Cold war liberalism and Clinton
A useful read for those too young to have experienced the Cold War.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36891-no-hillary-clinton-isnt-a-republican-but-the-resemblance-is-striking
Understanding the paradox of Cold War liberalism is crucial to understanding the paradox of Hillary Clinton — and the possibilities, for good or ill, of a Clinton administration that might take office next year. Cold War liberals of the golden age were internationalist hawks who favored an aggressive global policy of American hegemony, and they were also center-left Democrats who supported labor unions and civil rights and a broad range of progressive reforms. If the combination sounds bizarre in retrospect, it made more sense in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In its less hypocritical expressions, Cold War liberalism was about fighting Soviet communism around the world, while smoothing over the contradictions of capitalism and providing wider equality, justice and prosperity at home. Cold War liberals dominated political discourse for almost 30 years after World War II, a period that saw marginal tax rates above 90 percent for the wealthiest Americans and rapidly increasing wages and living conditions for working people.
But Cold War liberalism was about something else too: Crushing most kinds of Third World nationalism (since virtually by definition they were insufficiently pro-American and pro-capitalist) and purging all forms of radical and leftist ideology (whether socialist or anarchist or something-else-ist) from the Democratic Party and the labor unions and other major institutions of American political life. As Beinart mentions in passing, Americans for Democratic Action, a pillar of Democratic Party left-liberal consensus in the ‘60s and ‘70s, began as an organization devoted to rooting out undesirable left-wingers from mainstream politics, and only turned its attention to combating enemies on the right once that first battle had been won.
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Hillary Clinton would like to be the figure who finally brings Scoop Jackson’s politics to the White House. It’s difficult to tell the difference between sincerity and artifice with her, but I’m inclined to see Clinton’s recent pivot toward Sanders-lite economic populism as reflecting some genuine conviction. But she faces two big problems, before we even get to the unpredictable opponent who will shift positions daily and attack her from the left and right simultaneously.
One of those is that Clinton is stuck with the hollowed-out remnants of the Democratic Party, which during her husband’s tenure abandoned ideology and severed its connection with class-based progressive politics, in the delusional belief that permanent prosperity would lead to permanent victory. Instead it created economic disaster and spectacular defeat, and despite its supposed demographic advantages has virtually been wiped out across the middle of the country by an overtly racist opposition party that isn’t entirely convinced the earth is round.
Then there’s the bigger problem that no one really wants the ideological package Clinton is selling. She isn’t a Republican, and in fact she’s closer to being an old-line Democrat than her husband ever was. (She was never completely sold on Bill’s “New Democrat” crap.) She’s been inside the defensive Democratic Party carapace of Cold War liberalism for so long, believing it to be the only possible reality, that she hadn’t noticed until right now how much the political landscape had shifted. There are voters who want war, no doubt, and voters who want liberalism. But they aren’t the same people; the connection has been severed. Cold War liberalism, in 2016, is a political philosophy with a constituency of one. To use a reference Hillary Clinton will get immediately, one pill makes you larger and one pill takes you small. Taking both at once doesn’t do anything at all.
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