Why Hillary Clinton's 90s nostalgia is so dangerous
Last edited Sun May 22, 2016, 08:36 AM - Edit history (1)
Why Hillary Clinton's 90s nostalgia is so dangerous
Thomas Frank
The Guardian
American columnists have already expressed their annoyance with Hillary for offloading her duties-to-come onto her husband and thus compromising the first female presidency before it’s even started. But what really lends distinction to her announcement is the perversity, the sheer incoherence of the kind of policies she seems to hope her husband will recommend.
And deregulation! Before I watched the video of that Hillary Clinton campaign event, I had never heard someone denounce deregulation and hail the economic achievements of Bill Clinton in the same speech. That kind of mental combination, I’ve always assumed, puts you in danger of spontaneous combustion or something. After all, Bill Clinton is America’s all-time champion deregulator. He deregulated banks. He deregulated telecoms. He appointed arch deregulators Robert Rubin and Larry Summers to high office, and he re-upped Ronald Reagan’s pet Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan. He took some time out to dynamite the federal welfare system, then he came back and deregulated banks some more. And derivative securities, too.
Yes, we all know that times were good in the last few years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But unless 90s nostalgia has completely paralyzed our brains, we also know that this was due in large part to a series of financial bubbles. It is true that a different person was in the White House when the last of those bubbles exploded, but even a child understands that doesn’t get Bill Clinton entirely off the hook for it. Nor would it be a good idea to get Bill working on another Nasdaq bubble, even assuming such a thing is possible.
It all puts me in mind of a little nostalgia of my own. One of the reasons I voted for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton during the hopeful summer of 2008 was because I thought we needed to shut the door on the Clinton legacy once and for all. Obama won the nomination and, thanks to a global economic crisis, became president. But then he proceeded to bring back some of the very Clinton appointees that had done so much to precipitate the disaster in the first place.
The thought of embracing third way economic policy fills me with dread. Furthermore, I can't think of anything that would do more to discredit the "left" in the USA, as it did in the 90s.
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