Here They Come Again: The Kind of Neoliberal Democrats Who Prefer Trump to Sanders

An excellent article. Deep gratitude for

all wise and courageous truth-tellers. — Molly

Here's the question: to what extent is the Establishment's commitment to democratic institutions greater than their commitment to current forms of capitalist hierarchy? It seems like we are about to find out.

By

Adolph Reed Jr.

Twenty-four years ago, I published an essay titled “Liberals, I Do Despise” in the Village Voice, which Common Dreams reprinted as an enduring oldie in 2009. The title was a play on an old doggerel, in this case rendering it:

Liberals and flies, I do despise
The more I see liberals, the more I like flies.

I wrote the essay in disgust after Bill Clinton concluded his and other New Democrats’ deal with the devil by signing the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act—welfare reform—that ended the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to direct income provision for the indigent. That emphatically punctuated Clinton’s bulldozing of the left in Democratic politics and ushered in the bipartisan neoliberal regime under which we’ve lived ever since. Welfare “deform,” as many characterized it at the time, was a culmination of the year that began with Clinton using his State of the Union address to declare that “The era of big government is over.” As New Labour neoliberal Tony Blair was, by her own account, Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, Bill Clinton consolidated Reaganism as hegemonic in American politics, defined the neoliberal regime of upward redistribution and repression of the poor as the unchallengeable horizon of political aspiration. The essay comes to mind at this moment because so many liberal Democrats now in their dismissals and attacks regarding Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the party’s presidential nomination seem to be rehearsing the kind of smug, self-righteous, and backward arguments they made then about why it was necessary to sacrifice poor people—ultimately variants of a contention that commitment to egalitarian principles is naïve.

In the mid-1990s I reflected on how often it is liberals who enable, even abet, the rise of reactionary forces by accommodating them and treating them as legitimate, looking the other way at the dangerous aspects and implications of their agendas. Mass disfranchisement of black Americans in the South at the end of the nineteenth century was on its face in clear violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Southern Democrats used gossamer thin subterfuge—like the eight-box rule that required ballots to be deposited into as many different boxes; literacy tests, which could be waived if the registrar vouched for the registrant’s character or if the applicant had a grandfather who was eligible to vote before 1867 (found unconstitutional in 1915); and poll taxes—that enabled northern Republicans to take the violations of African Americans’ basic citizenship rights in stride with a wink and nod because those exclusions weren’t based explicitly on race. Or at least most of them; the white primary required a little more active denial.

Later in our history, proto-fascistic Cold War anticommunism got a sanitizing boost from liberals who, while wringing their hands, wrinkling their brows and privately tut-tutting about supposedly extraordinary “excesses,” validated persecution with their embrace of the notion that the dangers of “subversion” could necessitate denial of victims’ civil liberties, criminalization of ideas, and witch-hunting. Americans for Democratic Action, long the avatar of Democratic liberalism, was founded specifically as an engine of Cold War attack on the left, and high-minded liberal institutions like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the ACLU, as well as most prominent liberal intellectuals, capitulated to and rationalized anticommunist witch-hunting, most of all by accepting the premise that a shadowy “subversion” threatened the republic, which then justified persecution of those held to endorse it. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and nominal end of the Cold War, and especially in the post-9/11 world, “subversion” has been recast as “terrorism,” and liberals’ concerns with process and appearance of judicious orderliness shifted accordingly, to parse such issues as how to occupy a country humanely, at what point aggressive interrogation becomes torture, under what conditions killing civilians is acceptable, etc.

Liberal complicity stands out especially in its unwavering support for American imperialism and denial of other nations’ sovereignty—most dramatically in the form of military intervention—notwithstanding a sleight of hand that can make support for war-making seem like opposition to it. Even before the genocidal Vietnam War, American liberals supported and rationalized U.S. interference and perpetration of coups in other nations across the globe, from Iran to Guatemala and elsewhere, well before “regime change” became a coinage. [For a more general compendium, see here and here.] Indeed, liberals played a central role in crafting the idea of humanitarian intervention, which, perversely, represents bombing people as somehow for their own good.

Mainstream liberals’ main criterion for assessing a military intervention is whether or not it can attain U.S. objectives neatly and with limited American casualties. Under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, they’ve supported and rationalized military adventurism and extrajudicial killing of non-combatants, among other horrors, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Closer to home, Democratic liberals in the post-9/11 period have colluded in fictions that U.S.-backed coups and coup attempts in Honduras and Venezuela were the product of popular uprisings, and that the constitutional coups—when reactionary plotters seized power through claiming bogus constitutional authority and levying bogus charges of corruption—in Brazil and Bolivia were also expressions of popular will. Liberals have embraced and rehearsed obviously false golpista narratives and accusations against legitimately elected leftist governments without hesitation or shame.

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