Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumThe issue is not Hillary Clinton's Wall St links but Democrats' core dogmas
This is a very interesting article by Thomas Franks that it is not simply a fight between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but a fight between two very different visions for the Democratic party.
The issue is not Hillary Clinton's Wall St links but Democrats' core dogmas
Thomas Frank
http://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/feb/16/the-issue-is-not-hillary-clintons-wall-st-links-but-her-partys-core-dogmas
The figure that brought triumphant closure to that last internecine war was President Bill Clinton, who installed a new kind of Democratic administration in Washington. Rather than paying homage to the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, Clinton passed trade deals that defied and even injured the labor movement, once his partys leading constituency; he signed off on a measure that basically ended the federal welfare program; and he performed singular favors for the financial industry, the New Deals great nemesis.
Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clintons many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the presidents few failings were in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one.
Beowulf
(761 posts)Or at least some of it.
DJ13
(23,671 posts)"That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasnt the best idea after all."
"In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of intelligent design. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a political revolution."
Paka
(2,760 posts)The core principles themselves are at stake.