At Salon Paul Rosenberg argues for rolling back the “mistakes of the Clinton era”:
Much of the internal strife inside the Democratic Party today hearkens back to policy choices made in the 1990s, as the Clinton administration firmly wedded the party to a neoliberal policy agenda — on trade, deregulation, welfare reform, mass incarceration, and so on — much of which is finally getting the sort of sustained critical scrutiny it escaped at the time. While neoliberal ideas from the 1990s have been the source of significant strife, some problems facing us have solutions rooted in that decade as well.
The same intellectually restricted environment that made those Clinton-era compromises seem sensible also excluded insights, ideas and perspectives that could have served us far better at the time, and — more importantly — can still help us get a handle on some of the most challenging problems we face today. They are well worth re-examining and integrating into any progressive to-do-list for the years ahead.
The changes he would like to see include either abrogating or reworking NAFTA (in agreement, apparently, with Donald Trump), revising energy and environmental policies, and electoral reforms that I don’t recall having changed during Bill Clinton’s term of office. Conspicuous by their absence are reforms to the tax code (outsized executive compensation was an unforeseen consequence of Clinton era reforms to the corporate income tax), granting China “Most Favored Nation” trading status, and sponsoring China’s admission to the World Trade Organization.
His position leads me to the question how far do progressives wish to turn back the clock? You don’t have to search very hard to find Paul Krugman’s nostalgia for the pre-Kennedy tax code. Democrats have been pretty successful in turning back the clock to the Eisenhower era when Adlai Stevenson lost two consecutive presidential bids.
The Truman era when Harry Truman nationalized the steel industry? FDR’s first term when he instituted the National Recovery Administration, Works Project Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps?
All of which underscores a point I’ve made before: Democrats have become conservatives while Republicans have become radicals.
