“The Clintonite Right Is An Unsustainable Trend”: An Editorial
It’s one of those paradoxical features of American liberal democracy — and one of the signs of its fundamental dysfunction — that progressive reforms supported by the vast majority of the public aren’t, for the most part, ever even an option within the American system of government or political system.
The reasons why are several but the biggest, by far, is no secret, even if it is a thing that, weirdly, is rarely even brought up in “mainstream” political discourse: entrenched, well-heeled interests who make a fortune from the status quo oppose those reforms, which threaten to derail their gravy-train, and use the campaign finance system to purchase legislators to kill them.
In the American two-party system — still another of those “systems” — the Republican party is the traditionally conservative party, aligned with The Powers That Be and well-financed by them to go into public office, cut taxes on the well-off, cut regulation of industry and finance, keep wages low, facilitate the transfer of manufacturing out of the U.S. in the name of corporate profit — to make the well-off even more well-off at the expense of everyone else. The Democratic party was once the theoretically progressive opposition that, among other things, aligned with labor, civil rights, civil liberties and other progressive movements and supported reforms that annoyed TPTB by cutting into their profits.
Then, three decades ago came the Clintonite-right,[1] “Democrats” who argued for ditching all of that big reform stuff, enthusiastically embracing the bribery-and-donor-service model of “governance” and moving sharply to the right, following the Republicans in prostituting their allegedly-public offices to those TPTB — largely the same entrenched interests that funded the Republican party — in exchange for long campaign green.
It was an idea that proved lucrative. Capital was delighted and as the dollars rolled in, it caught on. Bill Clinton was elected president as a Democrat. Soon, the Clintonite right, in its various permutations, was running the party apparatus and had assumed hegemonic control over its elected officials at the federal level, a state of affairs that persists to the present.
The only real policy agenda of Clintonite-right politicians is serving their big donors and for decades now, while a seemingly endless raft of problems have arisen that would require vigorous progressive reform to in any way seriously address, the Clintonites’ primary role in government has been to hamstring, prevent, attenuate and preclude that increasingly needed reform on behalf of those they regard as their real constituents.
Such an odious way of doing business would, if nakedly stated, find few supporters among the voting public, so Clintonite-right pols have deployed various strategies to make their “program” seem more palatable. They often characterize themselves as “moderates” or “centrists,” tags that make them sound pragmatic, intemperate, reasonable, not ideologically rigid, to an American public that appreciates such things. The corporate press — yet another of those problematic “systems” — ubiquitously privilege them with such labels, marginalizing progressives, who are both denied these warm-and-fuzzy descriptors and presented as an opposition to them, and treating Clintonites, in policy disputes, as good-faith actors, rather than simply dirty pols in the pay of industry and finance. Clintonite-right pols use “triangulation” tactics, throwing their own party’s base under the bus in order to portray “both sides” — Republicans and progressive Democrats — as “extreme” and position themselves as an artificially-created “sensible center.”
This writer has, in various venues, covered many examples of the latter over the years. In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Hillary Clinton was faced with a serious challenge from progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and her program consisted of proposing watered-down-to-nothing versions of whatever Sanders has proposed first, then arguing the Sanders originals were too “radical” and completely unrealistic, while hers were more “doable.”[2] Sanders would propose raising the minimum wage to $15/hour, Clinton would, a few months later, propose only $12/hour. Sanders crafted a $1 trillion/5 year infrastructure investment plan, then, months later, Clinton would turn up proposing a totally inadequate $275 billion/5 year infrastructure plan. And so on.[3]
How do politicians in the pay of entrenched interests put a positive spin on half-assed, less-than-half-measures cooked up solely to defeat substantive reform without ever addressing the problem that gave rise to the need for reform?
Some Clintonites try to describe them as “incremental change” or “incrementalism.” This, they tell progressives, is the first step, how you get to the kind of policies you really want.
In the debate over healthcare during the Obama administration, this was often used as a way to sell the Affordable Care Act. Relentlessly rapacious capital — and government acquiescence to/facilitation of it — has ruined the healthcare system in the U.S.. Progressives were told that passing the ACA was an “incremental” “first step” in getting to single-payer healthcare, the reform that was actually needed, but in reality, the ACA was nothing more than a bad, industry-friendly healthcare plan developed by the Republicans, adopted by Obama and authored by a former executive of the largest health insurance firm in the U.S.. Its central aim was to defeat reform, not be reform; to delay the collapse of healthcare in the U.S. and allow the massive for-profit gravy-train to continue down the tracks a little longer; to further entrench the failed private insurance industry, the exact opposite of single-payer. If its industry-funded Clintonite advocates (or, before them, the Republican advocates of its predecessors) had ever come to genuinely believe it would ever lead to single payer, they would have fought it to their last breaths. It was sort of a giveaway that even as they sought to sweet-talk progressives with that siren song of “incrementalism,” they were, out of the other side of their mouths, dismissing single payer as an impossible — and undesirable — fantasy.
As they had with Hillary Clinton’s disastrous healthcare effort in the ’90s, the Clintonites also hijacked the progressives’ language about healthcare as a “human right,” slapping it on a policy that didn’t recognize healthcare to be anything of the sort. They adopted progressive language about “universal healthcare” and applied it to an “affordable care act” that left millions of Americans with nothing and many millions more with “insurance” so outrageously expensive as to be inaccessible.
More broadly, the ACA is a good illustration of how Clintonite right “reforms” undermine and defeat real reform.
The ACA was theater, a policy that pretended to address the problems of healthcare but without actually doing so, helping blunt any immediate push for reform.
Because the ACA doesn’t actually address the problems, made many of them worse and allowed many more to continue, it gives reform itself a bad name. Some people will be much more cynical — and not in the wise, informed way experience imparts — about future pols promising “reform.”
It puts on welfare the very for-profit entrenched interests who have nearly driven U.S. healthcare into the ground, subsidizing, among other things, their purchase of legislators, which makes any genuine reform effort in the future much harder.
Politically, the ACA allows unscrupulous Clintonite-right trash like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to continue the grift, pretending as if the profound problems with the ACA can be fixed with some minor tinkering, and facilitates their triangulation against real reform. Both Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 told America that Bernie Sanders wanted to repeal the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, everything, leaving everyone who relies on those programs with nothing, then try to pass single-payer Medicare For All, whereas they wanted to “build on” the ACA. Sounds easier, less radical. An absolutely disgraceful lie that helps defeat reform so that gravy-train continues. To get through the 2020 Democratic primaries, Biden pitched as an alternative to M4A a “public option,” a public-financed insurance program to compete with private insurers.[4] After his election, he never even mentioned it again. It had served its purpose. Americans, meanwhile, remain stuck with a dysfunctional healthcare system that bleeds them dry and that no “reform” any donor-owned Clintonite will ever be allowed to propose could even begin to fix.
As the Biden administration has yet again made plain, Clintonite-right pols can’t govern. To get progressive votes in 2020, Biden had advanced a series of moderately progressive reforms, which Democrats bundled into a package called Build Back Better. Over the months BBB was debated, Biden made no real effort to sell it, actively sabotaged its chances in congress then let it die — killed not at the hands of Republicans but at the cookie-jar-encased mitts of Clintonite-right “Democratic” legislators who had been put into office by the Clintonite-right leadership of the Democratic party and congressional caucus. They needed those pols, you see, to defeat progressive contenders.
People notice. Biden’s approval numbers went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his presidency and have stayed there, only worsening with time. The complete lack of any real record of accomplishments has put Biden in a bind vis-a-vis his extraordinarily ill-advised reelection effort. The Biden campaign’s initial strategy was to pretty straightforwardly gaslight people — to argue that “Bidenomics” had actually been very successful but that, in effect, people have been too stupid to recognize it. That went over just as well as could have been expected and only lasted a few weeks. Biden’s social media defenders still insist on pushing the fantasy that Biden has some great record that people just don’t acknowledge but the donor-driven regimen and policies Biden has pursued are, for the most part, actively bad/harmful, don’t address Americans’ problems, don’t improve their lives and are largely things no one wanted and about which no one cares. The truth is that his presidency has been a miserable failure, marked by, among other things, sky-high gas prices, out-of-control greedflation, soaring medical debt, unaffordable housing and a major rollback of civil liberties at the hands of a reactionary Supreme Court that mortally threatens every reform effort in the immediate future but which Biden refuses to do anything to fix.
Biden’s unpopularity isn’t merely a product of presently poor conditions but reflects a public weariness with this sort of “government.” While it may sound odd to say this after Clintonites have held hegemony over the Dem party and its elected officials for so long, Clintonite-right pols are not popular and never really have been.[see Appendix below] The fortunes that entrenched interests cough up can pay for lavish campaigns to sell them, give them high name-recognition and drown out and personally destroy the crowdfunded progressive reformers who challenge them, and progressive-minded voters may, in a two-party system give them an edge when the alternative is regressive Republicans, but theirs is a con that can only play out so far. Eventually, worsening conditions and the need to genuinely address them — among other things — will overtake it.
In a politico-economic system geared toward serving the needs of elites, one that, whenever necessary, grinds up everyone else in the process, Clintonite dominance of the Democratic party has unfortunately meant that positive progressive reforms to address those conditions usually aren’t even allowed to be part of the national debate within all those problematic “systems.” Clintonites join with Republicans and corporate media to smear, belittle and dismiss advocates of sensible, pragmatic progressive reforms similar to those long in place in every other advanced, industrialized nation as wild-eyed radical extremist charlatans peddling fairy-dust and unicorns; the Americas who support — and often very much need — these reforms are told that such policies are laughably unattainable, their advocates “unelectable.” The terms of that national debate are thus defined by conservatives, with the only counter-messaging allowed coming from other conservatives. Every cog of the machine moves to ensure that progressive reforms are rarely an issue,[5] progressive reformers never on the ballot in the Fall.
It shouldn’t really have to be explained that denying people in need of reform any sane alternative within the political system undermines the system. Why should people have any loyalty to a system that has no loyalty to them, a “democracy” that is entirely unresponsive to their desires and exigencies, a republic that stands, sits and runs only for the gilded toffs who bleed them dry? The kind of alienation, helplessness, hopelessness, anger and desperation this spawns doesn’t just spark a healthy interest in more radical alternatives. It breeds apathy and, worse, drives far too many who, though not ideologues, share progressive values and could, if it was ever an option, get behind a program of progressive reform into the arms of the protofascism that is consuming the Republican party, a protofascism that intentionally gears a part of its appeal toward those very people when no one else is trying to talk to them. A protofascism that openly threatens the continued existence of the liberal democracy itself while Clintonite-right dominance of the Democratic party feeds it and undermines the strongest bulwark against it: public belief in and support for the liberal democracy.
While Clintonites make a grand show of warning that if that protofascism ever gains the power to do so, it will end liberal democracy, how seriously they take the threat — vs. how much of this is just a self-serving effort to drive people to vote for bad Clintonite-right “Democrats” — can be judged by their plan for countering it: to just continue throwing up conservative, donor-owned politicians who, as problems pile up and fester, do nothing people want or need, pols who, like Joe Biden, most people actively dislike, and just hope those who show up to vote decide to hate Republicans even more that year. In every election. Forever.[6]
The Clintonite right is an unsustainable trend.
— j.
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[1] If that narrative, like the one about the use of the campaign finance system, seems simplistic, rest assure, it definitely is. There were always Dems like this. It was, in fact, widely noted at the time that the “New Democrats” were really just a very old breed of right-wing Democrat that had co-existed alongside the then-dominant reformist faction throughout the entirety of the latter portion of the 20th century. The Clinton “era” is just where, owing to a number of factors, they rose to the height of their prominence and became dominant within the party, as much of its elected officials embraced its “ethos.” In my defense, this is merely intended as a brief editorial; it sometimes uses broad strokes.
[2] It works the same way against Republicans. Bill Clinton, for example, adopted, as the primary themes of his presidency, the Republicans’ major priorities — deregulation, “free trade,” tough-on-crime-ism, welfare “reform,” deficit-cutting austerity, facilitating wealth concentration, warhawkishness in foreign affairs, etc. Republicans came to be seen as just the party of particularly unpopular “social issues” — anti-choice on abortion, anti-gay, church-state unionism and so on. Right-wing media first became a major force at this time and in reaction to this, precipitating a Republican march to the right (and eventually the far-right) to differentiate themselves. This is where Trumpism really began.
[3] Clinton apparently realized how badly this looked too. When she wrote “What Happened,” her godawful book in which she blamed everyone and everything else for her failure to win the 2016 election, she turned the gaslight up to maximum and reversed the order of this, falsely claiming it was she who was introducing ambitious policies, while Sanders followed her around proposing bigger, more extensive “magic abs” versions. This writer corrected this and some other outlandish excerpts from “What Happened” at great length in 2017.
[4] Barack Obama had proposed a “public option” in 2008, then, during the debate over healthcare during his presidency, abandoned it in a backroom deal with industry lobbyists.
[5] Though activists regularly get progressive reforms on the ballot via the referendum process. It’s an ongoing mark of the profound failure of the Clintonite right that in states and localities that overwhelmingly vote against Clintonite-right “Democrats,” progressive ballot initiatives regularly win by huge margins.
[6] Showing a complete disregard for the principles of liberal democracy, Clintonites also very actively try to shame voters into voting for their favored candidates and blame voters for those candidates’ failures whenever one of them loses. Pressuring the candidates to adopt popular policies that would earn them sufficient votes to win is never on the table.
APPENDIX:
Clintonite-Right Election Performance: An Analysis
I’ve covered most of this in more detail in an earlier piece, “Zombies, Dinosaurs & That Definition of Insanity: Clintonite-Right “Democratic Leadership” & Its Discontents,” but for the sake of completion, I’ll thumbnail it here.
Americans aren’t, for the most part, ideologues but they’re quite progressive and among them, progressive values are very deeply ingrained, even in those who would never dream of describing themselves as “progressive” (and who may react with rage if ever so described by others). In a two-party system, the vehicle for expressing discontent with the party in power is always the other party. That is, until one party finds a way to sufficiently endear voters to it, to produce results that convince voters that it deserves their enthusiastic support, that they feel compelled to show up and reelect it again and again. Clintonites can’t manage this trick, so elections tend to run, instead, in waves — one party, then the other. Democrats have nominated open Clintonites in 7 of the last 8 presidential contests. Some won, some lost but while nearly all of them faced absolute troglodyte Republican opposition that any strong candidate should have chopped up for bait, none had a dominant win. In 2008, the exception, Barack Obama ran as progressive and the result was a relatively healthy victory, with Democrats riding his coattails to a massive sweep across the U.S.. But Obama then took a hard Clintonite-right turn. He was reelected but with 4 million fewer votes than he’d originally won, and while voters ultimately granted both he and Bill Clinton two terms, Democrats ate huge losses throughout both presidencies. By the time Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vanity campaign had played out, the party had been reduced to one of its weakest points in its long history.
And what Democrats lose? The conservative Clintonites. They go into office with the backing of the party leadership in “blue wave” years, when any Dem running for the same seats — including the progressives the party leadership was trying to defeat by backing these Clintonites — would have won, then lose in large number in “red wave” years. Shifts to Republican control of congress are almost always down to large Clintonite-right losses.
The Trump presidency introduced a new dynamic: public revulsion at Trumpism. While Democrats have come to count on Trump as a boogeyman, the evidence that this is a sufficient lever to sustain power is weak. The opposition party always does well in the first midterm elections of a new presidency and Dems did too, gaining 41 seats and control of the House of Representatives in 2018 but Republicans retained control of the Senate. Joe Biden was elected in 2020 as the Not Trump but while gaining de facto control of the Senate (which had a 50/50 split, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker) and retaining control of the House, Dems actually lost 13 House seats. In the 2022 midterms, Dems avoided the sort of epic wipe-out often suffered by the party in the White House in a first midterm but still lost control of the House.
If Dems want to reliably draw enough votes to sustain control, they’re going to have to give voters some of the progressive reforms they want — some things to vote for.
