As regular readers know, while I have little hope that the Democratic party will do anything at all to challenge the power and greed of the oligarchy, I dread the thought of Hillary Clinton becoming the party’s nominee as that would make the oligarchy’s task that much easier. But Glenn Greenwald says that there is actually plenty of genuine enthusiasm for her candidacy. You just have to know where to look.
It’s easy to strike a pose of cynicism when contemplating Hillary Clinton’s inevitable (and terribly imminent) presidential campaign. As a drearily soulless, principle-free, power-hungry veteran of DC’s game of thrones, she’s about as banal of an American politician as it gets. One of the few unique aspects to her, perhaps the only one, is how the genuinely inspiring gender milestone of her election will (following the Obama model) be exploited to obscure her primary role as guardian of the status quo.
…But one shouldn’t be so jaded. There is genuine and intense excitement over the prospect of (another) Clinton presidency. Many significant American factions regard her elevation to the Oval Office as an opportunity for rejuvenation, as a stirring symbol of hope and change, as the vehicle for vital policy advances.
Who are the people so enthused? Greenwald lists them and the reasons why: Wall Street, the Israel Lobby, those who want to intervene and start wars abroad, and the neoconservatives.
Are you excited yet?
So we’re stuck with the lesser of the two major evils. Duverger’s Law bites, doesn’t it?
There is likely to be at least one good thing about a Hillary presidency. Given that President Obama succeeded where she and her husband had failed, I think that it’s unlikely that she will be pushing any major health-care reforms in the first few years of her presidency. So she may actually be able to get other things done.
I’d vote for Hillary over any Republican I’m aware of because I prefer the scraps she would throw to actual liberal causes to abortion bans and the undoing of significant progress on gay rights and public health.
But to be honest, there is one thing I hate about when establishment liberals win. There’s this Kafkaesque situation where they’re doing pretty much everything conservatives do: war, uncritical support of Israel, increasingly harsh law enforcement and criminal justice policies, blatant favoritism to the super-rich.
And not only do I have to see people that I voted for doing these things, but I have to hear the right screaming that we’ve been taken over by the most radical socialists who have ever lived. Everyone is a conservative compared to them! Lenin would vote Republican today if he were alive and an American citizen, it’s gotten so extreme. No one has ever been so madly ultra left wing in the history of all left wingery.
Soon they will be taxing our hair and redistributing punctuation marks. It will be illegal to own a large screen TV. Anyone who sneezes more than twice a day could be instantly put in a FEMA concentration camp for life. All welcome mats will have the design of the American flag on them. Al Sharpton will be on the Supreme Court. And blah-blah-blah-blah-blah all day long for years.
All the while, these supposed radical maniacs are enacting over 90% of the right wing agenda AND somehow serving as convenient propaganda scapegoats for the very people they are doing the dirty work for.
Hillary can serve as the lesser evil to boost that other faux liberal darling, Elizabeth Warren.
For anyone who still has any doubts about what a repulsive psychopath Clinton is, this video should remove them:
Another fucking US warmonger to the presidency. Good show, America.
Been there, done that! I can’t believe anyone would ever use this phrase again in context of an election. I can’t believe anyone would ever believe it again either. And I can’t believe that those behind the scenes who control the puppets in the public eye will ever allow anything other than cosmetic change unless it’s to their benefit.
By using this wornout phrase Greenwald merely demonstrates that journalism has become a mere thoughtless huckstering of slogans with no news content at all.
sailor1031,
You realize that Greenwald was using that phrase ironically and was mocking it, right?
As usual the left is going to step on its chances of holding enough power to make progress because it demands political virginity from female candidates, a whole loaf instead of the half loaf it can get. People which substantial political experience are never saints. You don’t survive over twenty years of vicious partisan attacks and constant investigation without getting your hands dirty.
But hey … any luck at all the perfectionist romantics on the left will sabotage Hillary, and every other likely candidate, and we end up with a Republican president to go along with the Republican senate and congress and they will coordinate with their religious right, corporatist, social conservative, and uber rich backers and undo twenty-five to fifty years of social/labor/environmental progress.
So there really is no down side to attacks from the left doing what twenty years of attacks from the right couldn’t do. It is all very predictable. Like a slow-motion train wreck.
@lorn, #7
I see that you’re getting a head start on coming up with excuses for why Hillary Clinton is going to lose that have absolutely nothing to do with either her actual policies or the type of campaign that she invariably runs. I’ll let you in on a little secret: outside of the Republicans the biggest enemies that Democrats lose isn’t us impractical leftists who refuse to treat mass surveillance, extrajudicial killings, and bankster immunity as if they were venal sins. It’s the Democrats themselves who have chosen to do themselves in regardless of what people like me say to them.
By the way, political power isn’t magic. If you have political power, but you never use it (and especially if the absence of such use guarantees your losing it) then can it really be said that you had political power at all?