Five Reasons No Progressive Should Support Hillary Clinton

[BainsBane]

80. That wasn't the question

The question wasn't name a few episodes in history that resulted in legislation you admire. It was what period do you want to return to? The New Deal? When the majority were denied equal rights, when New Deal programs were deliberately denied to most people of color? You do know the point of the New Deal was to save capitalism, right? It wasn't noblesse oblige. It was FDR stepping in to try to shore up capitalism in order to protect a system based on profit and exploitation. It was a time of massive public protest, in which the Communist Party played a key role in leading people's movements. FDR, like a good populist, coopted that movement and served the interest of the ruling elite by maintaining the capitalist economic and social order.

The Civil Rights movement was likewise a popular movement from below. It was not government acting for the benefit of the people. That does not now nor has ever existed in this country. The powerful respond when they are forced to, when they have no other alternative. The capitalist state does not now and has never served the interests of the people. That notion is a product of American mythology, part of the cultural hegemony that justifies the state that ensures capitalist exploitation.

The current era of neoliberal capitalism generates a new series of contradictions that exposes fissures in the capitalist system that is its very nature exploitative: inequality is inexorable to capitalism. The difference today is that capital is increasingly global, loyal to no place or nation. SCOTUS decisions like Citizens United, Buckley, and others have exposed the cash nexus between state and capital. It is not that the relationship did not exist in the past, but that it has become more obvious in recent years. Today we have lobbyists and investment banks; a century ago it was manufacturers and railroad tycoons; and for the first part of the 19th century it was slaveholders and the large landholders in the North. For much of our nation's history, liberty and opportunity for white men was made possible by the subjugation and enslavement of the majority, whether African slaves, immigrant laborers from Europe, impoverished working women, or Native Americans. Today being born into the white middle-class is no longer a guarantee of privilege and comfort. That group is starting to experience a bit of what it is like to live in America, and they don't like it.

It's one thing to point to corruption in the current system. Most of us can agree on that, but when people openly long to go back in time, it is often experienced as hostile and exclusionary by those of us who did not fare so well in the good ole days, who were deprived both basic civil rights and economic opportunity. When that is pointed out time and time again yet people continue to long for those days, it begins to appear that the exclusionary nature of such calls is not incidental. That it is accompanied by an unprecedented level of antipathy toward a black president, major female presidential candidate, and activist movements like BLM further underscores that impression.

Note: I am not accusing you personally of any such tendencies. I am just pointing out that I don't think it productive to focus on a restorationist agenda. Rather, I'd like to see a focus on how we can improve our present and future. Besides, going back in time is impossible. It's not going to happen, so why alienate people by expressing such longing?