Platypus Review<\/em> 82<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0December 2015 \u2013 January 2016<\/p>\nBernie Sanders with Jesse Jackson in the 1980s<\/p><\/div>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>THE CAMPAIGN CYCLE for the 2016 general election in the U.S. has been characterized by some throwbacks to the 1980s, most notably in the two major party challengers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most remarkably, the Sanders campaign has introduced the word \u201csocialism\u201d into mainstream political discourse. It\u2019s clear that what socialism means in Sanders\u2019s mouth, however, is New Deal liberalism — despite the poster of Eugene V. Debs that hangs in Sanders\u2019s Senate office. ((Bernie Sanders, Speech on \u201cdemocratic socialism,\u201d <em>Vox.com<\/em>, November 19, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2015\/11\/19\/9762028\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2015\/11\/19\/9762028\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism<\/a>; and Dylan Matthews, \u201cA leading socialist explains what Bernie Sanders\u2019s socialism gets right — and wrong: An interview with <em>Jacobin<\/em> magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara,\u201d <em>Vox.com<\/em>, November 20, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2015\/11\/20\/9767096\/bernie-sanders-socialism-jacobin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2015\/11\/20\/9767096\/bernie-sanders-socialism-jacobin<\/a>))\u00a0The specter of \u201csocialism\u201d is just that: the meaning it has for Obama\u2019s Tea Party opponents. As Marx wrote over 150 years ago, <\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cEvery demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an \u2018attempt on society\u2019 and stigmatized as \u2018socialism\u2019.\u201d (<em>The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em>, 1852)<\/p>\n<p>Just because Sanders embraces instead of rejecting the pejorative hurled at any and all proposed reforms of capitalism doesn\u2019t make the charge any more true in fact: for Sanders it is a mere ethic. But it appeals nonetheless. ((Ben Geier, \u201cBernie Sanders is a socialist, but he\u2019s not a Socialist,\u201d <em>Fortune<\/em>, September 19, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/09\/19\/bernie-sanders-socialist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/09\/19\/bernie-sanders-socialist\/<\/a>; and \u201cBernie Sanders just answered the biggest question of his campaign,\u201d <em>Fortune<\/em>, November 19, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/11\/19\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/11\/19\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism\/<\/a>))\u00a0Sanders\u2019s candidacy seems to fulfill the demands borne of the post-2008 economic crisis and downturn, the discontents with neoliberalism — itself an artifact of the post-1973 crisis that was met by the 1980s \u201cReagan revolution\u201d — and to offer the electoral vehicle for the Occupy Wall Street generation of activists disenchanted by Obama and the Democrats after 2012. ((Walker Bragman, \u201cMore like Reagan than FDR: I\u2019m a Millennial and will never vote for Hillary Clinton,\u201d <em>Salon.com<\/em>, November 30, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2015\/11\/30\/more_like_reagan_than_fdr_im_a_millennial_and_ill_never_vote_for_hillary_clinton\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2015\/11\/30\/more_like_reagan_than_fdr_im_a_millennial_and_ill_never_vote_for_hillary_clinton\/<\/a>\u00a0))<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23016\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23016\" class=\"wp-image-23016\" src=\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/weekend_at_bernies-med-size.jpg\" alt=\"weekend_at_bernies-med size\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-23016\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Weekend at Bernie\u2019s?<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The Occupy generation\u2019s wielding of the corpse of social democracy in getting behind Sanders as the standard-bearer of reform recalls the 1980s film <em>Weekend at Bernie\u2019s<\/em> (1989), in which the protagonists in the movie hide behind the eponymous man\u2019s body as an excuse for wild adventure — in this case, a hardly na\u00efve adolescent misadventure with the Democrats. It is regressive. In a dynamic reminiscent of Jesse Jackson\u2019s Presidential campaigns of the 1980s, Sanders has offered \u201cLeft\u201d opposition to Democratic Party Centrism, but not by opposing but trying to capture it as well. Sanders meeting with Killer Mike isn\u2019t the answer — Mike already had endorsed him back in June. <\/p>\n<p>Sanders\u2019s campaign from its inception in May has been surprisingly and increasingly successful. But it has since plateaued. For a moment in September, it looked like Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential candidacy was in jeopardy due to the Benghazi hearings. Even Obama threw the Democrats\u2019 favorite under the bus, acknowledging in an interview on <em>60 Minutes<\/em> (October 11, 2015) that Clinton had mishandled her email communication as Secretary of State. In the same interview, Obama asserted that he would win a third election, and — much the same thing — that Biden\u2019s experience as Vice President eminently qualified him to be President. But Hillary survived Benghazi; and Biden bowed out. <\/p>\n<p>The Democrats, since the 2014 midterm elections in which they failed to dislodge the Republicans\u2019 Congressional majority, have been faced with the problem of reproducing the \u201cObama majority\u201d that was victorious in 2008 and 2012. ((Jonathan Martin, \u201cAfter losses, liberal and centrist Democrats square off on strategy,\u201d <em>New York Times<\/em>, November 14, 2014 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/15\/us\/politics\/democratic-party-iberals-and-moderates.html\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/15\/us\/politics\/democratic-party-iberals-and-moderates.html<\/a>))\u00a0This has been described as the challenge of uniting the Democrats\u2019 \u201cLeft\u201d and \u201cCenter\u201d voters: the \u201cLeft\u201d is organized labor and others concerned with socio-economic issues; the \u201cCenter\u201d — really, the <em>Right<\/em> — are those concerned with identity-group politics, women, blacks and gays. This potentially fatal split among the Democrats was seen in the 2015 Chicago city-wide election, in which Obama\u2019s former Chief of Staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was challenged by fellow Democrat, Cook County Commissioner Jes\u00fas \u201cChuy\u201d Garc\u00eda, who had the support of the Chicago Teachers Union that had struck against Emanuel and his neoliberal education reforms in 2012, seeking to embarrass the Chicago native Obama precisely during his campaign for reelection. <\/p>\n<p>In the 2015 Chicago mayoral election, black Democrats supported Rahm against Chuy. This was not merely a division between blacks and Latinos, but rather a split of and within the Democrats\u2019 organized labor base from its ethnic constituency \u201ccommunity\u201d-based neoliberal politics. The former 1960s Black Panther, U.S. Congressional Representative Bobby Rush, for instance, denounced Chuy\u2019s campaign for trying to usurp the mantle of the (first black mayor of Chicago) \u201cHarold Washington majority\u201d (as against the prior Daley political machine) that first emerged in the 1980s, which Rush implied could only be reproduced (if at all) by black (and <em>not<\/em> Latino) leadership — that is, a neoliberal Center\/Right majority, and <em>not<\/em> a labor-based politics. Washington was supported by the \u201cLeft:\u201d his campaign chief was a former Maoist — shades of Van Jones? For Rush and other black Democrats in Chicago, Rahm <em>is<\/em> the \u201cWashington majority\u201d candidate. As Obama was, and Hillary will be. Chuy\u2019s challenge to Rahm has actually provided Emanuel with the opportunity for achieving the electoral mandate endorsement he previously lacked: now a majority has voted in <em>favor<\/em> of his neoliberal policies. Far from a crisis for neoliberalism, neoliberalism has been further consolidated against any contenders. This is a lesson for Sanders\u2019s supporters: when Hillary is elected by primary voters as the Democratic Party candidate for President, they will have chosen and given a mandate to neoliberalism. <\/p>\n<p>Hillary\u2019s ability to unite the \u201cLeft\u201d and Right of the Democrats is uncertain: if she can do so, still, she will not be able to generate the same level of enthusiasm that Obama did in 2008. Certainly this goes for labor. Obama\u2019s 2008 campaign for instance offered organized labor the prospect of passing the Employee Free Choice Act under a Democratic majority, but was unceremoniously dropped after the election. Obama\u2019s campaign demanded — and achieved — a reuniting of labor in the AFL-CIO from its split in the Change to Win Federation, so that they would have to negotiate with only one rather than multiple labor constituencies: Obama sought to bring labor under control, specifically in the context of the potentially explosive 2008 economic crisis. The Democrats did not face a labor insurgency. Neither will they now. <\/p>\n<p>Into this bitter legacy steps Sanders, whose call for \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d he explicitly described as an electoral strategy for raising turnout, especially among younger, newer voters, and thus returning the Democrats to a Congressional majority that they enjoyed when Obama was elected until the 2010 Tea Party Congressional election insurgency. Sanders has offered himself as a better champion for the Democrats in the 2016 general election than Hillary can be. The problem has been on the Democratic Right: Sanders\u2019s alleged \u201cproblem with women and blacks.\u201d Hillary has supposedly maintained appeal to the social identity constituencies, despite some turbulence from Black Lives Matter and the memory by gays that both Clintons have had a poor record on marriage equality. The presumptive character of Hillary\u2019s nomination, especially as a woman candidate, has exhibited a complacency that chafes and is not guaranteed to pay off in terms of voter mobilization. ((Michael Eric Dyson, \u201cYes she can: Why Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Obama: A skeptic\u2019s journey,\u201d <em>The New Republic<\/em>, November 29, 2015 <a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/124391\/yes-she-can\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/124391\/yes-she-can<\/a>))<\/p>\n<p>The degree to which the \u201cLeft\u201d has gotten on-board with Sanders, it has been in the form of the alleged \u201cbrocialists\u201d — straight white men. \u201cSocialism\u201d has meant a backlash against identity politics, an attempt to return to the Democrats\u2019 historic role as economic reformers going back to FDR\u2019s New Deal and LBJ\u2019s Great Society, which had pressured the Republicans such that even Eisenhower and Nixon were purportedly to the \u201cLeft\u201d of the Clintons on economic policy. There is also the sense that in the post-2008 environment Sanders could appeal to and win back an older generation of disaffected voters, the so-called \u201cReagan Democrats,\u201d whose shifting allegiances allowed the Republicans to triumph since the \u201980s, now approaching retirement age and concerned about the opportunities for their children and grandchildren bequeathed by 30 years of decrepit neoliberalism. ((Christopher C. Schons, \u201cFrom Reagan to Bernie Sanders: My political odyssey,\u201d <em>Counterpunch<\/em>, November 4, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/11\/04\/from-reagan-to-bernie-sanders-my-political-odyssey\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/11\/04\/from-reagan-to-bernie-sanders-my-political-odyssey\/<\/a>))<\/p>\n<p>Sanders thus offers the Democrats an answer to the Tea Party that has been sorely lacking since 2010, as expressed by the frustration that bubbled over in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. A new generation of activists was mobilized to \u201cget the money out of politics,\u201d especially in opposition to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s Citizens United decision that allows unlimited campaign spending, a generation whose concerns about \u201csocial justice\u201d and the erosion of \u201cdemocracy\u201d Sanders speaks to. The question has been whether the Sanders campaign is \u201cfor real,\u201d or whether, rather, it is merely a protest pressure-tactic on Hillary, slowing and perhaps redirecting, however slightly, the Clinton juggernaut. ((Bruce A. Dixon, \u201cPresidential candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016,\u201d <em>Black Agenda Report<\/em>, May 6, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary<\/a>))\u00a0Sanders\u2019s claim that higher turnout means electoral gains for the Democrats neglects that not only the Republicans but they themselves engage in and benefit from voter suppression, especially among blacks, especially in the Democrats\u2019 urban strongholds. The Democrats have no interest in popular political mobilization, even behind the most anodyne and unthreatening symbolic gestures — see Black Lives Matter — and so seek to curtail it. ((Glen Ford, \u201cBlacks will transform America, and free themselves, but not at the ballot box in 2016: Black voters cannot be counted on to support the most progressive presidential candidates available at the polls,\u201d <em>Black Agenda Report<\/em>, October 21, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/blacks_wont_free_themselves_at_ballot_box_in_2016\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/blacks_wont_free_themselves_at_ballot_box_in_2016<\/a>))<\/p>\n<p>Not least, this is because the Democrats don\u2019t want the political responsibility that would come with large majorities, as was clear in 2008-10, in which they bent their Congressional supermajority over backwards to placate the utterly prostrate Republicans. Any substantial increase in the voting electorate would present problems of political integration. See the Tea Parties\u2019 challenge to the Republican establishment, which would really rather do without such berserkers in their midst. Even before the Tea Parties, in the 2008 bailout crisis, it was unclear whether Congressional Republicans were to fall victim to their own neoliberal rhetoric instead of taking required action to prevent a complete financial meltdown. International financial markets constantly worry over the \u201cpolitical paralysis\u201d in the U.S. yielded by the Republicans hostage to the Tea Party Congressmen and the implications of this for the world economy. The Democrats would be challenged by such unruly voters (especially at the local level of municipal and state governments, as in Illinois) at least as much if not more so than the Republicans are. <\/p>\n<p>Neoliberalism needs to be seen as both an accommodation to and a reinforcement of social and political demobilization after the 1960s, visible for instance in the decimation of labor unions but also of other civil society institutions, after abandonment of their original liberal <em>raison d’\u00eatre<\/em> in favor of integration in what the Frankfurt School called the authoritarian \u201cadministered state,\u201d already observable to C. Wright Mills and other political scientists after the waning of the radicalization of the 1930s through WWII: what remained was the political parties\u2019 organization of a \u201cpower elite.\u201d But even this structure has atrophied since the 1960s. Privatization through NGOs has not meant a renaissance of civil society, but has left the political field abandoned of any substantial forces for reform since the 1980s. Even what Eisenhower decried as the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex\u201d in the Cold War has been revealed after the Iraq war as a massively corrupt freewheeling affair, and not a political force to be reckoned with: Enormous sums of money may be thrown around to government contractors, but this hardly amounts to political control over policy; 1970s Ford administration veteran Donald Rumsfeld went to war not only against foes in Afghanistan and Iraq but against the Pentagon itself, in a neoliberal privatization campaign of \u201cslimming down\u201d the military, to the embitterment of the officer corps, even amid soaring expenditures. What C. Wright Mills warned about \u201cpolitical irresponsibility\u201d in \u201cliberal rhetoric and conservative default\u201d has only grown more unchecked since the \u201960s. Indeed, Mills seems too optimistic in light of even more miserable realities today. The \u201cpolitical establishment\u201d is actually quite threadbare and in evident disarray, not a convincing \u201cpower elite.\u201d But: \u201cThere is no alternative.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The issue is whether the post-2008 crisis has been an opportunity for undoing neoliberalism — reversing the \u201980s — or for further entrenching it. But to overcome neoliberalism there would need to be an organized political force for doing so. The Democrats are decidedly <em>not<\/em> this, in any conceivable way. The crisis in Europe has demonstrated an opportunity for expanding and deepening neoliberalism, and not for returning to \u201csocial democracy\u201d — despite SYRIZA, Podemos, and Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s wresting seasoned 1980s (Bennite) leadership of the U.K.\u2019s Labour Party, back away from the \u201cThird Way\u201d spectacularly unconvincing 1990s-offspring Blairite runts. <\/p>\n<p>Sanders has more evident conviction than Hillary could ever exhibit. This recalls heroic opposition to Reaganism — why his followers have been affectionately nicknamed after the Sandinistas. One key issue for the Sandernistas that is also similar to the dynamic of Corbyn\u2019s supporters in the U.K. is the 2000s George W. Bush-era anti-war movement as touchstone: Sanders, like Corbyn, opposed the Iraq war, which makes him amenable to the \u201cLeft.\u201d Does the Sanders campaign represent a potential political turn, or is it the last gasp of Occupy activism before growing up and joining the fold of the Democrats? Sanders\u2019s abandoning his hitherto vintage 1960s \u201cindependence\u201d from the Democrats points the way for the younger generation of 21st century activists. <\/p>\n<p>The \u201cLeft\u201d may be tempted to imagine the Sanders campaign as a potential crisis for the Democrats — just as Corbyn\u2019s leadership of the Labour Party could be seen as a crisis and opportunity for the \u201cLeft.\u201d It is more likely that — just as Corbyn will save and not wreck the Labour Party — Sanders will boost and not undermine the Democrats\u2019 campaign around Hillary in 2016. Or at least that is his avowed hope. <\/p>\n<p>What if any kind of political movement could come out of the Sanders campaign? The Sandernistas certainly do not think of the campaign as a way to reconcile themselves to the Democratic Party but rather hope to transform it. Like with Chuy in Chicago, the hope is to mobilize new forces through the campaign that will be sustained after the election. Will this be within or outside the Democratic Party? Perhaps it will be both. In the 1980s, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was established; in 2004, the Progressive Democrats of America was founded out of the Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich Presidential campaigns. The first was, in DSA founder Michael Harrington\u2019s words, \u201ca remnant of a remnant\u201d of the New Left; the second was in many respects a repeat of the first. These have not been auspicious developments indicating possibilities for where the Sandernistas might go after 2016. The DSA supported Jesse Jackson\u2019s Democratic Party campaign for President, which Sanders also endorsed, in protest against Reaganism. The precedents in the 1980s legacy of the 1960s New Left suggest the further adaptation to — through protest of — the Democrats\u2019 moving ever Right-ward. <\/p>\n<p>Sanders like Trump demonstrates the hollowness of the two U.S. political parties today, if only through the inability to stop their candidacies by the \u201cestablishment.\u201d The parties are no longer the formidable \u201cmachines\u201d they were in the 20th century — confronted by the 1960s New Left generation — but are merely brandings anyone can buy into — whether wholesale by billionaire magnates like Trump himself or the Koch Brothers Tea Party-backers, or through tiny payments to Sanders\u2019s 2016 campaign, as had been made to Obama in 2008, as an internet media phenomenon. Clinton at least still needs to win over union endorsements and particular capitalist business-sector funding. But in any case there is no political process involved, but only the aestheticization of politics as a consumer article ((See Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction\u201d (1936).)). As such it can and will be rendered in typical postmodernist pastiche of non-partisan eclecticism. \u201cPolitics\u201d means what any- and everyone wants to make of it. This is even claimed as a virtue, of \u201cdivided government.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The worst possible outcome of this is the most likely, that Hillary will be elected as President, but the Republicans will retain a Congressional majority, reproducing the polarized stalemate and deadlock that actually sustains — stabilizes — U.S. politics around a conservative neoliberal consensus, in which certain social issues are given obligatory genuflections without being actually addressed let alone ameliorated. Since the Democrats won the \u201cculture wars\u201d under Obama\u2019s neoliberal leadership, a new division of labor with the Republicans has been established: that the Republicans will represent \u201cstraight white men,\u201d especially in rural and exurban areas; and the Democrats, under the leadership of the Clintonite neoliberal Center\/Right, will represent \u201cwomen, blacks and gays\u201d in their petit bourgeois ethnic constituency urban (and more urbane suburban) communities. Welcome to the \u201cnew normal.\u201d It began in the \u201980s with Reagan\u2019s Presidency, under which the Democrats retained control of Congress. <\/p>\n<p>In the 1980s, the \u201cyuppies\u201d — young urban professionals, that is to say, grown-up children of the 1960s — were regarded as new but conservative; today, they are called \u201chipsters\u201d and considered liberal as well as entirely normal: an electoral demographic spanning everyone from college to middle-age, referred to in conventional polling analysis as \u201cvoters under 50,\u201d i.e., the generation that came of age <em>after<\/em> the \u201980s. Sanders (like Trump) indicatively does best among them — where Clinton does better among those over 50. In the 1980s, identity politics consolidated the accommodation to and resolution of neoliberalism in the \u201cReagan revolution.\u201d What Adolph Reed has called the \u201cJesse Jackson phenomenon\u201d exemplified this. It has continued up to the present, through such eminently respectably conservative measures as gay marriage equality. Obama has not <em>brought about<\/em> any social changes, but only granted them legal legitimacy. But where Obama at least seemed to symbolize \u201cchange\u201d — a new post-\u201960s generation — Sanders as well as Clinton represent a return: diminished expectations. Sanders raising the specter of the \u201cOld Left\u201d 1930s-60s New Deal Coalition\u2019s venerable political heritage for the Democrats, which came to grief in the \u201980s, will be the means not for resuscitating but finally burying it. <\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23017\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23017\" class=\"wp-image-23017\" src=\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/daniel-ortega.jpg\" alt=\"daniel ortega\" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-23017\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Daniel Ortega in the 21st century<\/p><\/div>\n<p>There will be no \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d — apart from the one already long underway since the 1980s. The final decades of the 20th century were successfully seized by the same \u201cend of history\u201d to which the 21st century will yet continue to belong, evidently for a long time to come. Daniel Ortega\u2019s return to power as part of the greater Latin American \u201cPink Tide\u201d in the 2000s represented the final surrender — or was it rather the ultimate triumph? — of the Sandinistas, and put paid to any \u201980s \u201cLeft\u201d nostalgia on which he may have traded. The same will go for Sanders. Sanders, as an outlier 1960s remnant of the Reagan era, becomes a mainstream political phenomenon today only as a function of giving up the ghost. The 1960s were not defeated but institutionalized in the 1980s. Today, this recent historical process has been completely naturalized, the domesticated televised version of the 1960s as historical curiosity. What needs to be reconciled today — by contrast with 2008 — is not the \u201960s but the \u201980s: not the last hurrah of the former 1960s radical Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers who helped Obama get his political start as a generational bequest 40 years after Chicago\u2019s Days of Rage, but the 1980s Mayor of Burlington, Vermont (alongside the vintage 1980s New York City real estate speculator) will be the specter haunting 2016. <\/p>\n<p>The 1960s New Left in which Sanders and Clinton — and Corbyn — took part could not and will not give any rebirth to \u201csocialism,\u201d however defined. It could not prevent and indeed actively assisted and not merely accommodated the demise of the Great Society. Whatever regrets it may have now do not point any way forward, but only towards its retirement, and a historical settling of the past. <\/p>\n<p>Just as Clinton\u2019s election in 1992 did not reverse Reaganite neoliberalism by pot-smoking former campaigners in 1972 for George McGovern, Sanders\u2019s late protest today may seal neoliberalism\u2019s unalloyed triumph. Margaret Thatcher claimed Tony Blair as her ultimate achievement. Sanders begging to differ from Hillary before her election as Clinton II will thus be the final victory of the 1980s.\u00a0| <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><a name=\"postscript\"><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>Postscript on the March 15 primaries<\/h2>\n<p>The primary elections for the nomination of the Democrat and Republican candidates for President have demonstrated the depth and extent of the disarray of the two Parties. Sanders has successfully challenged Hillary and has gone beyond being a mere messenger of protest to become a real contender for the Democratic Party nomination. But this has been on the basis of the Democrats’ established constituencies and so has limited Sanders’s reach. Turnout for the Democratic Party primaries has not been significantly raised as Sanders hoped. The Republican primaries by contrast have reached new highs.<\/p>\n<p>Donald Trump has been the actual phenomenon of crisis and potential change in 2016, taking a much stronger initiative in challenging the established Republican Party, indeed offering the only convincing possibility of defeating Clinton. The significant crossover support between Sanders and Trump however marginal is very indicative of this crisis. Trump has elicited hysteria among both established Republicans and Democrats. Their hysteria says more about them than about him: fear of the base. Sanders has attempted to oppose the 1930\u201340s New Deal and 1960s\u201370s Great Society and New Left base of the Democratic Party, established and developed from FDR through the Nixon era, against its 1980s\u20132010s neoliberal leadership that has allegedly abandoned them. Trump has done something similar, winning back from Obama the “Reagan Democrats.” But the wild opportunism of his demagogy allows him to transcend any inherent limitations of this appeal. <\/p>\n<p>Trump is no “fascist” nor even really a “populist,” ((See Tad Tietze, “The Trump paradox: A rough guide for the Left,” <em>Left Flank<\/em> (January 25, 2016). Available on-line at:<<a href=\"http:\/\/left-flank.org\/2016\/01\/25\/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/left-flank.org\/2016\/01\/25\/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left\/<\/a>>.)) but is what the Republicans accuse him of being: a New York-style Democrat (like the blowhard former 1980s New York City Mayor Ed Koch). He challenges Hillary precisely because they occupy such similar Centrist positions in U.S. politics, whatever their differences on policy. But Trump more than Sanders represents something new and different: a potential post- and not pre-neoliberal form of capitalist politics, regarding changes in policies that have continued from Reagan through Obama, driven by discontents of those alienated from both Parties. Sanders could potentially best Trump, but only on the basis of a much greater and more substantial mobilization for a different politics than it is evidently possible to muster through the Democrats. The biggest “party” remains those who don’t vote. | <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><a name=\"p.p.s.\"><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>P.P.S. on Trump and the crisis of the Republican Party<\/h2>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: left;\">June 22, 2016<\/h4>\n<p><em>Further amendment after the end of the primary elections.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Trump is no “fascist,” nor even really a “populist,” but is precisely what the Republicans accuse him of being: a New York-style Democrat — like the socially and economically liberal but blowhard “law-and-order” conservative former 1980s New York City Mayor Ed Koch. Trump challenges Hillary precisely because they occupy such similar moderate Centrist positions on the U.S. political spectrum, whatever their various differences on policy. Trump more than Sanders represents something new and different in this election season: a potential post- and not pre-neoliberal form of capitalist politics, regarding changes in policies that have continued from Reagan through Obama, driven by discontents of those alienated from both Parties. Trump has successfully run against and seeks to overthrow the established Republican 1980s-era “Reagan Revolution” coalition of neoliberals, neoconservatives, Strict Construction Constitutionalist conservatives and evangelical Christian fundamentalists — against their (always uneasy) alliance as well as against all of its component parts. Established Republicans recoil at undoing the Reagan Coalition they have mobilized since the 1980s. Marco Rubio as well as Ted Cruz — both of whom were adolescents in the 1980s — denounced Trump not only for his “New York values” but also and indicatively as a “socialist.” Glenn Beck said that Trump meant that the America of “statism” of the Progressives Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had won over the America of “freedom” of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course that is ideological and leaves aside the problem of capitalism, which Trump seeks to reform. Sanders could have potentially bested Trump as a candidate for reform, perhaps, but only on the basis of a much greater and more substantial mobilization for a different politics than it is evidently possible to muster through the Democrats, whose nostalgia for the New Deal, Great Society and New Left does not provide the necessary resources.<\/p>\n<p>Trump has succeeded precisely where Sanders has failed in marshaling the discontents with neoliberalism and demand for change. Sanders has collapsed into the Democratic Party. To succeed, Sanders would have needed to run against the Democrats the way Trump has run against the Republicans. This would have meant challenging the ruling Democratic neoliberal combination of capitalist austerity with New Left identity politics of “race, gender and sexuality” that is the corporate status quo. The results of Trump’s contesting of Reaganite and Clintonian and Obama-era neoliberalism remain to be seen. The biggest “party” remains those who don’t vote. Trump will win if he mobilizes more of them than Clinton. Clinton is the conservative in this election; Trump is the candidate for change. The Republicans have been in crisis in ways the Democrats are not, and this is the political opportunity expressed by Trump. He is seeking to lead the yahoos to the Center as well as meeting their genuine discontents in neoliberalism. Of course the change Trump represents is insufficient and perhaps unworkable, but it is nonetheless necessary. Things must change; they will change. As Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” The future of any potential struggle for socialism in the U.S. will be on a basis among not only those who have voted for Sanders but also those who have and will vote for Trump. | <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<h2>Notes<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The final triumph of the 1980s Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 82\u00a0|\u00a0December 2015 \u2013 January 2016 THE CAMPAIGN CYCLE for the 2016 general election in the U.S. has been characterized by some throwbacks to the 1980s, most notably in the two major party challengers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most remarkably, the Sanders campaign has introduced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,23,15,6,43],"class_list":["post-2296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-37","tag-neoliberalism","tag-obama-era","tag-the-platypus-review","tag-trump-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2296"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3161,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions\/3161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Bernie Sanders with Jesse Jackson in the 1980s<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>THE CAMPAIGN CYCLE for the 2016 general election in the U.S. has been characterized by some throwbacks to the 1980s, most notably in the two major party challengers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most remarkably, the Sanders campaign has introduced the word \u201csocialism\u201d into mainstream political discourse. It\u2019s clear that what socialism means in Sanders\u2019s mouth, however, is New Deal liberalism — despite the poster of Eugene V. Debs that hangs in Sanders\u2019s Senate office. ((Bernie Sanders, Speech on \u201cdemocratic socialism,\u201d <em>Vox.com<\/em>, November 19, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2015\/11\/19\/9762028\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2015\/11\/19\/9762028\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism<\/a>; and Dylan Matthews, \u201cA leading socialist explains what Bernie Sanders\u2019s socialism gets right — and wrong: An interview with <em>Jacobin<\/em> magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara,\u201d <em>Vox.com<\/em>, November 20, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2015\/11\/20\/9767096\/bernie-sanders-socialism-jacobin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2015\/11\/20\/9767096\/bernie-sanders-socialism-jacobin<\/a>))\u00a0The specter of \u201csocialism\u201d is just that: the meaning it has for Obama\u2019s Tea Party opponents. As Marx wrote over 150 years ago, <\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cEvery demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an \u2018attempt on society\u2019 and stigmatized as \u2018socialism\u2019.\u201d (<em>The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/em>, 1852)<\/p>\n<p>Just because Sanders embraces instead of rejecting the pejorative hurled at any and all proposed reforms of capitalism doesn\u2019t make the charge any more true in fact: for Sanders it is a mere ethic. But it appeals nonetheless. ((Ben Geier, \u201cBernie Sanders is a socialist, but he\u2019s not a Socialist,\u201d <em>Fortune<\/em>, September 19, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/09\/19\/bernie-sanders-socialist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/09\/19\/bernie-sanders-socialist\/<\/a>; and \u201cBernie Sanders just answered the biggest question of his campaign,\u201d <em>Fortune<\/em>, November 19, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/11\/19\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/11\/19\/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism\/<\/a>))\u00a0Sanders\u2019s candidacy seems to fulfill the demands borne of the post-2008 economic crisis and downturn, the discontents with neoliberalism — itself an artifact of the post-1973 crisis that was met by the 1980s \u201cReagan revolution\u201d — and to offer the electoral vehicle for the Occupy Wall Street generation of activists disenchanted by Obama and the Democrats after 2012. ((Walker Bragman, \u201cMore like Reagan than FDR: I\u2019m a Millennial and will never vote for Hillary Clinton,\u201d <em>Salon.com<\/em>, November 30, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2015\/11\/30\/more_like_reagan_than_fdr_im_a_millennial_and_ill_never_vote_for_hillary_clinton\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2015\/11\/30\/more_like_reagan_than_fdr_im_a_millennial_and_ill_never_vote_for_hillary_clinton\/<\/a>\u00a0))<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23016\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23016\" class=\"wp-image-23016\" src=\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/weekend_at_bernies-med-size.jpg\" alt=\"weekend_at_bernies-med size\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-23016\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Weekend at Bernie\u2019s?<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The Occupy generation\u2019s wielding of the corpse of social democracy in getting behind Sanders as the standard-bearer of reform recalls the 1980s film <em>Weekend at Bernie\u2019s<\/em> (1989), in which the protagonists in the movie hide behind the eponymous man\u2019s body as an excuse for wild adventure — in this case, a hardly na\u00efve adolescent misadventure with the Democrats. It is regressive. In a dynamic reminiscent of Jesse Jackson\u2019s Presidential campaigns of the 1980s, Sanders has offered \u201cLeft\u201d opposition to Democratic Party Centrism, but not by opposing but trying to capture it as well. Sanders meeting with Killer Mike isn\u2019t the answer — Mike already had endorsed him back in June. <\/p>\n<p>Sanders\u2019s campaign from its inception in May has been surprisingly and increasingly successful. But it has since plateaued. For a moment in September, it looked like Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential candidacy was in jeopardy due to the Benghazi hearings. Even Obama threw the Democrats\u2019 favorite under the bus, acknowledging in an interview on <em>60 Minutes<\/em> (October 11, 2015) that Clinton had mishandled her email communication as Secretary of State. In the same interview, Obama asserted that he would win a third election, and — much the same thing — that Biden\u2019s experience as Vice President eminently qualified him to be President. But Hillary survived Benghazi; and Biden bowed out. <\/p>\n<p>The Democrats, since the 2014 midterm elections in which they failed to dislodge the Republicans\u2019 Congressional majority, have been faced with the problem of reproducing the \u201cObama majority\u201d that was victorious in 2008 and 2012. ((Jonathan Martin, \u201cAfter losses, liberal and centrist Democrats square off on strategy,\u201d <em>New York Times<\/em>, November 14, 2014 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/15\/us\/politics\/democratic-party-iberals-and-moderates.html\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/11\/15\/us\/politics\/democratic-party-iberals-and-moderates.html<\/a>))\u00a0This has been described as the challenge of uniting the Democrats\u2019 \u201cLeft\u201d and \u201cCenter\u201d voters: the \u201cLeft\u201d is organized labor and others concerned with socio-economic issues; the \u201cCenter\u201d — really, the <em>Right<\/em> — are those concerned with identity-group politics, women, blacks and gays. This potentially fatal split among the Democrats was seen in the 2015 Chicago city-wide election, in which Obama\u2019s former Chief of Staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was challenged by fellow Democrat, Cook County Commissioner Jes\u00fas \u201cChuy\u201d Garc\u00eda, who had the support of the Chicago Teachers Union that had struck against Emanuel and his neoliberal education reforms in 2012, seeking to embarrass the Chicago native Obama precisely during his campaign for reelection. <\/p>\n<p>In the 2015 Chicago mayoral election, black Democrats supported Rahm against Chuy. This was not merely a division between blacks and Latinos, but rather a split of and within the Democrats\u2019 organized labor base from its ethnic constituency \u201ccommunity\u201d-based neoliberal politics. The former 1960s Black Panther, U.S. Congressional Representative Bobby Rush, for instance, denounced Chuy\u2019s campaign for trying to usurp the mantle of the (first black mayor of Chicago) \u201cHarold Washington majority\u201d (as against the prior Daley political machine) that first emerged in the 1980s, which Rush implied could only be reproduced (if at all) by black (and <em>not<\/em> Latino) leadership — that is, a neoliberal Center\/Right majority, and <em>not<\/em> a labor-based politics. Washington was supported by the \u201cLeft:\u201d his campaign chief was a former Maoist — shades of Van Jones? For Rush and other black Democrats in Chicago, Rahm <em>is<\/em> the \u201cWashington majority\u201d candidate. As Obama was, and Hillary will be. Chuy\u2019s challenge to Rahm has actually provided Emanuel with the opportunity for achieving the electoral mandate endorsement he previously lacked: now a majority has voted in <em>favor<\/em> of his neoliberal policies. Far from a crisis for neoliberalism, neoliberalism has been further consolidated against any contenders. This is a lesson for Sanders\u2019s supporters: when Hillary is elected by primary voters as the Democratic Party candidate for President, they will have chosen and given a mandate to neoliberalism. <\/p>\n<p>Hillary\u2019s ability to unite the \u201cLeft\u201d and Right of the Democrats is uncertain: if she can do so, still, she will not be able to generate the same level of enthusiasm that Obama did in 2008. Certainly this goes for labor. Obama\u2019s 2008 campaign for instance offered organized labor the prospect of passing the Employee Free Choice Act under a Democratic majority, but was unceremoniously dropped after the election. Obama\u2019s campaign demanded — and achieved — a reuniting of labor in the AFL-CIO from its split in the Change to Win Federation, so that they would have to negotiate with only one rather than multiple labor constituencies: Obama sought to bring labor under control, specifically in the context of the potentially explosive 2008 economic crisis. The Democrats did not face a labor insurgency. Neither will they now. <\/p>\n<p>Into this bitter legacy steps Sanders, whose call for \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d he explicitly described as an electoral strategy for raising turnout, especially among younger, newer voters, and thus returning the Democrats to a Congressional majority that they enjoyed when Obama was elected until the 2010 Tea Party Congressional election insurgency. Sanders has offered himself as a better champion for the Democrats in the 2016 general election than Hillary can be. The problem has been on the Democratic Right: Sanders\u2019s alleged \u201cproblem with women and blacks.\u201d Hillary has supposedly maintained appeal to the social identity constituencies, despite some turbulence from Black Lives Matter and the memory by gays that both Clintons have had a poor record on marriage equality. The presumptive character of Hillary\u2019s nomination, especially as a woman candidate, has exhibited a complacency that chafes and is not guaranteed to pay off in terms of voter mobilization. ((Michael Eric Dyson, \u201cYes she can: Why Hillary Clinton will do more for black people than Obama: A skeptic\u2019s journey,\u201d <em>The New Republic<\/em>, November 29, 2015 <a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/124391\/yes-she-can\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/124391\/yes-she-can<\/a>))<\/p>\n<p>The degree to which the \u201cLeft\u201d has gotten on-board with Sanders, it has been in the form of the alleged \u201cbrocialists\u201d — straight white men. \u201cSocialism\u201d has meant a backlash against identity politics, an attempt to return to the Democrats\u2019 historic role as economic reformers going back to FDR\u2019s New Deal and LBJ\u2019s Great Society, which had pressured the Republicans such that even Eisenhower and Nixon were purportedly to the \u201cLeft\u201d of the Clintons on economic policy. There is also the sense that in the post-2008 environment Sanders could appeal to and win back an older generation of disaffected voters, the so-called \u201cReagan Democrats,\u201d whose shifting allegiances allowed the Republicans to triumph since the \u201980s, now approaching retirement age and concerned about the opportunities for their children and grandchildren bequeathed by 30 years of decrepit neoliberalism. ((Christopher C. Schons, \u201cFrom Reagan to Bernie Sanders: My political odyssey,\u201d <em>Counterpunch<\/em>, November 4, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/11\/04\/from-reagan-to-bernie-sanders-my-political-odyssey\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/11\/04\/from-reagan-to-bernie-sanders-my-political-odyssey\/<\/a>))<\/p>\n<p>Sanders thus offers the Democrats an answer to the Tea Party that has been sorely lacking since 2010, as expressed by the frustration that bubbled over in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. A new generation of activists was mobilized to \u201cget the money out of politics,\u201d especially in opposition to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s Citizens United decision that allows unlimited campaign spending, a generation whose concerns about \u201csocial justice\u201d and the erosion of \u201cdemocracy\u201d Sanders speaks to. The question has been whether the Sanders campaign is \u201cfor real,\u201d or whether, rather, it is merely a protest pressure-tactic on Hillary, slowing and perhaps redirecting, however slightly, the Clinton juggernaut. ((Bruce A. Dixon, \u201cPresidential candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016,\u201d <em>Black Agenda Report<\/em>, May 6, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary<\/a>))\u00a0Sanders\u2019s claim that higher turnout means electoral gains for the Democrats neglects that not only the Republicans but they themselves engage in and benefit from voter suppression, especially among blacks, especially in the Democrats\u2019 urban strongholds. The Democrats have no interest in popular political mobilization, even behind the most anodyne and unthreatening symbolic gestures — see Black Lives Matter — and so seek to curtail it. ((Glen Ford, \u201cBlacks will transform America, and free themselves, but not at the ballot box in 2016: Black voters cannot be counted on to support the most progressive presidential candidates available at the polls,\u201d <em>Black Agenda Report<\/em>, October 21, 2015 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/blacks_wont_free_themselves_at_ballot_box_in_2016\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/www.blackagendareport.com\/blacks_wont_free_themselves_at_ballot_box_in_2016<\/a>))<\/p>\n<p>Not least, this is because the Democrats don\u2019t want the political responsibility that would come with large majorities, as was clear in 2008-10, in which they bent their Congressional supermajority over backwards to placate the utterly prostrate Republicans. Any substantial increase in the voting electorate would present problems of political integration. See the Tea Parties\u2019 challenge to the Republican establishment, which would really rather do without such berserkers in their midst. Even before the Tea Parties, in the 2008 bailout crisis, it was unclear whether Congressional Republicans were to fall victim to their own neoliberal rhetoric instead of taking required action to prevent a complete financial meltdown. International financial markets constantly worry over the \u201cpolitical paralysis\u201d in the U.S. yielded by the Republicans hostage to the Tea Party Congressmen and the implications of this for the world economy. The Democrats would be challenged by such unruly voters (especially at the local level of municipal and state governments, as in Illinois) at least as much if not more so than the Republicans are. <\/p>\n<p>Neoliberalism needs to be seen as both an accommodation to and a reinforcement of social and political demobilization after the 1960s, visible for instance in the decimation of labor unions but also of other civil society institutions, after abandonment of their original liberal <em>raison d’\u00eatre<\/em> in favor of integration in what the Frankfurt School called the authoritarian \u201cadministered state,\u201d already observable to C. Wright Mills and other political scientists after the waning of the radicalization of the 1930s through WWII: what remained was the political parties\u2019 organization of a \u201cpower elite.\u201d But even this structure has atrophied since the 1960s. Privatization through NGOs has not meant a renaissance of civil society, but has left the political field abandoned of any substantial forces for reform since the 1980s. Even what Eisenhower decried as the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex\u201d in the Cold War has been revealed after the Iraq war as a massively corrupt freewheeling affair, and not a political force to be reckoned with: Enormous sums of money may be thrown around to government contractors, but this hardly amounts to political control over policy; 1970s Ford administration veteran Donald Rumsfeld went to war not only against foes in Afghanistan and Iraq but against the Pentagon itself, in a neoliberal privatization campaign of \u201cslimming down\u201d the military, to the embitterment of the officer corps, even amid soaring expenditures. What C. Wright Mills warned about \u201cpolitical irresponsibility\u201d in \u201cliberal rhetoric and conservative default\u201d has only grown more unchecked since the \u201960s. Indeed, Mills seems too optimistic in light of even more miserable realities today. The \u201cpolitical establishment\u201d is actually quite threadbare and in evident disarray, not a convincing \u201cpower elite.\u201d But: \u201cThere is no alternative.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The issue is whether the post-2008 crisis has been an opportunity for undoing neoliberalism — reversing the \u201980s — or for further entrenching it. But to overcome neoliberalism there would need to be an organized political force for doing so. The Democrats are decidedly <em>not<\/em> this, in any conceivable way. The crisis in Europe has demonstrated an opportunity for expanding and deepening neoliberalism, and not for returning to \u201csocial democracy\u201d — despite SYRIZA, Podemos, and Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s wresting seasoned 1980s (Bennite) leadership of the U.K.\u2019s Labour Party, back away from the \u201cThird Way\u201d spectacularly unconvincing 1990s-offspring Blairite runts. <\/p>\n<p>Sanders has more evident conviction than Hillary could ever exhibit. This recalls heroic opposition to Reaganism — why his followers have been affectionately nicknamed after the Sandinistas. One key issue for the Sandernistas that is also similar to the dynamic of Corbyn\u2019s supporters in the U.K. is the 2000s George W. Bush-era anti-war movement as touchstone: Sanders, like Corbyn, opposed the Iraq war, which makes him amenable to the \u201cLeft.\u201d Does the Sanders campaign represent a potential political turn, or is it the last gasp of Occupy activism before growing up and joining the fold of the Democrats? Sanders\u2019s abandoning his hitherto vintage 1960s \u201cindependence\u201d from the Democrats points the way for the younger generation of 21st century activists. <\/p>\n<p>The \u201cLeft\u201d may be tempted to imagine the Sanders campaign as a potential crisis for the Democrats — just as Corbyn\u2019s leadership of the Labour Party could be seen as a crisis and opportunity for the \u201cLeft.\u201d It is more likely that — just as Corbyn will save and not wreck the Labour Party — Sanders will boost and not undermine the Democrats\u2019 campaign around Hillary in 2016. Or at least that is his avowed hope. <\/p>\n<p>What if any kind of political movement could come out of the Sanders campaign? The Sandernistas certainly do not think of the campaign as a way to reconcile themselves to the Democratic Party but rather hope to transform it. Like with Chuy in Chicago, the hope is to mobilize new forces through the campaign that will be sustained after the election. Will this be within or outside the Democratic Party? Perhaps it will be both. In the 1980s, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was established; in 2004, the Progressive Democrats of America was founded out of the Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich Presidential campaigns. The first was, in DSA founder Michael Harrington\u2019s words, \u201ca remnant of a remnant\u201d of the New Left; the second was in many respects a repeat of the first. These have not been auspicious developments indicating possibilities for where the Sandernistas might go after 2016. The DSA supported Jesse Jackson\u2019s Democratic Party campaign for President, which Sanders also endorsed, in protest against Reaganism. The precedents in the 1980s legacy of the 1960s New Left suggest the further adaptation to — through protest of — the Democrats\u2019 moving ever Right-ward. <\/p>\n<p>Sanders like Trump demonstrates the hollowness of the two U.S. political parties today, if only through the inability to stop their candidacies by the \u201cestablishment.\u201d The parties are no longer the formidable \u201cmachines\u201d they were in the 20th century — confronted by the 1960s New Left generation — but are merely brandings anyone can buy into — whether wholesale by billionaire magnates like Trump himself or the Koch Brothers Tea Party-backers, or through tiny payments to Sanders\u2019s 2016 campaign, as had been made to Obama in 2008, as an internet media phenomenon. Clinton at least still needs to win over union endorsements and particular capitalist business-sector funding. But in any case there is no political process involved, but only the aestheticization of politics as a consumer article ((See Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction\u201d (1936).)). As such it can and will be rendered in typical postmodernist pastiche of non-partisan eclecticism. \u201cPolitics\u201d means what any- and everyone wants to make of it. This is even claimed as a virtue, of \u201cdivided government.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The worst possible outcome of this is the most likely, that Hillary will be elected as President, but the Republicans will retain a Congressional majority, reproducing the polarized stalemate and deadlock that actually sustains — stabilizes — U.S. politics around a conservative neoliberal consensus, in which certain social issues are given obligatory genuflections without being actually addressed let alone ameliorated. Since the Democrats won the \u201cculture wars\u201d under Obama\u2019s neoliberal leadership, a new division of labor with the Republicans has been established: that the Republicans will represent \u201cstraight white men,\u201d especially in rural and exurban areas; and the Democrats, under the leadership of the Clintonite neoliberal Center\/Right, will represent \u201cwomen, blacks and gays\u201d in their petit bourgeois ethnic constituency urban (and more urbane suburban) communities. Welcome to the \u201cnew normal.\u201d It began in the \u201980s with Reagan\u2019s Presidency, under which the Democrats retained control of Congress. <\/p>\n<p>In the 1980s, the \u201cyuppies\u201d — young urban professionals, that is to say, grown-up children of the 1960s — were regarded as new but conservative; today, they are called \u201chipsters\u201d and considered liberal as well as entirely normal: an electoral demographic spanning everyone from college to middle-age, referred to in conventional polling analysis as \u201cvoters under 50,\u201d i.e., the generation that came of age <em>after<\/em> the \u201980s. Sanders (like Trump) indicatively does best among them — where Clinton does better among those over 50. In the 1980s, identity politics consolidated the accommodation to and resolution of neoliberalism in the \u201cReagan revolution.\u201d What Adolph Reed has called the \u201cJesse Jackson phenomenon\u201d exemplified this. It has continued up to the present, through such eminently respectably conservative measures as gay marriage equality. Obama has not <em>brought about<\/em> any social changes, but only granted them legal legitimacy. But where Obama at least seemed to symbolize \u201cchange\u201d — a new post-\u201960s generation — Sanders as well as Clinton represent a return: diminished expectations. Sanders raising the specter of the \u201cOld Left\u201d 1930s-60s New Deal Coalition\u2019s venerable political heritage for the Democrats, which came to grief in the \u201980s, will be the means not for resuscitating but finally burying it. <\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_23017\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-23017\" class=\"wp-image-23017\" src=\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/daniel-ortega.jpg\" alt=\"daniel ortega\" width=\"400\" height=\"267\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-23017\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Daniel Ortega in the 21st century<\/p><\/div>\n<p>There will be no \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d — apart from the one already long underway since the 1980s. The final decades of the 20th century were successfully seized by the same \u201cend of history\u201d to which the 21st century will yet continue to belong, evidently for a long time to come. Daniel Ortega\u2019s return to power as part of the greater Latin American \u201cPink Tide\u201d in the 2000s represented the final surrender — or was it rather the ultimate triumph? — of the Sandinistas, and put paid to any \u201980s \u201cLeft\u201d nostalgia on which he may have traded. The same will go for Sanders. Sanders, as an outlier 1960s remnant of the Reagan era, becomes a mainstream political phenomenon today only as a function of giving up the ghost. The 1960s were not defeated but institutionalized in the 1980s. Today, this recent historical process has been completely naturalized, the domesticated televised version of the 1960s as historical curiosity. What needs to be reconciled today — by contrast with 2008 — is not the \u201960s but the \u201980s: not the last hurrah of the former 1960s radical Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers who helped Obama get his political start as a generational bequest 40 years after Chicago\u2019s Days of Rage, but the 1980s Mayor of Burlington, Vermont (alongside the vintage 1980s New York City real estate speculator) will be the specter haunting 2016. <\/p>\n<p>The 1960s New Left in which Sanders and Clinton — and Corbyn — took part could not and will not give any rebirth to \u201csocialism,\u201d however defined. It could not prevent and indeed actively assisted and not merely accommodated the demise of the Great Society. Whatever regrets it may have now do not point any way forward, but only towards its retirement, and a historical settling of the past. <\/p>\n<p>Just as Clinton\u2019s election in 1992 did not reverse Reaganite neoliberalism by pot-smoking former campaigners in 1972 for George McGovern, Sanders\u2019s late protest today may seal neoliberalism\u2019s unalloyed triumph. Margaret Thatcher claimed Tony Blair as her ultimate achievement. Sanders begging to differ from Hillary before her election as Clinton II will thus be the final victory of the 1980s.\u00a0| <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><a name=\"postscript\"><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>Postscript on the March 15 primaries<\/h2>\n<p>The primary elections for the nomination of the Democrat and Republican candidates for President have demonstrated the depth and extent of the disarray of the two Parties. Sanders has successfully challenged Hillary and has gone beyond being a mere messenger of protest to become a real contender for the Democratic Party nomination. But this has been on the basis of the Democrats’ established constituencies and so has limited Sanders’s reach. Turnout for the Democratic Party primaries has not been significantly raised as Sanders hoped. The Republican primaries by contrast have reached new highs.<\/p>\n<p>Donald Trump has been the actual phenomenon of crisis and potential change in 2016, taking a much stronger initiative in challenging the established Republican Party, indeed offering the only convincing possibility of defeating Clinton. The significant crossover support between Sanders and Trump however marginal is very indicative of this crisis. Trump has elicited hysteria among both established Republicans and Democrats. Their hysteria says more about them than about him: fear of the base. Sanders has attempted to oppose the 1930\u201340s New Deal and 1960s\u201370s Great Society and New Left base of the Democratic Party, established and developed from FDR through the Nixon era, against its 1980s\u20132010s neoliberal leadership that has allegedly abandoned them. Trump has done something similar, winning back from Obama the “Reagan Democrats.” But the wild opportunism of his demagogy allows him to transcend any inherent limitations of this appeal. <\/p>\n<p>Trump is no “fascist” nor even really a “populist,” ((See Tad Tietze, “The Trump paradox: A rough guide for the Left,” <em>Left Flank<\/em> (January 25, 2016). Available on-line at:<<a href=\"http:\/\/left-flank.org\/2016\/01\/25\/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">http:\/\/left-flank.org\/2016\/01\/25\/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left\/<\/a>>.)) but is what the Republicans accuse him of being: a New York-style Democrat (like the blowhard former 1980s New York City Mayor Ed Koch). He challenges Hillary precisely because they occupy such similar Centrist positions in U.S. politics, whatever their differences on policy. But Trump more than Sanders represents something new and different: a potential post- and not pre-neoliberal form of capitalist politics, regarding changes in policies that have continued from Reagan through Obama, driven by discontents of those alienated from both Parties. Sanders could potentially best Trump, but only on the basis of a much greater and more substantial mobilization for a different politics than it is evidently possible to muster through the Democrats. The biggest “party” remains those who don’t vote. | <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><a name=\"p.p.s.\"><\/a><\/p>\n<h2>P.P.S. on Trump and the crisis of the Republican Party<\/h2>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: left;\">June 22, 2016<\/h4>\n<p><em>Further amendment after the end of the primary elections.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Trump is no “fascist,” nor even really a “populist,” but is precisely what the Republicans accuse him of being: a New York-style Democrat — like the socially and economically liberal but blowhard “law-and-order” conservative former 1980s New York City Mayor Ed Koch. Trump challenges Hillary precisely because they occupy such similar moderate Centrist positions on the U.S. political spectrum, whatever their various differences on policy. Trump more than Sanders represents something new and different in this election season: a potential post- and not pre-neoliberal form of capitalist politics, regarding changes in policies that have continued from Reagan through Obama, driven by discontents of those alienated from both Parties. Trump has successfully run against and seeks to overthrow the established Republican 1980s-era “Reagan Revolution” coalition of neoliberals, neoconservatives, Strict Construction Constitutionalist conservatives and evangelical Christian fundamentalists — against their (always uneasy) alliance as well as against all of its component parts. Established Republicans recoil at undoing the Reagan Coalition they have mobilized since the 1980s. Marco Rubio as well as Ted Cruz — both of whom were adolescents in the 1980s — denounced Trump not only for his “New York values” but also and indicatively as a “socialist.” Glenn Beck said that Trump meant that the America of “statism” of the Progressives Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had won over the America of “freedom” of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course that is ideological and leaves aside the problem of capitalism, which Trump seeks to reform. Sanders could have potentially bested Trump as a candidate for reform, perhaps, but only on the basis of a much greater and more substantial mobilization for a different politics than it is evidently possible to muster through the Democrats, whose nostalgia for the New Deal, Great Society and New Left does not provide the necessary resources.<\/p>\n<p>Trump has succeeded precisely where Sanders has failed in marshaling the discontents with neoliberalism and demand for change. Sanders has collapsed into the Democratic Party. To succeed, Sanders would have needed to run against the Democrats the way Trump has run against the Republicans. This would have meant challenging the ruling Democratic neoliberal combination of capitalist austerity with New Left identity politics of “race, gender and sexuality” that is the corporate status quo. The results of Trump’s contesting of Reaganite and Clintonian and Obama-era neoliberalism remain to be seen. The biggest “party” remains those who don’t vote. Trump will win if he mobilizes more of them than Clinton. Clinton is the conservative in this election; Trump is the candidate for change. The Republicans have been in crisis in ways the Democrats are not, and this is the political opportunity expressed by Trump. He is seeking to lead the yahoos to the Center as well as meeting their genuine discontents in neoliberalism. Of course the change Trump represents is insufficient and perhaps unworkable, but it is nonetheless necessary. Things must change; they will change. As Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” The future of any potential struggle for socialism in the U.S. will be on a basis among not only those who have voted for Sanders but also those who have and will vote for Trump. | <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<h2>Notes<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The final triumph of the 1980s Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 82\u00a0|\u00a0December 2015 \u2013 January 2016 THE CAMPAIGN CYCLE for the 2016 general election in the U.S. has been characterized by some throwbacks to the 1980s, most notably in the two major party challengers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most remarkably, the Sanders campaign has introduced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,23,15,6,43],"class_list":["post-2296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-37","tag-neoliberalism","tag-obama-era","tag-the-platypus-review","tag-trump-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2296"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3161,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296\/revisions\/3161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"sandersjackson-croped\"](\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/sandersjackson-croped.jpeg\")