Just before the New York primary, the New York Times (4/16/16) published an op-ed by Michael Lind called “Trumpism and Clintonism Are the Future.” It’s a good guide to how the wishful thinking of the pundit class will likely lead them to misread the clear message of the 2016 elections.
Michael Lind: “Trumpism and Clintonism will define conservatism and progressivism in America.” (photo: New America)
Lind is a former conservative who found a new home in the world of centrist punditry as a critic of the right. He’s now at the New America foundation, which he helped found, a think tank whose top funders include the Gates Foundation, Google chair Eric Schmidt and the US State Department.
The thesis of Lind’s essay is that “Trumpism represents the future of the Republicans and Clintonism the future of the Democrats.” People who think the GOP will “soon return to free-market, limited government orthodoxy are mistaken”—as are “those who believe that the appeal of Sen. Bernie Sanders to the young represents a repudiation of the center-left synthesis shared by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” No, says Lind: “In one form or another, Trumpism and Clintonism will define conservatism and progressivism in America.”
For Lind, “Trumpism” is a “socially conservative, economically populist” movement that took over the Republican Party long before the emergence of Donald Trump: “The Republicans of 2016 rely for their votes on the Southern white and Northern white working-class constituencies that were once the mainstays of the other party,” and so they’ve pushed aside “the traditional conservative wing focused on business and limited government.”
As anyone who follows US politics should recognize, it’s absurd to present the Republican Party of 2016 as somehow no longer a pro-business party. Lind refers to the supposedly passe “Chamber of Commerce boosterism” of the old-style Reagan-led GOP; if you look at how the actual US Chamber of Commerce rates politicians, it’s obvious they are much more in tune with Republicans than even establishment Democrats. House Speaker Paul Ryan gets an 89 percent rating from the Chamber, for instance, while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is rated at 26 percent; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is 92 percent in line with the Chamber, Minority Leader Harry Reid is 38 percent.
As for “limited government,” Ryan’s budget blueprint, taken literally, would eliminate the entire non-military discretionary federal budget by 2050 (FAIR.org, 4/7/16). It’s hard to limit government more than that.
Clintonism is a “synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism.” (photo: New York Times)
Lind’s take on the Democratic Party is no less fantastical: “Today’s Democratic base is, to simplify somewhat, an alliance of Northern, Midwestern and West Coast whites from the old Rockefeller Republican tradition with blacks and Latinos.” This argument—that the Democrats, not Republicans, are now the party of the affluent—has been made in the Times before, and it was no less spurious then (FAIR.org, 10/9/15). It’s not hard to look up exit polls and see how various income groups voted; Barack Obama in 2012, for example, won by getting 60 percent of the votes of people who made less than $50,000; Mitt Romney won people who made more than $50,000, 53 percent/45 percent.
But this fantasy that the Democratic Party is now an alliance of affluent whites with voters of color allows Lind to advocate for Democrats to steer sharply to the right on economic issues:
The success of the Democrats in winning the popular vote for the presidency in every election since 1992 except 2004 has convinced most Democratic strategists that they don’t need socially conservative, economically liberal Reagan or Wallace Democrats any more…. The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.
Note that this assumes (falsely) that people of color are not even interested in economics, let alone “economically liberal”: The issues that these “core constituencies” favor range “from criminal justice to immigration enforcement.” This is how Lind argues for “the centrality of identity politics, rather than progressive economics, to the contemporary Democratic Party.”
It’s true that the leading Democratic presidential candidate—Hillary Clinton—tends to stress identity politics over progressive economics. As Lind quotes Clinton on the campaign trail: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?”
But that is not to say that Democratic voters, white or otherwise, are uninterested in progressive economics. When asked by NBC News (1/12/16) to name the most important issue facing the nation, Democratic voters’ top choice was “jobs and the economy” (29 percent), followed by healthcare (17 percent), the environment (15 percent) and education (13 percent). (For Republicans, the top choice was terrorism, picked by 34 percent.)
And Democratic voters’ views on jobs and the economy contrasts starkly with the approach of Republican voters. In another NBC News poll (10/30/15), Democrats and Republicans were asked the best way to spur economic growth. Seventy-three percent chose “spend more on education and infrastructure, raise taxes”—as opposed to “lower taxes, cut government spending,” picked by 76 percent of Republicans. It’s hard to find here the “pro-business, finance-friendly” constituency of Lind’s imagination.
Polling on the specific issues that separate Clinton from Sanders doesn’t provide much support for Clintonism as the future of the Democratic Party—or even its present. For example, 81 percent of Democrats (along with 58 percent of the public at large) support single-payer healthcare—a system that Clinton insists “will never, ever come to pass.”
So how does Lind prognosticate that “the future of the Democrats will be Clintonism—Hillary Clintonism, that is, a slightly more progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism”?
Part of it relies on a cartoon version of the Sanders movement as uninterested in issues beyond class: “On the social and racial issues that are important to today’s Democratic base, it is Mr. Sanders, not Mrs. Clinton, who has had to modify his message,” he says:
At the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Sanders the democratic socialist focused in the manner of a single issue candidate almost exclusively on themes of class, inequality and political corruption. But because he is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, he has had to put greater emphasis on other issues, including racial disparity in policing and sentencing and the environment and immigration.
This being the 21st century, of course, you can look up what Sanders, as well as Clinton, were saying as they launched their campaigns. Unsurprisingly, Sanders had a major emphasis on climate change in his announcement speech, with three paragraphs of a detailed climate agenda. It was Sanders, not Clinton, who brought up racial disparities in his speech—not in sentencing, but in employment: “Youth unemployment is over 17 percent and African-American youth unemployment is much higher than that.” Sanders, telling his personal story, stressed as he usually does that his father was an immigrant. And he concluded his speech with the promise of a country “where every person, no matter their race, their religion, their disability or their sexual orientation, realizes the full promise of equality that is our birthright as Americans.”
The reason that Lind cites as “most important of all” for Clintonism being the future is his assertion that an attraction to Sanders-style social democracy is something you grow out of:
It would be a serious mistake to assume that the growing sympathy of many of today’s millennials for the concept of democratic socialism as embodied by Mr. Sanders will translate into a social democratic America in the 2030s or 2050s. Half a century ago, as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Age of Reagan, many of the hippies of the ’60s became, in effect, the yuppies of the ’80s — still socially liberal, but with new concerns about government spending, now that they were paying taxes and mortgages.
Generations tend to stay in their ideological lanes rather than drifting rightward with age, as the stereotype suggests—and as Lind’s theory requires. (Chart: Pew Center)
Actually, the political attitudes people have as young adults have a powerful impact throughout their lives. As Pew’s Drew Desilver (7/9/14) noted:
On an individual level, of course, many people’s political views evolve over the course of their lives. But academic research indicates not only that generations have distinct political identities, but that most people’s basic outlooks and orientations are set fairly early on in life. As one famous longitudinal study of Bennington College women put it, “through late childhood and early adolescence, attitudes are relatively malleable…with the potential for dramatic change possible in late adolescence or early adulthood. [B]ut greater stability sets in at some early point, and attitudes tend to be increasingly persistent as people age.”
Or as Amanda Cox observed in the New York Times (7/7/14): “It’s no longer true, as it was in the 1960s, that Republican vote share increases linearly with age.”
As a gauge of the impact the Sanders campaign will have on the cohort born around the end of the 20th century, Obama—himself a powerful generational influence—beat Clinton by 20 percentage points among voters under 30 in Iowa in 2008. In 2016, Sanders beat Clinton by 70 percentage points (Atlantic, 2/2/16).
Such gaps have recurred again and again throughout this campaign. In New York, exit polls indicated that Sanders got the votes of 81 percent of voters aged 24 and younger. In California, 71 percent of those under 30 say they intend to vote for Sanders (LA Times, 4/24/16).
These voting patterns reflect not just a personal attraction to Sanders, but a profound ideological shift among young adults. When Americans aged 18-26 were asked by GOP pollster Frank Luntz (Intercept, 2/24/16), “Which type of political system do you think is the most compassionate?,” 58 percent said socialism. Sixty-six percent said corporate America “embodies everything that is wrong about America.” Accordingly, 31 percent said that Bernie Sanders was the political figure they “like and respect the most”—a figure that rose to 40 percent among the younger half of respondents, aged 18-21. (The corresponding numbers were 11 percent and just 3 percent for Hillary Clinton.)
The idea that such attitudes won’t matter is Lind’s “most important” reason why Clintonism is the future, but it’s really just a just-so story based on Lind’s sense of the way things ought to be. I would suggest that that’s not in fact the real reason he’s so confident in this Clintonist future; rather, it’s the explanation he offers just before that:
The pro-Sanders left objects to the solicitude of the Democratic Party for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the sources of much of its funding. But it is safe to assume that most progressives, when confronted with conservative candidates, will prefer incremental, finance-friendly Clintonism over the right-wing alternative.
Did you catch that? “Most progressives” will choose “incremental, finance-friendly Clintonism”—because the only other choice will be the right. They’ll choose Clintonism, in other words, because they won’t be given any other choice.
There is no doubt that that’s how the Democratic establishment—and the Gateses and the Googles who stand behind it—will try to move forward, once (they hope) the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 is just a bad memory. Sanders, in this view, is a one-of-a-kind candidate, leading youth astray through sheer star power. (“Part of the explanation” for “the appeal of Bernie Sanders,” Lind writes, is that “Mrs. Clinton is less charismatic a candidate than Barack Obama or her husband was.”) Once he exits the stage, Democratic voters will get what they get and they won’t get upset.
As we’ve seen, though, this theory is based on ignoring everything we know about the demographics and attitudes of Democratic voters, particularly young Democratic voters. This suggests that corralling them up again for a Clintonist future is going to be more difficult than Lind and his colleagues in corporate media want to believe.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be followed on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
The words “well-fed white idiot” spring immediately to mind for some reason.
” Democratic voters will get what they get and they won’t get upset.”
“Happy democrats” is clearly the reason democrats keep getting trounced in the mid-terms and are setting themselves up for another walloping in 2018.
Sanders should continue to stage rallies, make speeches and raise money, but he should be frugal about spending it on his own campaign from now on. He should give money to candidates for congress such as Tammy Duckworth, Alan Grayson, Zephyr Teachout, and Russ Feingold, to name a few.
“I like Bernie but will hold my nose and vote for Hillary because she’s more electable.” Millions of well-meaning Dems are voting for Clinton in primaries because of this electability meme.
Truth is, Sanders outperforms Clinton in nearly every poll that pits the two against GOP challengers. Sanders wins more of these November matchups and by wider margins. Source: BernieWorks.com, which tallies the matchups. [Disclosure: my site.]
In April so far, Sanders has won 44 out of 46 matchups against the GOP and lost 2. By contrast, Clinton has won 38, lost 6 and tied 2.
Thus Clinton is failing to win 20 percent of the time against the GOP, going into what could be a most crucial presidential election. Sanders is losing 4 percent and winning 96 percent of the time.
What about point spreads — as in sports, another way to judge performance? In April to date, Sanders’ average margin of victory is 19 points. Clinton’s, 12 points.
Except we are not talking about a basketball tourney but keeping GOP crazies out of the White House. We need absolutely the strongest contender to represent us in November. That would be Sanders.
Nearly 200 total matchups against the GOP in March and April consistently show it.
The sad irony is that people in upcoming primary states are NOT getting the memo. No one is alerting these voters of conscience that Sanders is demonstrably stronger candidate against all three GOP challengers.
Reporters are not reporting it. Bloggers are not blogging it. Pundits are not debating it. TV spots are not proclaiming it. Editorials? Full page ads in the papers? Fuhgeddaboutit.
In other words, Sanders may not get the chance to change American history as president of the United States because well-meaning people who like him better are holding their nose to vote for his measurably weaker primary opponent.
These people could eat their cake and have it too. They could vote for the best candidate AND the strongest, all in one. They just don’t know it.
America will lose, we will all lose as a result. Does that make you want to weep? It should.
If you trust current polls to tell you how voters will feel about Sanders in August, September, October, you’re an idiot. If Sanders had, by some miracle, become the nominee, he would have been trounced beyond anything Hillary would have faced. As I see it, the better numbers Sanders has gotten in the polls against Republicans, has gotten a good deal of attention on the networks. MSNBC speaks constantly of these favorable Sanders numbers. You greatly underestimate Hillary’s strengths. You’re blinded by your biases and hatred.
“You greatly underestimate Hillary’s strengths. You’re blinded by your biases and hatred”
How’s that feeling today?
Wow, this Lind guy is the furthest thing from a Progressive. His column may be wishful thinking, but I get the sense it’s yet another propaganda piece meant to sway public opinion AWAY from progressivism and (back) toward the two-party plutocracy (that’s realizing its days are numbered); more specifically to 2016, AWAY from Sanders and toward Hillary.
Btw, Jim, the Democratic party is absolutely “pro-business, finance-friendly” these days. On that Lind is correct.
Except for Bernie Sanders, compared to the other candidates, Trump is a saint.
TRUMP — OUR ONLY HOPE FOR CHANGE
Whatever the change may be, is it not better then a repeat of bad history, the same old Empire building with no-change Hillary?
I agree with the author. Occupy and the Sanders campaign have raised political consciousness among the under-40 segment of the population. Some of them will no doubt reluctantly vote for Clinton in November, but a large number of them will write in Sanders, vote for an alternative like Jill Stein, or sit out the election. My hope is that millions of them transition into movement politics and continue their political educations by exploring the basic cause of income and wealth inequality, imperial militarism, and unfair trade policies that have stripped America of its manufacturing base—capitalism. We need a new poltiical organization that represents workers’ interests solely and takes no funding from corporations or the rich. The Greens fit this description in many ways, but their platform is reformist. We need a major party whose foundational goal is to spur systemic change.
To be fair, Lind does appear correct on one aspect of Clintonism, presuming he’s the author of the quote you use to caption the second image in this piece: the Clintons do in fact blend “pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism.” This is how the Clintons converted the Democratic Party establishment into the left wing of the corporate party. As anyone who has worked in Corporate America knows, the 1% are overwhelmingly libertarian on “social policy” and neoliberal on “economic policy.” (“Neoliberal” being the ideology holding that Job One for any state is minimally to protect wealth and income inequality, and optimally to increase it.) And that’s why the 1% will side overwhelmingly with Hillary in a contest against Trump. Of course, the fact that Hillary’s unfavorability rating is higher than that of everyone but Trump will cause problems for them … but that’s a minor detail compared to the mathematical problem that has made democracy so unpalatable to Big Money for centuries: 1% << 50%. To paraphrase Hillary's previous employer, "look out for falling voter-participation rates," and major-league vote suppression.
You fail to factor in the causes of Hillary’s high (but not fatally high) un-favorability numbers, which are about 50 – 50. If you consider that party affiliation accounts for at least 75% of her unfavorable numbers, at least another 35% “I believe” is the outcome of 25 years of constant attacks by republicans against her. Attacks which media have been as delighted to promote as her worst enemies. I’ll make reference to a single instance of footage from the Bill Clinton era, shown obsessively by CNN. The footage was shown so constantly that everyone will likely remember it. It shows Clinton in a large crowd shot, walking along, greeting, shaking hands,, etc, but when he comes to Monica, who was waiting in the crowd, he hugs her. This shot was shown so often, by CNN, seeking to implicate and hopefully to increase the likelihood of a successful impeachment, that I once saw them show the same footage, twice in a row. This was the CNN attitude towards Bill and it’s the attitude towards Hillary. I understand that the Sanders crowd can’t see this, blinded as they are with the hatred and bias they feel against Hillary.
In my post, I mistakenly said 75%, when I meant 25%.
Actually, Hillary Clinton is the new face of the Republican party. The Republicans have played the southern strategy, the race card, the abortion card, the gay marriage card and lost on all these social issues.
As their aging, white, rural, evangelical, socially conservative base becomes less and less relevant, the corporate Republicans know it’s time to throw them under the bus.
So, along comes a woman, a strong woman, one who has survived every attack, every insult… a woman who is progressive on all the liberal issues, but very “business friendly,” meaning she won’t do a damned thing to reign in Wall Street and the corporations, won’t do a thing for the middle and working classes, …… Ladies and Gentlemen, I present; Hillary Rodham Clinton!
Aren’t you the deceptive one. It will be easy to interpret most “small” improvements, as no improvements at all. when you know damn well, that your Messiah would also have not done anything to reign in Wall Street and the corporations.