“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Cornel West: Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here
The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians.
The Bush and Clinton dynasties were destroyed by the media-saturated lure of the pseudo-populist billionaire with narcissist sensibilities and ugly, fascist proclivities. The monumental election of Trump was a desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order – a nostalgic return to an imaginary past of greatness.
White working- and middle-class fellow citizens – out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. Yet these same citizens also supported a candidate who appeared to blame their social misery on minorities, and who alienated Mexican immigrants, Muslims, black people, Jews, gay people, women and China in the process.
This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future.
Thomas Piketty: We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail
Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.
Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. [..]
It is time to change the political discourse on globalization: trade is a good thing, but fair and sustainable development also demands public services, infrastructure, health and education systems. In turn, these themselves demand fair taxation systems. If we fail to deliver these, Trumpism will prevail.
Polly Toynbee: Equality looks further away than ever in a Brexit, Donald Trump world
Once a year the government faces the ritual embarrassment of its own Social Mobility Commission’s “state of the nation” report – and yesterday’s was more thoroughly excoriating than ever before. Progress is in reverse, with dire warnings for the future.
Those born in the 1980s, Thatcher’s children, are now worse off than their parents, breaking the expectation that has been the norm for many generations that things will always get better, standards of living for most will always rise. [..]
There is only one important question and no one has an answer: how can enough voters be persuaded to will the necessary shift, to convince the older/richer voters to make some sacrifice? In the post-Brexit vote and Trump despair, with the nation’s self-image grossly distorted by an increasingly malevolent antisocial press, I read the sometimes poisonous comments that follow any Guardian article on inequality, and I don’t know the answer. I have spent most of my journalistic life writing about it, including books chronicling the widening divide between the rich and the low paid, observing the social chasm and its miserable effects on everyone, but right now the answer to the only important question looks further away than ever.
Suzanne Moore: Why did women vote for Trump? Because misogyny is not a male-only attribute
Susan Sarandon told us why she would not vote for Hillary Clinton: “I don’t vote with my vagina.” Nor, it seems, do many women. The howl of pain that accompanied the post-election analysis has often centred on that one disturbing statistic: 53% of white women voted for a man who calls women pigs, has a string of sexual assault claims still outstanding, who will happily turn back women’s rights to contraception and abortion if it suits him. Women beware women. [..]
For power is never simply a possession but an exercise; power is about how we understand ourselves. Feminism seeks to unpick all the tiny ways in which we are bound. Everywhere we look, there are women hating other women for business or pleasure: those who don’t want a female boss; who don’t want positive discrimination; who like strip clubs and porn as much as the boys; who don’t want to worship in churches with female priests; who want to force other women to give birth to children they don’t want; who say FGM is “cultural”; and who get off on body shaming. On and on it goes. How can we be surprised that misogyny is not a male-only attribute?
Far from it. As the American satirist HL Mencken defined it, a misogynist is “a man who hates women as much as women hate one another”.
Which is immeasurably.
Heather Digby Parton “Sore winner” syndrome: Why are Donald Trump’s supporters still so angry? Abraham Lincoln understood
It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.
Much of the unrest has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts on the left while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by the other side, they have a right to say it.
But there have also been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.
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