Democratic Primaries in the Shadow of Neoliberalism

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/19/democratic-primaries-shadow-neoliberalism

Two things then happened that frame the choices before us now. On the Democratic side of the aisle here in the United States, both a moderate and a more radical challenge to the earlier neoliberal orthodoxy began to crystalize. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may now personify those different challenges, but they are not their sole architects. On the contrary, across the Democratic coalition as a whole, the last seven years have witnessed the increasing presence in the progressive policy debate of two linked but competing lists of policy preferences. The moderate list includes

LIST B

• The maintenance of demand through public spending and the toleration of public debt
• The avoidance of further financial crisis by tighter financial oversight
• The infrastructure route to growth (public spending to modernize roads, bridges, rail & internet)
• Progressive taxation to reduce excessive inequality and to spread the cost of welfare provision to those best able to bear it
• Greater rights for women and minorities at work, more childcare & paid parental leave
• Moves towards a carbon-free energy policy

The more radical list includes the moderate agenda, but adds some/all of the following

LIST C

• Greater rights for trade unions, and a major hike in both the minimum wage & Social Security
• Systemic attack on the sources of poverty, with affirmative action while poverty persists
• The deconstruction of the system of mass incarceration and the ending of the war on drugs
• New trade policy to reverse the outsourcing of well-paying jobs
• The breaking up of banks that are too big to fail
• Less spending on the military & on foreign wars: more nation-building at home, less abroad

Those lists contain very specific American dimensions (not least the ending of mass incarceration and the winding down of foreign wars). But they are not, in all their essentials, American lists alone. Parallel changes in understanding and policy are in debate and dispute in many western European center-left parties right now. They certainly are in the British Labour Party, where leadership has recently switched to Jeremy Corbyn, in many ways the UK’s Bernie Sanders equivalent. For the post-2008 struggle, in all advanced capitalist economies, to return to generalized prosperity and job security is obliging the center-left everywhere to re-examine the wisdom of its earlier enthusiastic accommodation to neoliberalism. It is that re-examination that lies at the heart of the current clash, in the on-going series of Democratic Party presidential primaries, between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.