krebscycle

On the eve of the fateful 2016 Presidential election, in a pre-election “explainer”, Dissent magazine told its readers a completely false story that St. Bernie Sanders was bringing us socialism, whether we deserved it or not, but evil neoliberal Hillary Clinton was a fanatical devotee of the harshest form of market economics.

Whether they realize it or not, millions of Bernie Sanders supporters across the country have embraced a version of socialism developed by political economist Karl Polanyi in his 1944 classic, The Great Transformation. Dissent explains.

On the other hand, Neoliberal Devil Clinton  wants education to be a “market commodity”.

Clinton also wants higher education to remain a market commodity, because she says that if the government paid, it would needlessly be giving a free ride to the children of the wealthy and the upper-middle class. Clinton’s reasoning appeals to ideas of market efficiency, while Sanders, in stating that “Education should be a right, not a privilege,” appeals to ideas of community beyond markets. Dissent.

Making public education free has nothing to do with “market efficiency”, which is a right wing doctrine from people who oppose things like public universities entirely. Hillary Clinton’s proposal is:

“I believe that we should make community college free. We should have debt-free college if you got to a public college or university. You should not have to borrow a dime to pay tuition,” Clinton said. “I disagree with free college for everybody. I don’t think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump’s kids to college.”

Supposed socialist Bernard Sanders proposed that the government pay tuition in private and public universities and Clinton proposed that the government make public community college free for everyone and public universities free for people who are not rich enough to pay. Sanders wanted the government to pay rich kids to go to Harvard, and presumably to Liberty U, but Clinton wanted everyone to be able to afford public universities. Clinton’s proposal is not rooted in making education a market commodity any more than Sanders proposal to pay private universities is “socialism” in any meaningful sense. However, there is a rigorous class based analysis at the core of the Dissent article in the sense that it champions the class interests of it authors and more generally left wing ideologists/professionals over the interests of the working class. Ellen Willis made this point in a review of Thomas Frank’s counterfactual “What is the matter with Kansas”

I suspect it’s of a piece with the denial that culture is important—a defense against the terror of radicalism that must be warded off at all costs. For some, there is also. nostalgia for a time when white liberal men like Tom Frank were heroes, before they were robbed of the spotlight by blacks, women and gays, forced to confront private conflicts as public issues, and ultimately pushed aside by the right.”

The reason why the “left” has been so ineffective in opposing the rise of the far right in America, at least, is that the class interests of left wing academics and professional intellectuals is threatened by the rise of the multi-racial coalition in the Democratic Party. This class dynamic is the source of counter-factual analysis filled with nostalgia for the imagined left wing New Deal and denunciations of the equally imaginary “neoliberal” right wing economics of current Democrats who are, in real-life, solid social democrats – even sharing Polanyi’s understanding that markets are the creation of government. And this counter-factual reactionary “left wing” argument is enormously valuable to a far right on the march, that depends on discouraging voting. The more disillusioned cynical non-voters and voters for the deeply inauthentic spoiler candidates like Jill Stein or Cornell West, Tulsi Gabbard, Ralph Nader, or Bernard Sanders, the stronger the Trumpist right.

See Confessions of an ex-leftist.

[original May 24, 2016] [updated and expanded May 2018][edits july 2023]