Are Neolib Democrats Real Democrats? NO!

"Hehehehehe..heeheehee. Hey, you may not like my money grubbin' ways and support of the wealthy, but I'm a Democrat too! Hehehehehehehe..."


Yes, I have to 'fess up, I hate the bastards! All the soft in the spine, money grubbing, pro-bribery poltroons who make up the "centrist" branch of the Democratic Party - or what I call Demo-rats. As a recent salon.com article put it:

"The argument for centrism within the Democratic party is a distraction, but also a tactic. After all, what does centrism really mean in Washington? It means corporatism. It means the neoliberal alliance between Wall Street and D.C. that we have seen wreak havoc over the past 30 years"

Couldn't have put it better, given I hate the Neoliberal idiom and  false market worship which paves the way for Wall Street  Democrats to even exist. Ensconced in their gated communities or high end condos, stuffing themselves on wine and brie, they care not a whit about the 85 percent of citizens on the lower end of the income scale.

Worse, they are now seeking to sink the reputations of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. An example of the Wall Street mutation of the Dems is the “centrist” think tank, “Third Way,” founded by a coterie of former Clinton staffers. This organization has aggressively gone after Elizabeth Warren and the liberal movement, saying in a Wall Street Journal editorial:

“If you talk to leading progressives these days, you’ll be sure to hear this message: The Democratic Party should embrace the economic populism of New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Such economic populism, they argue, should be the guiding star for Democrats heading into 2016. Nothing would be more disastrous for Democrats.”

In other words, Third Way is an enclave for DINO traitors to the genuine Democratic cause and brand. The 'Third Way' is actually a craven fourth column which seeks to upend the social justice actions, legislation put into place by FDR, and instead extol Neoliberalism.  Perhaps no better synopsis of Neoliberalism has been written than by Henry Giroux (Protesting Youth in an Age of Neoliberal Savagery' )

"As the latest stage of predatory capitalism, neoliberalism is part of a broader economic and political project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital, particularly financial capital (Giroux 2008; 2014). As a political project, it includes “the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws” (Yates 2013).

As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations.

As a mode of governance, it produces identities, subjects, and ways of life driven by a survival-of-the fittest ethic, grounded in the idea of the free, possessive individual, and committed to the right of ruling groups and institutions to exercise power removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a policy and political project, it is wedded to the privatization of public services, the dismantling of the connection of private issues and public problems, the selling off of state functions, liberalization of trade in goods and capital investment, the eradication of government regulation of financial institutions and corporations, the destruction of the welfare state and unions, and the endless marketization and commodification of society.

Neoliberalism has put an enormous effort into creating a commanding cultural apparatus and public pedagogy in which individuals can only view themselves as consumers, embrace freedom as the right to participate in the market, and supplant issues of social responsibility for an unchecked embrace of individualism and the belief that all social relation be judged according to how they further one’s individual needs and self-interests.

Matters of mutual caring, respect, and compassion for the other have given way to the limiting orbits of privatization and unrestrained self-interest, just as it has become increasingly difficult to translate private troubles into larger social, economic, and political considerations. As the democratic public spheres of civil society have atrophied under the onslaught of neoliberal regimes of austerity, the social contract has been either greatly weakened or replaced by savage forms of casino capitalism, a culture of fear, and the increasing use of state violence."

How any Democrat with red blood coursing through his veins could support such a bastardized system is beyond me. But perhaps this is because I am a product of the 50s and 60s and always embraced the true liberalism manifested by FDR and JFK which the current mutation of Wall Street Dems despise. (These "Dems", as another indicator, were also behind the Chained CPI cuts to Social Security when Obama - another Neolib- first proposed it via his "deficit commission").  I also have not changed my political stripes one iota over a generation. I have not changed one metaphorical millimeter moving to the center, or to the right.

Why not? Because principles valid to liberalism - which the Democratic Party should be about in counterpoint to the Repukes' pro -business, wealth agenda- do not change over time. What was unacceptable in the 1940s, or 1950s, 1960s (e.g. kids going hungry, seniors without social insurance dying in ditches, kids working in factories, people lacking access to health care) must also be unacceptable in the 2000s, or even 3000s.

As Conor Lynch puts it (ibid.), pegging why the corporatists and their lackeys are so terrified of Sanders and Warren:

The fact is, Wall Street is afraid of modern liberalism, and is working hard to kill it from within with the same arguments that were made in the eighties and nineties. The only difference is, today, we know just how bad neoliberalism has been for the majority of people, and how good it has been for folks on Wall Street.

The financial crisis and the current inequality we face discredits the neoliberal ideology of the past thirty years.


SO make no mistake that Elizabeth Warren and the rising liberal movement (which even Karl Rove in yesterday's WSJ noted claims 31% of Americans, up from 25% five years ago)   have created a real fear within the Republican party and Wall Street. Certain right wing pundits thus hysterically paint Warren as nothing less than a radical socialist, aiming to overthrow the capitalist system. This is irrational fear. Fear that the new liberal movement is not just a fad, and that the future is moving leftward. (It is, and each year that inequality continues, pushes the marker further left)

Those Democrats who are aware what side their 'bread is buttered on' know well enough not to support the Neoliberal imperative any longer. Already, six House Dems vying for Senate seats in the 2016 elections have rejected the Trans Pacific Partnership - the cornerstone of current Neoliberal market manipulation. They have stated openly that their constituents have made it very clear to them that they want no part of this egregious, Anti-American deal.

It would be well for other Dems, especially the nominal ones, DINOS and Neolibs, to perhaps let that sink through their heads lest they vote on the TPP "fast track" passage in the near future.