These two articles are very interesting and both are basically arguing the same thing – which is that the obsession, by the Democratic Party and a lot of US left/liberal commentators, with Russian meddling in the election of Trump is a massive distraction. Trump got elected for reasons and one of the big reasons is that the Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Trump may be an incompetent bigot but he got, and still has, a lot of support from precisely the sort of working class constituency that the Democrats have lost connection with. The main issue is not Trump or Russia but the reconstruction of the Democratic Party as a social democratic party.
What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking
Jackson Lears
Here is a quote from the article
“American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.
A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.”
Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller? Glenn Greenwald’s war on the Russia investigation.
Here is a quote from Glenn Greenwald (from the article)
“When Trump becomes the starting point and ending point for how we talk about American politics, [we] don’t end up talking about the fundamental ways the American political and economic and cultural system are completely fucked for huge numbers of Americans who voted for Trump for that reason,” he says. “We don’t talk about all the ways the Democratic Party is a complete fucking disaster and a corrupt, sleazy sewer, and not an adequate alternative to this far-right movement that’s taking over American politics.”
Yes, many opposing Trump do seem to think in general that simply repeating how gross he is and hoping for an impeachment is the answer. In fact impeachment would simply put Pence in power and do nothing to tackle the issues in the so called rust belt that tipped the election.
It repeats Clintons losing strategy of outraged disgust but puts forward no clear social and economic strategy that answers the issues of growing wealth discrepencies and neo -liberal economics.
Also never realised what a vacuum is left in a presidential system where there is no clear leader of the opposition or general setting of policy direction.
In the UK Labour has set out its social goals clearly and has connected with many but still think more needs to be made of our approach to the economy, both as one that works for all but answers those sceptical of Labour aound the economy.
In fact, I think the vision laid out in the manifesto – IT Super Highway, Green Industries and an investment bank to promote new medium and small businesses was agood one but needs more fore fronting.
As the other Clinton said , ‘It’s the economy stupid’.
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