Yes, the title is provocative; predictably, some Kossacks reading this diary are going to allow their emotions to cloud their comprehension. So I’m going to preface my diary with a couple points of clarification.
First of all, I am not blaming the Clintons directly for the rise of the Alt Right — this vile, right wing racist, reactionary majoritarian element has always existed in American society in various evolving incarnations since founding. This American conservative culture didn’t originate with the Clintons.
Which leads to my second point: the Clintons shaped the Democratic Party around this reality. LBJ foresaw a Democratic Party facing an existential threat when he when he signed the Civil Rights Act. The Reagan Revolution lead to the Gingrich Revolution, Bush Era and Tea Party Era were manifestations of LBJ’s long term foresight, denying Democrats a persistent majority in Congress. The South recently purged the last Southern Democratic Senator in Mary Landrieu. The Clintons, under the leadership of Al From, molded the Democratic establishment around this new reality by creating a left wing variant of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism — a product of the nascent New Right, ditching the New Deal Democrat ideology of old to appeal to middle of the road conservatives.
This second point is a hard fact that makes many Kossacks all hot and bothered with denial, and as a result I’m predictably going to receive a tidal wave of unjust flags. Yet these Kossacks are happy to bash Reaganian neoliberalism all day long and to their hearts extent, while ignoring the fact that Clintonian neoliberalism is cut from the same cloth. Just as Reaganistas have a different perspective of the Reagan era where they imagine Reagan cut taxes and downsized goverment, apparently, Perception is Reality for these Kossacks, as they have a tendency to reimagine a Bill Clinton who was forced by a Republican majority Congress to trade a few New Deal or New Left style bones in exchange for steep bouts of Reagan ideology — ignoring fact that Bill Clinton actively shared many of the same ideological principles as his Republican opponents, enough to team up with Newt Gingrich to make a failed attempt at privatizing Social Security, the Democratic Party’s crown jewel. We’ve come to call this perception ‘incrementalism’.
Again, I am not blaming the Clintons for their “third way” politics, as I feel they believed at the time was the course of action necessary to ensure Bill Clinton’s chances of winning the 1992 and 1996 election, as well as the long term survival of the Democratic Party. Just as Reaganomics was an experiment within the Republican Party, Clintonomics was also an experiment within the Democratic Party. A lot of Democratic voters at the time had ridden the Reagan wave, so Clinton had revised policy to bring those lost Democratic voters back into the fold.
As hindsight is 20/20 — we are now able to look back and analyze what Clintonian neoliberalism has wrought. If there is one word that could sum up everything that is wrong with Clintonism, it is momentum. More specifically, the lack of it. Momentum is succinctly implied in the concept of incrementalism: short bouts of positive progressive momentum in exchange for long bouts of negative conservative momentum. Problem was, these long bouts of negative conservative momentum really hurt both politically, economically and socially. It had the effect of delaying the inevitable — Clintonian Democrats wasted much more time and political capital reversing policies that they initially supported to attract Reagan Democrats to the party, than they had spent fighting for progressive ideals. This had the effect of stifling momentum, and therefore any enthusiasm the younger generation had to bother and show up at the polls and vote Democrat.
And it would only get worse -the optics of incrementalism unintentionally resulted in a Democratic Party that appears to revolve primarily around ‘social justice’, and poorly at that — though not as badly as their capitulation to Reaganomics and Wall Street. This perception was exacerbated during the racially supercharged political climate that followed the election of America’s first black president, consequently resulting in the rise of the young , naive, and overreachingly politically correct, but well intended ‘Social Justice Warrior’ on the Left, and their persistent accusations of ‘white privilege’ and endless list of ‘micro-aggressions’ that they demand every living, breathing white individual must be made aware of.
As every action has an opposite and equal reaction, this cultural onslaught from both the Democratic establishment and progressive base alienated many young economically and socially liberal whites who would have otherwise found a home in the Democratic Party, if only if these especially irrational ‘social justice warriors’ weren’t so perceivably hostile towards them, as perception is reality. These white youth instead were lured to the dark side — they found appeal in a new left-hating movement that we’ve all come to know as the Alt Right — and they exist in far greater numbers than the so called ‘Social Justice Warriors’ that they found offensive. And who can blame them?