Quote:
Originally Posted by bobman0330
The truly grim fact for this morning is that, even if we survive four years of Trump's Visigothic occupation of Washington, there's nothing particularly to look forward to on the horizon. It's abundantly clear that the Dems will pivot further left to the Sanders/Warren wingnut types, and they have nothing really to offer.
In a perfect world, the message that should have sunk Trump is his record of spewing hate towards women and minorities. This is real life though, so the message that was practically going to sink Trump is that everything is going fine and it would be insane to turn the reins of power over to a petty neophyte who may or may not be a pawn of hostile foreign interests. But, crucially, the Dems have robbed themselves of the ability to make that case, largely because they are burrowing into the same rabbit hole that the Tea Party took the GOP down, that the system is hopelessly corrupt, that "neoliberalism" is a cancer, that we need a revolution, etc., etc.
Trump's victory really represents a total victory for the structural critique of capitalism that the left has been pushing for decades. Trade is so toxic that HRC had to walk away from a landmark FTA that she negotiated, even when unemployment is <5% on election day. Take that, global capital! The overlooked part is that the left doesn't really have any alternative to replace the neoliberal order, just a grab-bag of random terrible nonsense policies ($15 min wage, free college, etc.) and a vague hope that we can trim 15% off of our GDP/c and become Germany.
Ironically, the one area where the leftist critique is correct and the system is broken is structural inequality/social justice, and of course that cause has been comprehensively crushed.
This post defeats itself, it does not matter how great capitalism is at making pie if it does an absolutely ****ty job of sharing out the pie, which is something you allude to.
From 1970 to 2014 wages for the median worker only grew by 8% when adjusted for inflation, productivity grew by way way way more than that. I think its safe to assume that the rate between 2008-2014 is a significant drag on the figure taken for the whole period.
Centrist business as usual politics is dead for the moment precisely becuase of a total failure to share pie properly, and the monetarist responses to the 2008 crises, mostly Quantitative money printing to inflate asset prices have been terrible in this regard.
The right have recognised the collapse of the centre and romped to soul shattering victories, first in Brexit now in Yanklandia.
If the left does not wake up and start working out how to appeal to this new reality and keeps on putting out centrist BAU candidates, its done for a decade at least.