinely left-wing party under these conditions almost by definition robs this cozy arrangement of political cover. If Samaras were still in power in Greece, he would have continued to provide that political cover.
So now you’re telling me that Syriza should have waited another election cycle or three to become “poised” to take over under political conditions that would have assured their ability to remain intellectually consistent. Colour me deeply skeptical. The Eurozone is already moving to try to blunt objectors for another cycle, while retaining the same overall political flaws and official neoliberal posture. Tsipras had to make hay while the sun shone, and now more people know exactly what is holding the Eurozone together — in a way that most people previously didn’t.
It is more or less on the same basis that I criticize this:
As an aside, in an electoral political system organized in a hierarchy which politicians must ascend in increasing influence, not considering the interests of politicians in their careers is folly. When you have the power to reorganize the system on other lines, it may make sense.
What you are talking about has been a literal graveyard of left-wing ideas, at least in modern times. It’s all well enough to say that great leaders change the feelings of the people, but if that is the case, then the progressive left (at least as represented by this blog’s commentariat) doesn’t understand how leaders are produced today. They are busy producing the Bryans of yesteryear. It displays an appalling naivete about how people react to ideas, which doesn’t necessarily follow a logic of class self-interest.
Mandos
Oh, I am absolutely happy if someone wishes to break the “ground rules”. The ground rules suck. My only argument is that despite all the effort you (construed broadly, to include many participants here and elsewhere) have quite evidently put into it, you have not come up with a credible design for a lever that will move those rules.
I generally agree with the reasons you see for the SNP political dominance in Scotland. Scottish voters are anti-austerity and found a vehicle to voice their demand. What will happen after is anyone’s guess. Perhaps an anti-austerity party will rise in England, under the best case scenario, because that’s clearly not the direction in which English Labour seems to be going. So the anti-austerity Scots managed to find the lever to change Scottish electoral politics — a sense that there was no hope in achieving this in concert with UK-level parties and English voters.
Electoral politics as it exists currently follows a particular logic. The “ground rules” that create the “acceptable policy matrix”, if you like. Those rules interact with a kind of emotional logic in sectors of the electorate. The neoliberal right puts lots of energy in to understanding that emotional logic. Occasionally, anti-neoliberals get lucky, or crack the code, but most of the time, they seem to invest very little effort in understanding why someone might e.g. knowingly be unaffected by inheritance taxes and yet oppose them, just to pick one combination I’ve seen.
Or why it is that there is a big de facto fiscal transfer from Massachusetts to Mississippi, but Mississippi voters may be less happy about it than Massachusetts voters, as expressed in their voting behaviour.
CMike
Mandos writes:
I just can’t figure out how the two of us can be seeing the reverse of what each other is seeing. I’ll go with the thesis in the documentary “Lifting the Veil,” [LINK] the Democratic Party has played the histoical role of being “the graveyard of social movements,” instead of your theory that it’s the upsetting of the Democratic apple cart in the United States that leads to the internment of lefty proposals.
At first glance the Obama trajectory might have seemed like William Jennings Bryan’s or Ross Perot’s but actually he had been groomed and vetted by the Daily Machine, he was spotlighted by the Democratic Party in 2004 as their national convention’s keynote speaker because he could be counted on to deliver the Tweedledum message why can’t we all, Dems and Republicans, get along?, and he would go on to receive more financial services money in 2007 than Hillary Clinton. The idea that Obama was a change agent is something no one should have believed in.
You mock Bryan’s meteoric ascendancy in the Democratic Party but his is one of the few imaginable templates for turning the Democratic Party around. He did not deliver a party conformist’s message at the 1896 Democratic convention but his own populist one which Bryan had been traveling around the country promoting in the months before the convention and which was an attack on the policies of Democratic Party’s current standard bearer, the sitting President of the United states Grover Cleveland. Now granted, Bryan did short circuit the rise of the Peoples(/Populist) Party but, in retrospect, it’s hard to see back at the turn to the twentieth century how, in any event, without an assassination or a Great Depression, Big Business was ever going to find itself challenged by the political forces.
Instead, Mandos, your insight seems to be it’s easier to get a neo-liberal Democrat nominated and elected to high office than someone on the left. When exactly do you recall the spokespeople for a left leaning social movement delivering an “or else” message to a Democratic pol? Perhaps that’s what went on in the Oval Office in the hours following MLK Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech and that was the message Gay Rights activists have been sending for the last several years, if they can be considered left leaning, but, otherwise, what left leaning social movements have refused to subordinate themselves to the short run electoral interests of Democratic candidates? well, also, there are those members of the Green Party who nearly polled 3% in a national election once.
So what exactly is this specific sophisticated approach you’re recommending for creating the wide spread emotional consciousness among voters you think is the sine qua non for the left to achieve electoral success? I mean, given that you reject the notion of special interest groups delivering ultimatums to Democratic general election candidates and naive firebrands proposing dramatic alternative policy initiatives.
Z
“(Obama) would go on to receive more financial services money in 2007 than Hillary Clinton..
I’m not sure if there is a difference between “financial services money” and “Wall Street money” but, if not and this Reuter’s article is accurate, then you are incorrect:
“At the end of 2007, Clinton topped the cash list from Wall Street with $6.3 million. Obama was third, behind Giuliani, CRP data shows. McCain was a distant sixth.”
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/06/05/analysis-shares-obama-idUKNOA53525520080605
Not to pick on the writer of the above post because this probably doesn’t pertain to them, but I’ve recently been reading a lot of the Hillary backers talking up that Obama received more Wall Street money than she did in the 2008 elections as some sort of evidence that she is not a courtesan for Wall Street. Well, it would appear that if that is the truth that it only happened because it became obvious that Obama was going to win the nomination.
Z
CMike
Your source looks definitive Z. which would mean I was wrong (but it wasn’t because of any Hillary love). Guess I had filed away some incomplete information at some point [LINK].
I do remember some of the accounting as the story unfolded was a bit complicated: