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The rise and fall of Clintonism.


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2018 Feb 20, 5:50am   2,161 views  4 comments

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Two new books help fill in the details of the rise and fall of Clintonian economics and politics: Bill Clinton, a short biography by Michael Tomasky, and Shattered, a narrative account of Hillary’s 2016 election loss by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

These demonstrate neatly how Clintonism—a politics of triangulation in a neoliberal age—eventually undermined itself.

it’s worth considering one final point: that the basic premise of Clintonism was never true. It was never necessary to bow before neoliberalism to achieve growth and employment. Indeed, the phrase “stagflation” is somewhat misleading, since growth as such was never the problem.

While the 1970s did have high inflation and unemployment, it was a high-growth decade—average real GDP growth per year was higher than in the 1980s and much higher than in the 2000s or ’10s.

The decade’s real problems were the oil shocks, the continued wasteful spending on the Vietnam War, and a huge surge into the labor force as women got jobs en masse and the baby boomers came of age at the same time.

Super-high demand led to rising prices and fast growth, but there still weren’t enough new jobs to completely absorb a huge increase in the working-age population.

All this caused a reversal of the US balance of trade, which helped break the Bretton Woods currency system and led to more problems.

Make no mistake: These were all serious issues. But none of them were caused by the basic New Deal framework (with the partial exception of mass unionization, which did help fuel inflation through cost-of-living contract stipulations). And while the New Democrats did occasionally make some good points about sclerotic or captured regulatory agencies, rolling them back didn’t unleash a massive surge of growth.

On the contrary, growth since the 1970s has largely been middling to poor, with the brief exception of the late-’90s tech boom—and even that didn’t hold a candle to the explosive boom of the 1960s. Then too, regulation by state agencies was merely replaced by even worse and less accountable regulation by monopolist corporations.

In the context of postwar politics, the upper class accommodated itself to a truce in the class war, for about three decades.

But when the system came under strain, the elites launched a renewed class war, leveraging stagflation to destroy and devour the welfare state. Clintonism could work in the early stages of that process, buoyed by the economic bubble of the 1990s.

But when the inevitable disaster struck, it would become an anchor around the neck of the Democratic Party—and it remains one to this day.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-clintonism/

#Clintonism

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2   anonymous   2018 Feb 20, 10:30am  

Reading is educational and it helps pass the time. Idle minds and hands are the devil's playground.
3   Tenpoundbass   2018 Feb 20, 11:04am  

Clintonims will fall at the gallows.
Where we want to see that putrid cunt hang by her neck until dead, dead DEAD!
4   anonymous   2018 Feb 20, 11:05am  

Tenpoundbass says
Clintonims will fall at the gallows.
Where we want to see that putrid cunt hang by her neck until dead, dead DEAD!


MAGA!!!!

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