2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHilary is doing it wrong.
A very good piece on why Hilary has it backwards.
This comes from Bill McKibben - the climate change activist - and it came up on my FB feed earlier this morning.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35099-getting-change-wrong
In the mounting, panicky attempts of elites to derail the Sanders candidacy, one strand dominates.
You find it woven through every sage piece from the old-school pundits of the Times and the hip insider websites like Vox. Yes, they say, he's saying some useful things. But he can't really make them happen. He's talking "puppies and rainbows." Real "reform is hard." The Times editors, in their endorsement of Hillary Clinton, managed a matchless condescension: His ideas about breaking up the banks or guaranteeing health care for everyone, they intoned, "have earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people. But his plans for achieving them aren't realistic." Wait 'til you're older and richer like us, and then you'll understand how change happens.
In fact, these pundits couldn't be more wrong about where change comes from. And neither could Hillary Clinton. Here's how she put it a few months ago, backstage at a tense and fascinating little confrontation with Black Lives Matter activists:
"I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate."
That sounds sensible, grown-up, wise. It's what Washington pundits always say -- they said it over and over again when we launched, say, the fight to stop the Keystone pipeline. But in fact it's completely backwards.
As someone who came up in the 1960's and saw that we needed to not just fight against the war in Vietnam, but to change the climate so that we could end the war, this piece hits home. And it addresses one of the reasons that HRC is the wrong candidate for the Presidency.
malthaussen
(17,065 posts)It is possible to change hearts. It would be necessary to re-invent Western society from bottom to top in order to do so, but that doesn't make it impossible, just something that requires much time. In the interim, you change laws, institutions, etc, as a means of assuaging the damage inherent in the way business is done. This does, of course, carry with it the advantage of leaving the fat cats in possession of their booty. It resembles, somewhat, the phenomenon of "pulling up the ladder" after you've made it to the top. Oddly enough, it also resembles the concept of "spreading the misery equally," for a given value of "equally" that means "everybody who isn't already in the club."
-- Mal
roguevalley
(40,656 posts)they are dinosaurs and the meteor is coming to blow them all away to that special hell someone out there likes to consign people.
GoneOffShore
(17,309 posts)Began to rankle with me just after he took office.
And Hilary's continued advocacy for Wall Street firms just doesn't make sense. Or rather it does, considering that she bought into the club as soon as she could. In her way she's as phony and self regarding as Ann Romney.
And although this article in The Nation is about Trump and his fellow Republicans, it could just as well be about WJC and HRC and their attitudes toward 'the proles'.
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-dickensian-politics-of-trump-and-his-fellow-ebenezers/