Hillary Clinton. (photo: AP)
Why
Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling
Stone
26 March 16
Listening to the youth vote doesn't always lead to disaster
I was
disappointed to hear that Rolling Stone had endorsed Hillary Clinton, but I
also understood. In many ways, the endorsement by my boss and editor, Jann
Wenner, read like the result of painful soul-searching, after this very
magazine had a profound influence on a similar race, back in 1972.
Jann
explains this eloquently in "Hillary Clinton for President":
"Rolling
Stone has championed the 'youth vote' since 1972, when 18-year-olds
were first given the right to vote. The Vietnam War was a fact of daily life
then, and Sen. George McGovern, the liberal anti-war activist from South
Dakota, became the first vessel of young Americans, and Hunter S. Thompson
wrote our first presidential-campaign coverage. We worked furiously for
McGovern. We failed; Nixon was re-elected in a landslide."
The
failure of George McGovern had a major impact on a generation of Democrats, who
believed they'd faced a painful reality about the limits of idealism in
American politics. Jann sums it up: "Those of us there learned a very
clear lesson: America chooses its presidents from the middle, not from the
ideological wings."
But it
would be a shame if we disqualified every honest politician, or forever
disavowed the judgment of young people, just because George McGovern lost an
election four decades ago.
That
'72 loss hovered like a rain cloud over the Democrats until Bill Clinton came
along. He took the White House using a formula engineered by a think tank, the
Democratic Leadership Council, that was created in response to losses by
McGovern and Walter Mondale.
The
new strategy was a party that was socially liberal but fiscally conservative.
It counterattacked Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, a racially themed appeal
to disaffected whites Nixon tabbed the "Silent Majority," by subtly
taking positions against the Democrats' own left flank.
In
1992 and in 1996, Clinton recaptured some of Nixon's territory through a mix of
populist positions (like a middle-class tax cut) and the
"triangulating" technique of pushing back against the Democrats' own
liberal legacy on issues like welfare, crime and trade.
And
that was the point. No more McGoverns. The chief moral argument of the Clinton
revolution was not about striving for an end to the war or poverty or racism or
inequality, but keeping the far worse Republicans out of power.
The
new Democratic version of idealism came in a package called "transactional
politics." It was about getting the best deal possible given the political
realities, which we were led to believe were hopelessly stacked against the
hopes and dreams of the young.
In
fact, it was during Bill Clinton's presidency that D.C. pundits first began
complaining about a thing they called "purity." This was code for any
politician who stood too much on principle.The American Prospect in
1995 derisively described it
as an "unwillingness to share the burden of morally ambiguous
compromise." Sometimes you had to budge a little for the sake of progress.
Jann
describes this in the context of saluting the value of "incremental
politics" and solutions that "stand a chance of working." The
implication is that even when young people believe in the right things, they
often don't realize what it takes to get things done.
But I
think they do understand. Young people have repudiated the campaign of Hillary
Clinton in overwhelming and historic fashion, with Bernie Sanders winning
under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins, as high as 80 to 85 percent in
many states. He has done less well with young African-American voters, but even
there he's seen some gains as
time has gone on. And the energy coming from the pre-middle-aged has little to
do with an inability to appreciate political reality.
Instead,
the millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary's campaign this year
are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of
the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.
For
young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion,
the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance,
police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others.
And to
one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary
Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these
issues.
Hillary
not only voted for the Iraq War, but offered a succession of ridiculous excuses
for her vote. Remember, this was one of the easiest calls ever. A child could
see that the Bush administration's fairy tales about WMDs and Iraqi drones spraying poison over
the capital (where were they going to launch from, Martha's Vineyard?) were
just that, fairy tales.
Yet
Hillary voted for the invasion for the same reason many other mainstream
Democrats did: They didn't want to be tagged as McGovernite peaceniks. The new
Democratic Party refused to be seen as being too antiwar, even at the cost of
supporting a wrong one.
It was
a classic "we can't be too pure" moment. Hillary gambled that
Democrats would understand that she'd outraged conscience and common sense for
the sake of the Democrats' electoral viability going forward. As a mock-Hillary
in a 2007 Saturday Night Live episodeput it, "Democrats know me…. They know my
support for the Iraq War has always been insincere."
This
pattern, of modern Democrats bending so far back to preserve what they believe
is their claim on the middle that they end up plainly in the wrong, has
continually repeated itself.
Take
the mass incarceration phenomenon. This was pioneered in Mario Cuomo's New York and
furthered under Bill Clinton's presidency, which authorized more than $16
billion for new prisons and more police in a crime bill.
As The
New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander noted, America when Bill
Clinton left office had the world's highest incarceration rate, with a prison admission rate for
black drug inmates that was 23 times 1983 levels. Hillary stumped for that
crime bill, adding the Reaganesque observation
that inner-city criminals were "super-predators" who needed to be
"brought to heel."
You
can go on down the line of all these issues. Trade? From NAFTA to the TPP,
Hillary and her party cohorts have consistently supported these
anti-union free trade agreements, until it became politically inexpedient.
Debt? Hillary infamously voted for
regressive bankruptcy reform just a few years after privately meeting with
Elizabeth Warren and agreeing that such industry-driven efforts to choke off
debt relief needed to be stopped.
Then
of course there is the matter of the great gobs of money Hillary has taken to
give speeches to Goldman Sachs and God knows whom else. Her answer about that
— "That's what they offered" —
gets right to the heart of what young people find so repugnant about this brand
of politics.
One
can talk about having the strength to get things done, given the political
reality of the times. But one also can become too easily convinced of certain
political realities, particularly when they're paying you hundreds of thousands
of dollars an hour.
Is
Hillary really doing the most good that she can do, fighting for the best deal
that's there to get for ordinary people?
Or is
she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that, while
taking tens of millions of dollars from
some of the world's biggest jerks?
I
doubt even Hillary Clinton could answer that question. She has been playing the
inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost in it. She behaves like
a person who often doesn't know what the truth is, but instead merely reaches
for what is the best answer in that moment, not realizing the difference.
This
is why her shifting explanations and flippant attitude about
the email scandal are almost more unnerving than the ostensible offense. She
seems confident that just because her detractors are politically motivated, as
they always have been, that they must be wrong, as they often were.
But
that's faulty thinking. My worry is that Democrats like Hillary have been
saying, "The Republicans are worse!" for so long that they've begun
to believe it excuses everything. It makes me nervous to see Hillary supporters
like law professor Stephen Vladeck arguing in theNew York Times that
the real problem wasn't anything Hillary did, but that the Espionage Act isn't
"practical."
If
you're willing to extend the "purity" argument to the Espionage
Act, it's only a matter of time before you get in real trouble. And even if
it doesn't happen this summer,
Democrats may soon wish they'd picked the frumpy senator from Vermont who
probably checks his restaurant bills to make sure he hasn't been undercharged.
But in
the age of Trump, winning is the only thing that matters, right? In that case,
there's plenty of evidence suggesting Sanders would perform better against a reality TV
free-coverage machine like Trump than would Hillary Clinton. This
would largely be due to the passion and energy of young voters.
Young
people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between idealism and
incremental progress. The choice they see is between an honest politician, and
one who is so profoundly a part of the problem that she can't even see it
anymore.
They've
seen in the last decades that politicians who promise they can deliver change
while also taking the money, mostly just end up taking the money.
And
they're voting for Sanders because his idea of an entirely voter-funded
electoral "revolution" that bars corporate money is, no matter what
its objective chances of success, the only practical road left to break what
they perceive to be an inexorable pattern of corruption.
Young
people aren't dreaming. They're thinking. And we should listen to them.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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