I’ve seen it in several documentaries and articles about her: her friends and acquaintances almost uniformly report that she starts going left economically in college, abandoning Goldwater’s full-blown neoliberalism (from her high school days) for Rockefeller/Nixon/Lindsay neoliberalism-lite (first few years of college) and then going further left in her junior year at Wellesley as she sees that neoliberalism-lite is integral to the various GOP assaults on social justice movements (feminism, minority civil rights, anti-war, etc.). By the time she meets Bill in law school she’s fully enmeshed in the what was, at the time, a more economically and socially leftist Democratic party.
All of which makes the comment that she was always a neoliberal (full-blown or otherwise) the truly misleading comment. And I say this as someone who vowed never to vote for her again after 2003 in part because she’d essentially backslid to where she’d been in sophomore year of college.
The vast majority of Presidential elections don’t get rank-and-file voters excited about the candidates on the ballot. Almost by definition the person that builds a big enough coalition to win the nomination usually ends up being somewhat of a centrist within their party rather than a revolutionary.
Krugman might be a good candidate for “neoliberal-lite”. He’s a little tough to peg because he takes the “managed markets” perspective I associate with neoliberalism, but he does advocate for some socialist policies, esp. single payer healthcare. I get the feeling that he’d be more socialist if he weren’t so establishment, and to the extent that he’s neoliberal it’s because the establishment is neoliberal and he’s trying to maintain his credibility there because that’s how he can do the most good.
That might be giving him more credit than he deserves, but I have a bit of a soft spot for Krugman.
You said she was “like Bernie” “by the time she was in college”. In actual fact, she was a member of the college Republicans.
Even if I conceded that she was economically socialist in any way (you’ve given me no reason to think so; even if I take your word on these documentaries and articles, you don’t explicitly mention anything about her economic views), this would still be a very misleading thing to say. In fact, I was being generous with “a bit misleading”. It’s actually a glaring falsehood.
I disagree:
-Reagan was far right, not centrist.
-Clinton was farthest right of the Dems – centrist overall, but not within his party. -Bush was far right Nah, he’s a data point in favor of your theory – ran as a centrist
-Obama was actually centrist, but campaigned as far left.
In context, Reagan was revolutionary (they literally called it “the Reagan revolution”), Clinton was revolutionary (breaking right instead of left as a Democrat was a new untested strategy), Obama pretended to be revolutionary.
Yes, by her junior year she was. She worked for Gene McCarthy, was a civil rights advocate, was against the Vietnam War, etc. – all things Bernie supported. I wasn’t implying that her transformation took place instantaneously on the first day of freshman year, as you seem to have interpreted the statement. It was a process.
Her economic views shifted to a Bernie-like view as she saw that neoliberalism and neoliberalism-lite were deeply enmeshed in other social injustices. A full-blown neoliberal would not provide free legal advice for the poor or support migrant workers’ rights or choose to intern at a law firm run in part by Communists that supported radical causes.
Krugman is definitely a globalist and free-trade advocate, which some conflate with “neoliberal.” He’s also a member of the economic establishment and not what anyone would call a behavioural economist, so he’s often assumed to be part of the neoliberal consensus. But in reality he’s a Keynesian critic of that consensus – too far toward the left for the Clintons and Third-Way crowd to work with.
I suppose that depends on who you are comparing him to. Behold this video of Reagan and Bush debating ways our border and immigration policies could be more supportive and sensitive to the good people of Mexico.
He also pledged during his first campaign that he’d be the first President to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court if given the opportunity (a promise he later made good on with Sandra Day O’Connor). So in at least some important respects he wasn’t “far right” for a 1980s Republican.
You said “by the time she was in college”. If you meant something different, you should have said something different.
If you’re going to nitpick, it behooves you to be factually accurate while you do so.
This seems like begging the question about what “neoliberal” means.
I don’t know why she clerked at that particular law firm as figuring it out would require more biographical information about the lady than I care to look up, but I can think of lots of reasons besides her actually being a socialist.
“I sometimes think that I didn’t leave the Republican Party as much as it left me.”
-Hillary Clinton
Let me make a startling confession: I think the one-dimensional political axis is insufficient to capture the complexities of the real world.
However, let me also suggest that Reagan’s stance on immigration and women’s rights were still revolutionary rather than centrist for the Republican party at the time.
Even if I concede Reagan (I don’t – “Reagan revolution”), we’re still at 50/50 in for four of the last five presidents, suggesting that it’s not really the most centrist who wins most of the time.
Note that the one I didn’t mention is the one best described as “centrist”, and he’s the only one of the five to have lost a presidential election.
While your question is a valid one, I don’t know if a Judge Smails meme is a good choice to emphasise it. Still a funny one, though – Ted Knight really owned that role.
(The movie came out in 1980. If there could have been any common ground to be found between old-money Judge Smails and nouveau riche Al Czervik it would have been that both would vote for Reagan and his neoliberal agenda. Enough derail, though.)
Welp, may as well stay home and feel outraged. But as you do, remember that one party is working very hard to make you stay home. Who knows, maybe they will drain the swamp.
That’s true for now, but until the Southern Strategy, the Dixiecrats racist dipshits with no discernable political ideology were viable as a third party. That’s why the Republicans were so eager to woo them.
Before that, though, we had Roosevelt and LaFollette. If either of them had become president, the world would be a much better place.
