Putting a Progressive Gloss on Neoliberalism

Former Clinton campaign aide and Obama/Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan has a piece up in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas explaining how the centrist Democrats have finally seen the light that their centrist message is not a big hit with voters.  

But try as he might, he just can't hide the bait-and-switch behind a hodgepodge of progressive rhetoric. The fraud of replacing the conservative "New Democrats" with the brand new "New Old Democrats." is exposed right at the start of his piece -- which, as the editors helpfully inform the time-pressed among us, is a "41-minute read."

So after approximately a one-minute read comes this disclaimer about why the New Dems have been acting more like Old Republicans for about the last trillion minutes:

 It turned out to be a 30-year tide, one that shifted the center of political gravity dramatically. From Ronald Reagan’s “[t]he most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” to Bill Clinton’s “[the] era of big government is over,” all the way through the 2012 election, a new consensus shaped by Reagan prevailed. Democratic presidents, Clinton and Barack Obama, surely advocated for and pursued progressive policies, but within limits defined for them, forced to trim their ambition compared with the Great Society and New Deal eras. Republican presidents, meanwhile, aggressively dismantled the progressive scaffolding of those earlier periods. Along the way, economic inequality skyrocketed—and America’s middle class kept losing ground.

If Sullivan right off the bat refuses to take ownership of the Democratic Party's policies and decisions, you can pretty much rest assured that the next 40 minutes will be a slog of blame-gaming, revisionist history and gaslighting. He deprives both Clinton and Obama of any personal agency at all. They were "forced" by those nasty old right-wingers like Pat Buchanan to "trim their ambitions" according to the limits defined for them and not by them. 

At least Sullivan doesn't tack on the standard apologists' trope that "the progressives/left let them down." 

But thankfully, that fickle liberal public is now finally waking up and believing that government can and should make people's lives better.  It's just too bad that the simultaneous epiphany of Jake and his fellow New Old Dems is being so drowned out by the fickle media's addiction to Donald Trump's tweets.

And, Sullivan continues, the media shouldn't really be fretting that the Party is moving too far left, particularly in the direction of de facto Old Dem Bernie Sanders - who, by the way, is as dotty and detail-free as he ever was. That's because you can be a corporate centrist and a progressive at the very same time! Or more accurately, you should be able to sell voters on the notion that you can serve corporations and struggling people at the very same time.

But back to Jake Sullivan's personal epiphany about the pressing need to change, not the actual plutocrat-serving policies of the New Old New Dems, but the message they are selling to voters:

I am obviously not the first person to see these trends or make these points. Others have been advancing this case for a while now. In fact, I have to confess that I did not fully appreciate the need for a more dramatic rethink at the start of the 2016 campaign. I was Hillary Clinton’s senior policy adviser, responsible for developing and rolling out proposals on everything from tax policy to bank regulation. But before that, I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, steeped in the centrist politics of the era. And I had spent the years leading up to the campaign working on foreign policy, traveling the world and learning what was happening “over there” instead of coming to terms with what was going on back here.

That was the apology to Hillary Clinton that all her minions have been issuing in print lately. Jake was in such a Reagan bubble and flitting around the world so much that he was incapable of bursting the Reagan bubble that Hillary herself was helplessly trapped in. Jake let Hillary down, big-time, and now he's reinventing himself as the Great Progressive New Old Dem Hope. He repeats himself, just in case Hillary did not get the message the first time:

 This is not to rebuke the New Democrats of the 1990s. For one thing, the Clinton years, while imperfect, produced greater growth and fairness—with rising wages across the board and particularly strong gains for disadvantaged groups–than anything we’ve seen since. For another, the political constraints of the time were real. Bill Clinton came into office with a big, bold agenda, but the defeat of his health-care plan (remember Hillarycare?) and the walloping he took at the ballot box in the 1994 midterm elections forced him to dial back his ambition and seek more incremental progress where he could find openings.

Sullivan omits the fact that the booming economy of the Clinton years was largely the result of a bubble engendered by an orgy of deregulation: the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking regulations and the passage of telecommunications legislation which enabled the consolidation of the mass media into five or six giant corporate entities. He fails to mention the record poverty soon to become apparent thanks to the 1996 repeal of FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children. And he fails to mention that one reason "Hillarycare" failed was not so much the result of those "Harry and Louise" TV ads, but because Hillary refused any outside input from advocates of single payer health care. Its failure was more the result of bickering between the giant insurance companies and smaller insurance companies and her stubborn penchant for secrecy.

But never mind all that stuff he never even mentioned, Sullivan soothes. Because "we're in a different moment now" and have always to look forward, not backward. Sure, Hillary was wrong to denigrate Bernie Sanders as too pie-in-the-sky. But she was wrong only in her choice of denigrating words, not in the substance of her critique:

 He was offering prescriptions for the world as it once was, not the world as it is and will be. His worldview was rooted in the 1970s; he had little to say on the changing nature of work, the changing character of American families, or the enduring realities of globalization. (For example, his agenda lacked clear plans for dealing with workers in irregular employment relationships, or those dislocated by technological change.)

I must have read that paragraph ten times (adding many wasted minutes to my 41-minute allotment)  and I still couldn't understand what it meant. It finally dawned on me. It doesn't mean anything at all. It simply conveys the same old denigrating message that Bernie is a doddering old dinosaur who wouldn't know a real family if one smacked him in the face. He is so, like,'pre-Reagan 70s and doesn't understand that globalization is a natural phenomenon and, just like the weather, beyond the control of the neoliberal politicians like the Clintons who gladly helped finish what Reagan started.

But my time's a wastin' and so is yours, so I'll skip the fluffy filler and go straight to Sullivan's Platform for the New Old Democrats:

Recognize that the "future of work" is actually "the present of work." (Since it's already a gig economy right this very minute, we have to discuss things like buying into Medicare -- rather than, say, demand single payer coverage for everybody regardless of their employment status. Apparently forgetting that he'd just criticized Bernie for his lack of details, Sullivan writes about worker rights: "If we start from this basic premise ('the future is here') we can figure out the details so we can both promote innovation (my bold) and protect workers."

(This is the same old neoliberal centrism. "Innovation" is code for the profits of big business, which must be protected with the same old enthusiasm causing the increasing stagnation of wages over the past 40 years. Sullivan just cannot quit being a New Dem.)

 The roles and responsibilities of families have changed... People aren’t looking for handouts. These are working adults looking for a fair deal for their participation in the workforce. Hillary raised these challenges incessantly in her speeches, but they didn’t count as part of an “economic message,” because they were seen as soft “family” issues. They’re not. They are core economic issues. 

(Therefore, what families need are not single payer health care or subsidized  child care, but rather just a little "help" paying for these exorbitant costs out of their own pockets. This is Classic Neoliberalism 101. There will be no end to the privatization of everything and everything for a profit.)

 Recognize the service sector.

This is another way of suggesting that the Old New Dems should give up on the stereotypical male Trump voter, forget the factory workers and the steel workers, and concentrate on working class women, like home health aides. He writes, "So Democrats need to develop a story and a strategy for ensuring that workers in the caring economy, the services economy, and the value-added manufacturing economy receive not just a decent income and stronger benefits, but also dignity and respect along the way. I confess I don’t have the answers for how exactly to make this happen, but I do know that we should elevate these questions in the national policy dialogue."

(He just gave away the con, again. Before these workers get their fair wages and health care, the New Old Dems have to spin them a yarn because of course he doesn't have any actual answers for them. I suspect he doesn't imagine any of these overworked servants/ listeners are reading his piece in "Democracy" - a concept which does not seem to apply to actual people any more. But hey, as long as actual people get some "recognition" then what more do they want from the Newbie Oldies?)

  Education, education, education!

The emphasis should therefore shift away from degrees and diplomas and toward skills and credentials. Instead of prioritizing “free college,” we should prioritize debt-free lifelong learning: Every American willing to meet basic requirements should be able to find a training opportunity, at any stage of their lives, that provides them with job-relevant skills at a cost they can (truly) afford, and a job on the other end. This approach will both assure the ongoing vitality of middle class families and their children, and also provide new pathways for children of poverty to enter the middle class.

How many neoliberalisms can you count in just that one paragraph? You have exactly two minutes, and the clock is running right now! So I'll just give you a time-saving synopsis of what Sullivan is actually saying:

People are mainly stupid compared to us Old New Old Dems, so keep learning your whole life until you drop dead. Don't expect any help in meeting those basic requirements and always strive for a job that you can afford and never expect your boss to be able to afford you. Because that's not how it works in the Now-Future. Of course, the life-goal of every poor person is not to eat or find shelter, but to "seek a path to the middle class." Thankfully, though, Sullivan has replaced those rickety "ladders of opportunity" offered by the New Dems to the "launchpads of opportunity" now being sold for a very limited time by the New Oldies But Moldies.

Phew! I'm sorry to say that having gone way beyond my allotted 41 minutes, I  was unable to launch myself to the blissful end of this piece and sadly did not achieve full neoliberal Nirvana. But if you follow the helpful link in the first sentence of this much briefer synopsis, then you too can have the opportunity to get access to every golden word, regardless of your level of wonkiness or lack thereof.

Good luck, and have a great sardonic weekend.