Back From a Break
And what do I find?
Precisely what I left.
It is a remarkable fact that the current election here in America is likely to produce as its protagonists the two least liked candidates. It is far less remarkable how they would have been selected: both Trump and Clinton started the race – if you can recall that far back – with the greatest name recognition. America apparently takes a while to see through the acts of well known players.
Yet their routes to dominance have been equally remarkable in their difference. Trump has mounted an insurgency that has toppled the Republican establishment. By the time November rolls around I think we will be in the midst of a complete and very open break-up of the Republicans. This is simply the end point, or the logical conclusion, of the steady re-apraisal of what it means to be a Republican. The origins of which are coterminous with the rise of the hard right Californian faction with Reagan as its figurehead.
Reagan was an ideologue, his personal views on things like Social Security – which he argued was a communist method for undermining good old American self-reliance – set him out of step with the American middle class, and were it not for the 1970’s and its economic turmoil, stagflation, and oil crises, his extremism – nor his racism – would never have been acceptable. His skin deep Hollywood style demeanor and solutions were simply an overlay beneath which sat the manifestly anti-democratic machinations of a rising corporately funded and manned effort to subvert government and place it in the hands of big business.
I wish I could say that the Democrats fought back and called out that big business attack on democracy, but I cannot. Instead, scared by the immense popularity of Reagan’s charisma, which people still seem to conflate with the popularity of his policies, the Democrats cut their long time allies adrift, abandoned economic progressivism, and, under Clinton, became a milder version of Republicanism.
Neoliberal political economy has since run as a common thread between the two parties. Free trade, pro-business deregulation, anti-unionism, anti-government austerity policies, and the like became in various ways the platform of both parties, with the ugly stand-off in Congress we now witness entirely due to differences on social issues.
Trump’s ascendancy is simply a recognition that the post-Reagan GOP has never really been committed to its own propaganda. It advocated that its policies would provide a prosperous future with opportunity for all. In actuality those policies were designed to benefit the wealthy few and big business alone. This contradiction has been laid bare by the stagnation of wages and the prospect of a further decline in fortunes for the very people who provided its most loyal voter base. Those voters, not unsurprisingly, are rejecting the establishment as a consequence. Hence the turmoil and the likelihood of a re-alignment on the right in our politics.
In contrast Clinton is the candidate of the establishment. She is steeped in neoliberal ideology. An ideology that produced welfare reform and threw millions into the working poor, which deregulated the banks leading to the recent crisis, which passed NAFTA, a device to ship manufacturing jobs abroad, which was the origin of our bloated prison population because of its attitudes towards crime, and which was committed to a fiscal conservatism that failed to undo the rising tide of inequality unleashed by Reagan.
Clinton is a more reliable friend of business that Trump could ever be. Her pro-business credentials are worthy of a candidate of the right in most any other western nation. She is an avid supporter of the current round of pro-business trade agreements, and her affiliation with Wall Street is a legendary example of the interbreeding between big finance and Washington policy makers. As a leader of the left she is a fraud. As a conduit for corporate control she is perfect.
I find all this ironic.
The party associated with conservatism is in chaos and likely to reinvent itself in some updated way. The party associated with the progressive agenda is stolidly in the grip of an establishment which owes its soul to its corporate money backers.
The one offers us chaos and a neo-fascist policy suite. The other offers us a bland attachment to all that is worst in our recent past. The conservatives are radical and the radicals conservative.
It’s all very confusing and not a little disconcerting. The one thing I can say is that big business will manage to retain its grip on power. After all, the extent of lobbying means that our elections no longer matter: the minute the politicians return to Washington after November they will be reminded who owns them.
Hint: it’s not you or me.
