The Democratic primaries in the shadow of neoliberalism

David Coates - Professor of Anglo-American Studies, Wake Forest University, North Carolina

Two things then happened that frame the choices being debated now. On the Democratic side of the aisle in the United States, both a moderate and a more radical challenge to the earlier neoliberal orthodoxy began to crystallize. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders may now personify those different challenges, but they are not their sole architects.  On the contrary, across the Democratic coalition as a whole, the last seven years have witnessed the increasing presence in progressive policy debates of two linked but competing lists of policy preferences.  The moderate policy list (List B) includes:

• The maintenance of demand through public spending and the toleration of public debt;

• The avoidance of further financial crisis by tighter financial oversight;

• The infrastructure route to growth (public spending to modernize roads, bridges, rail and internet provision);

• Progressive taxation to reduce excessive inequality and to spread the cost of welfare provision to those best able to bear it;

• Greater rights for women and minorities at work, more childcare and paid parental leave;

• Moves towards a carbon-free energy policy.

The more radical list (List C) includes the moderate agenda, but adds some or all of the following:

• Greater rights for trade unions, and a major hike in both the minimum wage and the federal pension;

• Systematic attack on the sources of poverty, with affirmative action while poverty persists;

• The deconstruction of the system of mass incarceration and the ending of the war on drugs;

• New trade policy to reverse the outsourcing of well-paying jobs;

• The breaking up of banks that are too big to fail;

• Less spending on the military and foreign wars: more nation-building at home, less abroad.

Those lists contain very specific American dimensions (not least the ending of mass incarceration and winding down foreign wars). But they are not, in all their essentials, American lists alone.  Parallel changes in understanding and policy are in debate and dispute in many western European centre-left parties.  This is certainly true in the British Labour Party but also in centre-left parties in France, Spain and Germany.  In advanced capitalist economies, the post-2008 struggle to return to prosperity and job security is obliging the centre-left to re-examine the wisdom of its earlier enthusiastic accommodation to neoliberalism.  It is that re-examination that lies at the heart of the current clash in the on-going Democratic presidential primaries between Clinton and Sanders.

Each of the three policy lists I have set out has a different centre of gravity because the analyses underpinning them also differ. And because they are different, and because of the history in which they sit, Hillary Clinton in particular has a double problem with her potential electoral base.

Her first problem is this. When she was the politically active first lady to her husband’s presidency, economic policy operated on List A.  So one question that Hillary Clinton has to answer now is whether economic policy under a second Clinton presidency (namely hers) will be similar or different?  Her Republican opponents will attempt to tar her with the Bill Clinton brush, pointing to sexual infidelity and possibly financial corruption or worse.  Her progressive critics should worry more about the extent to which the current global activities of the Clinton Foundation point to her husband’s on-going commitment to neoliberal principles.  Because if he hasn’t made the break, and she is on record as intending to look to him for advice on economic policy, how much of a break has she really made, or how much of a break will she be able to sustain?

Then there’s the second problem, the really big one: if the answer to the first question is that yes, under her presidency, policy would be very different, will it be different by operating on List B (essentially the blocked economic policy of the Obama presidency), or will it stretch out to encompass some dimensions, or the totality, of List C, that so many radical supporters of Bernie Sanders now believe to be essential? This then raises the further questions: how radical has Hillary Clinton become?  How much is show, and how much is real?

The great fear, on the left of the Democratic coalition, is that the rupture with the original Clinton list (List A) is still paper thin and that Hillary Clinton will endorse more radical policies (from the other two lists, including List C) simply to win office. Then, when in office, she will go back to List A, triangulating with neoliberal Republicans in the manner of the first Clinton presidency.  Reassuring her progressive supporters that she will not do any of this is therefore a vital task for her between now and November, because only if that reassurance is forthcoming – only if the depth of her rupture with her own past is unambiguously clear – will the vast majority of those mobilized by Bernie Sanders act as willing foot-soldiers in the electoral battle to save America from a Trump presidency.  And she will need those foot-soldiers.

A fuller version of this article was first posted at www.davidcoates.net.