The New Plutocracy: How Democrats Betrayed Their Origins

by Lorna Salzman (May 2016)

Underlining the classic Democratic maneuver of blaming the Republicans, Zach Carter in Huffington Post referred to Bill Clinton’s statement at an April 7th rally for Hillary in Philadelphia (where blacks confronted him on his welfare reform), in which he blamed the Republicans for cutting welfare benefits:

This wasn’t an accident or an unintended consequence. The whole point of welfare reform was to kick people off the welfare rolls. Clinton had campaigned on doing just that in 1992. ‘When I ran for president four years ago, I pledged to end welfare as we know it,’ he said on the day the bill passed. ‘I have worked for four years to do just that.’ In 1996, the year the law was passed, the poverty rate was 13.7 percent. At the close of 2014 — the most recent available annual census data —it was 14.8 percent. But welfare rolls have declined roughly 70 percent, from a peak of 14.2 million in 1994 to 4.2 million today. Maybe that’s because 70 percent of the people on welfare were all lazy moochers. Republicans who continue to applaud Clinton’s actions suggest just that. But even Clinton himself didn’t make that (ridiculous) argument on Thursday. He instead claimed that the GOP was to blame for unnecessarily cutting off aid to needy people, not he.

But that is not the whole reason. Other parts of the puzzle are the social justice activists and movements who (Frank might suggest) monopolize the media and public attention which distracts attention away from the big issues like economic inequality, corporate globalization and, especially climate change, so as to put their own relatively trivial concerns up front.

This is a devilishly clever but successful maneuver and it works every four years. If one were paranoid, one could entertain the suspicion that the Social Justice Warriors are on the Democratic Party payroll. They unwittingly aid the DP in their reluctance to address the fundamental economic and political failures (unless forced to do so by people like Bernie Sanders).

The startling point that Frank makes about the widespread acceptance of this society by people who should be more skeptical is that the financial and banking elites are no longer Republican but Democrats. A look at those who peopled the Clinton and Obama administrations reveals the truth. Lawrence Summers, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, Zoe Baird, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin are on a long list of individuals who came from and eventually returned to Wall Street, after having created or participated in major financial crises without paying a penalty for their failure or their conflict of interest.

It is no wonder that some universities are now trying to sideline the humanities and substitute the STEM curriculum (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). Those Social Justice Warriors at Stanford University who want to stop the re-introduction of a course on western civilization should be delighted at this new non-racial diverse society that banishes the humanities and its genuine concerns about learning, philosophy, anthropology, ethics, history and the arts to the sidelines in favor of Personal Pique as the basis for societal change.

None of this lets the American public off the hook. Most Americans are literate, to one extent or another. But like other human beings, they are not isolated voters. They belong to a peer group or a professional association. Their politics were shaped by their family, education and social affiliations. Their present complaints and needs are fed or inflamed by what their peers or friends or families tell them, and not least the internet gossip network. Whatever prejudices they had are inevitably going to be echoed by others even if they are not personally affected. Human society is, in a word, flawed. Add on to this the absence of principled leadership and an independent media, an educational system now being clawed to death by anti-intellectual and authoritarian ideologies, and the usual demagoguery and cant disguised as legitimate dissent, and you have the ingredients for a complete meltdown of democracy. We are already feeling its heat.

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Politics as if Evolution Mattered,” which addresses the intersection of evolution with socio-political policy. 

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