mags wrote:
innervisionscm wrote:
The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism has destroyed the country and has come under fire from both left and right, and it will not be able to hold power for much longer. Defeating Trump is not just about this election, but about the future Trumps that will emerge 4, 8, and 12 years from now. Those efforts to fend off future fascism need to start now, and while I prefer focusing on popular movements and building institutional power through unions and the media, it might be a good use of your time to consider Stein, depending where you live and how her campaign turns out.
That's a stretch, a blanket misstatement.....Not good and definitely not true to generalize, to lump all of them together
There's no meaningful difference in how Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton 1, Bush 2, Obama, and Clinton 2 use the state to manage the economy. They differ on social issues like gay rights and abortion rights but that's about it.
It really started with the latter Carter years at the end of the 70s. The response to worldwide overcapacity in manufacturing, which, in addition to the oil shocks, produced a long recession, was to empower the finance class to extract capital from the less profitable manufacturing sector (and from the public sector) and invest it elsewhere at a higher rate of return. If you look at the economic advisors of each of these presidents, they're all from the same school of thinking. Their policies are working toward the same goal.
Now, of course, the financiers didn't use that capital to create the economy of the future, but instead created a pattern of deindustrialization, rolling back of public services, and enormous, unstable debt bubbles, which served to empower a metropolitan elite at the expense of the rest of the country. So people are angry. You have non-metropolitan workers who have lost their jobs (which, in America, means your community falls apart), you have young university graduates (myself included!) with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and poor job prospects relative to their education, and you have an immiserated underclass (often black and brown) which, beyond the brutality of the criminal justice system, receives basically nothing from the state.
This pattern cannot continue, bottom line. This election, even in the very likely case that Hillary wins, has shown that there will be a paradigm shift in the very near future. The question in the American context is whether you get a kind of multi-racial social democracy or an ethno-nationalist, law-and-order authoritarianism. You're not going to be able to sell liberals like Clinton or Obama eight years from now, people are struggling and want a change.
