[rad-green] Here They Come Again: The Kind of Neoliberal Democrats Who Prefer Trump to Sanders -- Adolph Reed

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/11/here-they-come-again-kind-neoliberal-democrats-who-prefer-trump-sanders
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/11/here-they-come-again-kind-neoliberal-democrats-who-prefer-trump-sanders>Common
Dreams          February 11, 2020Here They Come Again: The Kind of
Neoliberal Democrats Who Prefer Trump to SandersHere's the question: to
what extent is the Establishment's commitment to democratic institutions
greater than their commitment to current forms of capitalist hierarchy? It
seems like we are about to find out.by Adolph Reed Jr.*

[image: Democratic presidential candidates former South Bend, Indiana Mayor
Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Vice President Joe
Biden greet each other prior to the start of the Democratic presidential
primary debate in the Sullivan Arena at St. Anselm College on February 07,
2020 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Seven candidates qualified for the
second Democratic presidential primary debate of 2020 which comes just days
before the New Hampshire primary on February 11. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty
Ima]

*Democratic presidential candidates former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete
Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Vice President Joe Biden
greet each other prior to the start of the Democratic presidential primary
debate in the Sullivan Arena at St. Anselm College on February 07, 2020 in
Manchester, New Hampshire. Seven candidates qualified for the second
Democratic presidential primary debate of 2020 which comes just days before
the New Hampshire primary on February 11. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)*

Twenty-four years ago, I published an essay titled “Liberals, I Do Despise”
in the *Village Voice*, which *Common Dreams* reprinted
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/12/09/liberals-i-do-despise> as an
enduring oldie in 2009. The title was a play on an old doggerel, in this
case rendering it:

*Liberals and flies, I do despise*
*The more I see liberals, the more I like flies.*

I wrote the essay in disgust after Bill Clinton concluded his and other New
Democrats’ deal with the devil by signing the 1996 Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—*welfare reform*—that ended the
federal government’s sixty-year commitment to direct income provision for
the indigent. That emphatically punctuated Clinton’s bulldozing of the left
in Democratic politics and ushered in the bipartisan neoliberal regime
under which we’ve lived ever since. Welfare “deform,” as many characterized
it at the time, was a culmination of the year that began with Clinton using
his State of the Union address to declare that “The era of big government
is over.” As New Labour neoliberal Tony Blair was, by her own account,
Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, Bill Clinton consolidated
Reaganism as hegemonic in American politics, defined the neoliberal regime
of upward redistribution and repression of the poor as the unchallengeable
horizon of political aspiration. The essay comes to mind at this moment
because so many liberal Democrats now in their dismissals and attacks
regarding Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the party’s presidential nomination
seem to be rehearsing the kind of smug, self-righteous, and backward
arguments they made then about why it was necessary to sacrifice poor
people—ultimately variants of a contention that commitment to egalitarian
principles is naïve.

In the mid-1990s I reflected on how often it is liberals who enable, even
abet, the rise of reactionary forces by accommodating them and treating
them as legitimate, looking the other way at the dangerous aspects and
implications of their agendas. Mass disfranchisement of black Americans in
the South at the end of the nineteenth century was on its face in clear
violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Southern Democrats used
gossamer thin subterfuge
<https://www.amazon.com/Shaping-Southern-Politics-Establishment-Publications/dp/0300016964>—like
the eight-box rule that required ballots to be deposited into as many
different boxes; literacy tests, which could be waived if the registrar
vouched for the registrant’s character or if the applicant had a
grandfather who was eligible to vote before 1867 (found unconstitutional in
1915); and poll taxes—that enabled northern Republicans to take the
violations of African Americans’ basic citizenship rights in stride with a
wink and nod because those exclusions weren’t based explicitly on race. Or
at least most of them; the white primary required a little more active
denial.

Later in our history, proto-fascistic Cold War anticommunism got a
sanitizing boost from liberals who, while wringing their hands, wrinkling
their brows and privately tut-tutting about supposedly extraordinary
“excesses,” validated persecution with their embrace of the notion that the
dangers of “subversion” could necessitate denial of victims’ civil
liberties, criminalization of ideas, and witch-hunting. Americans for
Democratic Action, long the avatar of Democratic liberalism, was founded
specifically as an engine of Cold War attack on the left, and high-minded
liberal institutions like the American Association of University Professors
(AAUP) and the ACLU, as well as most prominent liberal intellectuals,
capitulated to and rationalized anticommunist witch-hunting, most of all by
accepting the premise that a shadowy “subversion” threatened the republic,
which then justified persecution of those held to endorse it. With the
collapse of the Soviet Union and nominal end of the Cold War, and
especially in the post-9/11 world, “subversion” has been recast as
“terrorism,” and liberals’ concerns with process and appearance of
judicious orderliness shifted accordingly, to parse such issues as how to
occupy a country humanely, at what point aggressive interrogation becomes
torture, under what conditions killing civilians is acceptable, etc.

Liberal complicity stands out especially in its unwavering support for
American imperialism and denial of other nations’ sovereignty—most
dramatically in the form of military intervention—notwithstanding a sleight
of hand that can make support for war-making seem like opposition to it.
Even before the genocidal Vietnam War, American liberals supported and
rationalized U.S. interference and perpetration of coups in other nations
across the globe, from Iran to Guatemala and elsewhere, well before “regime
change” became a coinage. [For a more general compendium, see here
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/03/26/venezuela-us-solidarity-and-future-socialism>
 and here
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/03/30/vietnam-venezuela-us-interventionism-and-failure-left>.]
Indeed, liberals played a central role in crafting the idea of humanitarian
intervention, which, perversely, represents bombing people as somehow for
their own good.

"This history is important for understanding the seriousness of the
political moment that confronts us between now and November and beyond."

Mainstream liberals’ main criterion for assessing a military intervention
is whether or not it can attain U.S. objectives neatly and with limited
American casualties. Under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and
Donald Trump, they’ve supported and rationalized military adventurism and
extrajudicial killing of non-combatants, among other horrors, in the Middle
East and elsewhere. Closer to home, Democratic liberals in the post-9/11
period have colluded in fictions that U.S.-backed coups and coup attempts
in Honduras and Venezuela were the product of popular uprisings, and that
the constitutional coups—when reactionary plotters seized power through
claiming bogus constitutional authority and levying bogus charges of
corruption—in Brazil and Bolivia were also expressions of popular will.
Liberals have embraced and rehearsed obviously false *golpista* narratives
and accusations against legitimately elected leftist governments without
hesitation or shame.

This history of liberal support for authoritarianism and dictatorship
is especially
significant at this moment as a tide of authoritarian neoliberalism has
been rising all over the world
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08935696.2013.843250?journalCode=rrmx20>.
Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil,
Salvini in Italy, Poroshenko in Ukraine, and for that matter Boris Johnson
in the United Kingdom demonstrate that the neoliberal program of regressive
transfer does not require popular democracy
<https://nonsite.org/article/populism-or-capitalist-de-modernization-at-the-semi-periphery>.
Popular oversight instead has been a hindrance to regimes of neoliberalization
since Reagan and Thatcher
<https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273>,
and those pursuing such agendas have commonly sought to insulate their programs
from popular democratic processe
<https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Resurgent-Roots-Neoliberal-Revolution/dp/0674011589/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Capital+Resurgent%3A+Roots+of+the+Neoliberal+Revolution&qid=1581363849&s=books&sr=1-1>s,
behind special commissions and other unelected bodies
<https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Free-Markets-Neoliberal-Economic/dp/0226679020>
.

Watching Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi proudly applauding and then
standing for a photo-op with Venezuelan fraud and third-rate coup-plotter
Juan Guaidó
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/05/no-better-distillation-washington-democrats-and-gop-join-trump-standing-ovation>
during
and after Trump’s 2020 State of the Union message and recalling her and
other liberal Democrats’ collusion in the boldfaced lie that duly elected
President Nicolás Maduro is a ruthless dictator and their propagation of
the preposterous fiction that Guaidó, though all but unknown in Venezuela,
is somehow the country’s legitimate “interim president” (a title more
recently claimed also by religio-fascist usurper Jeanine Áñez Chávez in
Bolivia) underscores the lack of regard, even contempt, these Democratic
neoliberals have for popular democracy. They’ve shown it before, of course.

Many of them remain livid to this day about what they perceive as Ralph
Nader’s irresponsible third-party challenge 2000, when the Democrats put
forth a Republican-in-all-but-name ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. Not
only did Nader not cost Gore the election: the Vice-President would not
fight for Florida because he didn’t want to be identified with the militant
groups urging him to do so; even so, if he’d won Tennessee—his home
state—Florida wouldn’t have mattered. Most telling about the Democrats’
outrage at Nader, though, is the astounding, profoundly anti-democratic
sense of entitlement on which it rested, the idea that Democrats in effect
own every left-of-center vote without having to do anything to earn them.
Their outrage was very much of the “Who does he think he is to try to take
our vote” variety, never acknowledging that the party’s having put forward
the most conservative Democratic ticket since Woodrow Wilson may have
influenced Nader’s decision to run. By that point in time, Democratic
elites were already fully committed to their course of dismissing working
people and their concerns only to say in effect, as a close comrade put it
at the time: “Don’t worry; we’ll come back for you after we take care of
the investor class; besides, what else can you do? Look at how terrible the
other guy is!” Hillary Clinton and her confederates at the Democratic
National Committee showed the same contemptuous, anti-democratic sense of
entitlement in 2016.

This history is important for understanding the seriousness of the
political moment that confronts us between now and November and beyond. In
the past several weeks the level of hysteria in the nonstop corporate media
and Democratic Party elite effort to dismiss or discredit Bernie Sanders’
campaign for the party’s presidential nomination has ratcheted up. This
isn’t really a surprise, or it shouldn’t be. Since 2016, it has become ever
clearer that much of the Democratic establishment and its propaganda organs—
*MSNBC* first among them—are more worried about a victory of the left than
about Trump’s re-election. As the Sanders campaign and the political
movement propelling it continue to make headway, those forces have become
more shrill and over-the-top, with many openly calling for coalescence
around a need to stop Sanders from becoming the party’s nominee as the
central Democratic objective for 2020. Corporate Democrat hacks and
retainers like Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd, et al. have begun hysterically
evoking
<https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/02/your-liberal-media.html%20> paranoid
Birchite fantasies, like Matthews’ recent assertion
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/08/chris-matthews-slammed-spreading-misinformation-about-sanders-democratic-socialist>
that
Medicare for All will ensue in mass executions in Central Park.
Second-string hack Maria Teresa Kumar put her finger on the neoliberal
Democrats’ dilemma
<https://twitter.com/ibrahimpols/status/1225927067163865088>when she
insisted that attacking the billionaire class will backfire on the party if
it follows the Sanders line because “there’s not an American that wakes up
every single morning and doesn’t say ‘I’m going to get up in the morning so
that I someday either can be rich or my kid can be rich.’”

"Since 2016, it has become ever clearer that much of the Democratic
establishment and its propaganda organs—*MSNBC* first among them—are more
worried about a victory of the left than about Trump's re-election."

The problem for Kumar, Todd, et al. and the interests they serve is that no
one is saying that any more—if many grown people ever did—because hegemonic
neoliberalism has lost the confidence of masses of working-class people. As
a moral economy, after forty years of false promises, scapegoating, and
subterfuge, it has largely run out of steam. It delivers for fewer and
fewer people, which after all was always the point, and the bromides of its
free-market utopian ideology ring increasingly hollow. It doesn’t take long
to recognize that what has been sold as
sky’s-the-limit/you-can-be-as-rich-as-you-want-to-be flexible
entrepreneurialism in the new gig economy is in reality precarious
employment with no rights or benefits, or that promises to improve the
quality of public goods and services from education to water and sanitation
by introducing “choice” into vital public institutions means turning them
into profit centers for private interests at the expense of the public
good. People notice a health care system geared far more to profit-taking
by insurance and pharmaceutical companies than to their own health and
wellbeing.

We may be rapidly approaching a point at which there are only two credible
roads forward electorally. Both authoritarian neoliberalism and the
populist leftism represented by the Pink Tide in Latin America, Jeremy
Corbyn in the U.K., and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. have emerged and gained
momentum as alternative responses to the bankruptcy of the familiar
neoliberal regime as both rhetoric and practice. It is understandable that
corporate Democrats and investor class liberals will fight to preserve the
current order with its shibboleths and flimflam, supported by the fictions
of groupist identity politics, that present individual upward mobility as
the equivalent of collective security. Hillary Clinton was a terrible
candidate, to be sure, but Trump’s victory, along with the advances made by
authoritarian neoliberals elsewhere, points to something else as well,
something far more sinister.

Just after the 2016 election, I reflected
<https://nonsite.org/editorial/mazzocchi-and-the-moment> on the late labor
leader Anthony Mazzocchi’s warning more than two decades prior that
Democratic neoliberals would have nothing to offer those people who have
been or fear being ground up by the decades of relentless capitalist attack
on living and working conditions. He warned that if the left and the labor
movement didn’t find ways to connect with that growing population of those
hurting and to offer credible explanations of the sources of their
condition and plausible strategies for fighting back, other, nasty and
dangerous tendencies would. Here we are. Trump and Trumpism are committed
to galvanizing the most reactionary and dangerous elements in the society
and must be defeated. If not, things could become very ugly in this country.

I have no doubt that the Democratic liberals who fear that Sanders is
“unelectable” are genuine in their belief. They also want and need for him
to be unelectable because for them the really significant divisions in the
society must not be those between economic classes. As Kumar puts it,
“There’s plenty of billionaires that are actually aligned with this whole
proposal of what America should look like,” by which she meant a country in
which any one individual can become rich without regard to identity-group
status. Todd picked up the baton to suggest that opposition to the
billionaire class hurts Democrats with voters of color in particular, who
in his mind aspire to be rich. (Neoliberal Democrats’ propensity for
ventriloquizing black people is amazing, and often amazingly ridiculous.)
From the standpoint of those liberals tied to investor-class interests, a
Trump victory in 2020, even if it were to raise a serious threat of
authoritarianism, could be less disturbing than a Sanders-led, left-tacking
political realignment. And, much as the Clinton administration’s liberal
architects of welfare reform dismissed their left critics as tendentious
and naïve—until those critics were proven right—liberals’ insistence that
Sanders can’t win preempts, at least for now, questions about what they
would do if he were to win the nomination. Would they support him? Would
they follow Bloomberg, or someone else, on a third-party ticket?

"From the standpoint of those liberals tied to investor-class interests, a
Trump victory in 2020, even if it were to raise a serious threat of
authoritarianism, could be less disturbing than a Sanders-led, left-tacking
political realignment."

We don’t know the answers to those questions, but I have my suspicions. I
suspect that there’s a decent likelihood that some neoliberal Democratic
elites would try to bring Sanders’ candidacy down while blaming him for
forcing them to do so by standing for a clear working-class agenda, which
they “know” can’t win. Contrary to that view, my sense is that Sanders is
the Democrat with the best chance to defeat Trump in November, not least
because we know that in 2016 millions of Trump voters had previously voted
for Sanders in the primaries and for Obama—no doubt under the same sort of
mistaken identity from which they voted for Trump—at least once. And they
voted for Sanders as a clear and uncompromising voice for working people’s
concerns.

Here’s what it comes down to: to what extent are liberal Democrats’
commitments to democracy and democratic institutions greater than their
commitments to current forms of capitalist hierarchy? That’s what we’ll
determine between now and November, and the answer might have everything to
say about the future of American politics and of the left within it. This
may be a political moment when one or the other commitment must take
precedence. Liberals characteristically embrace high-minded ideals of
constitutionalism, due process, tolerance and “rule of law,” which they’ve
been chattering about quite a bit lately.

We know as well, however, that, when they’ve perceived their class’s
interests to be threatened, they’ve also found ways to justify suspension
of the rule of law and due process and to tolerate death squads. I suppose
we’ll just see.

Adolph Reed Jr. <https://www.commondreams.org/author/adolph-reed-jr> is
Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
For the March 2014 issue of *Harper's* magazine, he wrote, "*Nothing Left:
The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals*
<https://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/>." His books
include: "Class
Notes: Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene,
<https://www.amazon.com/Class-Notes-Politics-Thoughts-American/dp/1565846753/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2GR8581O4UYYQ&keywords=adolph+reed+jr&qid=1581347900&s=books&sprefix=Adolph+Reed%2Caps%2C243&sr=1-1>"
and, with Julian Bond, "Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the
Post-Segregation Era
<https://www.amazon.com/Stirrings-Jug-Black-Politics-Post-Segregation/dp/0816626812/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2GR8581O4UYYQ&keywords=adolph+reed+jr&qid=1581347900&s=books&sprefix=Adolph+Reed%2Caps%2C243&sr=1-2>
."

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