By Robin Lehman
I appreciate Mr. Oliver's plea to us Bernie backers. Mostly, I think he's right on target but misses the actual history and purpose of our movement since we already tried to compromise. About two years ago Bernie sent out an email asking whether he should run for president and, if so, as an Independent or a Democrat. We all said yes, run as a Democrat. Bernie is the compromise of the Independent left, trying to avoid a spoiler like Ralph Nader. We'd much rather he run as an Independent, but (and here's the election rigging) the mainstream media won't cover Independent candidates adequately for them to get any traction. So we compromised, thinking that if we put out a viable moderate left-wing candidate running in the party, the Democrats would work with us. But instead, the Democrats totally dissed us, calling us Bernie boys, outsiders, whiners and that we should simmer down and drop out. So Mr. Oliver is right. The Democrats won, which is why I believe that now is the chance for those of us on the Independent left to start a new party. Momentum is with us.
I will not vote for Hillary Clinton in November. I can't vote for her any more than I can vote for Donald Trump. And again Mr. Oliver is correct: Hillary Clinton isn't a liar, she's a chameleon (good propagandists never lie). Hillary was for NAFTA and TPP, so-called free trade agreements, until Bernie forced her to agree that they were terrible ideas. She was for offshore drilling until she was against it. She was for oil pipelines until she was against them. I'm not sure where she stands on fracking. She was for the Iraq war until she was against it.
She has totally bought in to the neocon idea that, first and foremost, we must export neoliberal capitalism around the world, at the point of a gun if necessary. William Kristol and Henry Kissinger are two of her biggest fans. Both were and are fans of the Iraq war and expanding the already bloated war budget of $660 billion a year. As for Hillary's close ties to Wall Street: She supported her husband's repeal of the Glass-Steagall act which, in large part, caused the 2008 meltdown of the economy and still, to this day, doesn't want it re-instituted. I could go on and on with her changing colors, but where she stays the same is neoliberalism. She believes and the Democratic Party believes that human beings are at the service of business rather than business being at the service of human beings.
Where Mr. Oliver and the Democratic Party have got it wrong for the past two decades is that the party had to move rightward to win elections. We on the left have said that the only reason the Democrats won going rightward with Bill Clinton was his charisma. So when they ran with John Kerry and Al Gore (two conservative neoliberal Democrats) we knew they would lose. Obama (another neoliberal) won because of his charisma and he is black.
The Democrats are doing the same thing with Hillary. So we have nothing personal against Hillary. And we consider the fact that she's a woman to be a good thing. It’s just that she represents the banality of the neoliberal Democratic Party. We've been telling the Democrats that we can't vote for her and our compromise was running with Bernie. But the Democrats won't compromise and so we won't vote for Hillary as we've said all along. The Democrats lose when they pick terrible candidates.
One last point: You must have covered Hannah Arendt in your high school philosophy class discussions on morality. She was a Jewish philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany and wrote for The New Yorker magazine. She was asked to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Israel after the Mossad operatives caught him hiding in Brazil.
All of the newspapers were calling him a monster, but she said no, he wasn't a monster any more than all the Germans were monsters. He was just very good at his job of arranging time schedules for the trains delivering one and a half million Jews to their death. Encapsulating her sentiments, she coined the phrase, “the banality of evil,” which conveys the notion that an individual who doesn't stand up to evil, becomes part of that evil. Suffice it to say, at 63 years old I can no longer vote for a Democrat or Republican who espouses the neoliberal/neocon agenda of world domination. It is evil.
Lehman lives in Warren.
