A dying America is raging against the capitalist machine
salon.com
salon.com
>Trump is, of course, a conscienceless demagogue, serial liar, and nihilist with a belief in nothing save himself. Sanders, on the other hand, means what he says. On the issue of economic justice, he has been a broken record for more than a quarter-century, even if no one beyond the boundaries of Vermont paid much attention until recently. He is now widely trusted and applauded for his views.
>Hillary Clinton is broadly distrusted. Sanders has consistently outpolled her against potential Republican opponents for president because she is indeed a limousine liberal whose career has burned through trust at an astonishing rate. And more important than that, the rebellion that has carried Sanders aloft is not afraid to put capitalism in the dock. Trump is hardly about to do that, but the diseased state of the neoliberal status quo has made him, too, a force to be reckoned with. However you look at it, the age of acquiescence is passing away.
I agree with this analysis, but I don't see where socialism, at least in its classic sense of having the government own the means of production, would be a solution.
The author previously wrote a book about how Limousine Liberal vs Populist Conservative is a false dichotomy that has polarized political perspectives ever since Nixon invented the term. Back then, the progressive/socialist left opposed liberalism for it being intimately connected to the war machine (where war in Korea was engineered to serve aggregate demand for American goods). As we entered into the bold new (Post-Nixon Shock) era of the 1970s where the failure to replicate the "success" in Korea caused economic turmoil, liberalism co-opted the efforts & reforms of the left when it came to social equality, and then liberalism and the progressive left became conflated under assault from the resurgent right for decades to come.
Around the time of the 1990s, the Clintons realized that you can form a bulwork against many forms of discrimination without "disturbing the equanimity of the 1%." Until both the Occupy Movement and Tea Parties arose, as responses to the damage of neoliberalism, whereas the former was motivated by similar ideals as the 1960s left, the latter was motivated by "fantasy of older capitalism, one friendlier to the way they think America used to be".
Later in the article it talks about how Trump and Sanders camps have been damaged by neoliberalism, where Sanders is a New-Deal style social democrat, whereas Trump is a "conscienceless demagogue, serial liar, and nihilist".
(By "biased" I mean that I would prefer to bring more attention to the economic paradigm shift precipitated by the Nixon shock rather than the particular propaganda method of the concept of "Limousine Liberal")
What The Flatulence? Did people actually believe that? Do they still?