Jesus Christ why do people insist on relitigating the primary? Living in yesteryear does absolutely nothing to advance progressive causes.
Anyways, I thought they both did what they usually did well but like I expected, Cruz never addressed what would happen to people who got healthcare, and Bernie failed to clearly articulate how he's gonna pay for Medicare-for-all.
The Clintons set progressive causes back decades, so I'm damn interested in having them not have control of the party any more.
I think Clintons were toxic for Democrats, they couldn't shake of the skeletons but explain how it set progressive causes back?
Bill Clinton didn't attempt to move the country to the left the slightest after his first 2 years in office, and that 2 years included him getting a Democratic Congress to pass NAFTA. He has a long list of right-wing accomplishments, such as repealing Glass Steagal, telecommuncations deregulation, welfare reform, the Mickey Mouse copyright act, and numerous others. When he took office, the Democrats had had the House for 38 years. In the over 22 years since he lost it 2 years later, they've had it just 4 years. The party has had huge losses in state and local governments since then, too. Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election was such a utter disgrace, with DOMA, V-chips, and being open to abortion limitations being what he ran on.
And in 2016, they had the party take down an actual progressive, talked to Trump right before he announced, had the media give extra coverage to Trump, and managed to out Dewey Tom Dewey in losing to Trump.
I don't think it's entirely fair to target Obama and the Clintons like that, because it ignores the underlying reason that neoliberalism/third way politics even developed and has sustained itself. Neoliberalism developed not only in the United States, but in virtually all other Western democracies as well at about the same time. It's not some conspiracy, there are legitimate reasons for why it occurred.
First, people today overlook the effects the 1960s had on dramatically reshaping our political discourses and affiliations. Take one particular Senator and notable presidential candidate as the example - Eugene McCarthy. This man was adored by the hippies and college students during the late 60s and early 70s for his vocal and principled opposition to the Vietnam War; it made him a liberal darling. Yet, what people don't know is how radically McCarthy broke with the norms of the Democratic Party and the traditional left on economic issues (while being considerably more liberal on social ones). He, along with many other anti-war Democrats of that era, championed the universal basic income as a way to scrap the New Deal/Great Society welfare state - an idea inspired, in part, by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (both ardent advocates of limited government and free-market capitalism). This was not their only break from Democratic orthodoxy either. In fact, McCarthy, that liberal darling, actually endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980. These new styled liberals set the foundation for a new breed of Democrat - one detached from a political foundation in the labor movement, since the labor movement was strongly associated with the Democratic establishment that championed the Vietnam War and other policies antithetical to the views of the emerging college educated, socially liberal left.
That leads to the second point, which is that the labor movement was declining at the same time these new liberal (neoliberal) Democrats were emerging in opposition to the labor backed establishment. The peak of the labor movement was during the 1940s and peak unionization occurred in the 1950s, but since then union membership and, consequently, labor power began to decline. As it declined, this allowed a power vacuum within the Democratic Party to be filled by those neoliberals who were socially liberal and anti-war. They were associated strongly with college students, who largely became white collar workers (i.e. non-unionized) and eschewed the influence of the Vietnam War enabling labor movement, many of whose members began to break from the anti-war left within the Democratic Party (see: Nixon's Hard Hats, Reagan Democrats). Since the labor movement is what provided Democratic politicians with their mobilization abilities and campaign funds, these neoliberal obviously had to search for funding elsewhere. Thus, they turned to the private sector and, particularly, the financial industry which had recently become more favorable to the party thanks to the financial deregulations begun, not by Reagan, but by Carter.
By the 1980s, with more of these Vietnam War era Democrats entering elected office, the decline of the labor movement's power, the increasing success of the Southern Strategy, and the political dominance of Reagan and the Republican Party (in alliance with conservative, Southern Democrats), the Democrats began to discuss how to come back from the political wilderness, which led to the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC argued, in part thanks to the funding it and its supporters received from the financial industry, that the party should shift away from its affiliation with the left wing, economic populism of the previous decades that was driven by a dying labor movement, and instead embrace a new liberalism that coopted Republican economic rhetoric and policies while retaining liberal social views. By the 1988 and 1992, nearly all the top Democratic candidates for President were associated with the DLC and it's wing of the party, thereby driving a wedge between the economic left associated with the declining labor movement and the aspiring neoliberals who eventually gained control over the party and have held it since the Clinton Administration.
So, if the Democratic Party is to shift away from neoliberalism, it'll require a new base of financial support and a leadership that aligns with the interests of this base. The labor movement is no longer an option and the goal is to break from the financial industry, thus the only remaining options would be the emerging technology industry and/or popular political activism. Bernie Sanders demonstrated the strength of the latter option with his campaign's unprecedented ability to raise money without appealing to big money or unions, but rather to an energized base of supporters. We're watching this unfold before our eyes right now with the blueprint established by the Sanders campaign for the Progressive wing of the party to move away from reliance on big money, like the establishment wing does, and instead mobilize its progressive base.
