We Won't Get Anywhere Until We Realize How Many Sanders Supporters Are Neoliberals in Populist Clothing

The definition of neoliberalism has changed over time, but for Americans in 2016, it boils down to doing what's profitable in the name of doing what's right--whether it's right or not.

Hillary Clinton will support green energy as soon as the people behind it are willing to give her more money than the fracking industry. Until then, you can expect neoliberals to insist that there's a profound moral difference between Donald Trump's refusal to acknowledge climate change and Clinton's refusal to do anything about it.

Barack Obama will support reforming police departments throughout the country as soon as doing so becomes more profitable than oppressing communities of color on a nationwide scale. Until then, you can expect him and his neoliberal media apologists to pay lip service to the problem by providing highly controlled and emotionally loaded (but politically impotent) coverage of Black Lives Matter and Mothers of the Movement.

Joe Biden and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz will support the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex until someone pays them more to leave non-violent U.S. citizens alone than they're currently being paid to support locking folks up. Until then, they'll keep telling us that forcing Americans to rot in jail is the only way to protect us from ourselves.

Dianne Feinstein will continue to support spying on citizens until it becomes more profitable for Silicon Valley to protect the privacy of consumers than it is to compromise that privacy. Until then, she'll keep telling us that the slightest possibility of cyber-terrorism justifies the U.S. government's decision to terrorize its own population through constant surveillance.

Andrew Cuomo will continue to support attempts to quash the BDS movement until it becomes more profitable to recognize the humanity of Palestinians than to support their oppression. Until then, he'll keep equating empathy for human beings in Palestine with anti-semitism.

Loretta Lynch will continue to support prosecution of Edward Snowden for the crime of exposing the criminal behavior of our government until it becomes more profitable for her to protect the Fourth Amendment than it currently is for her to subvert it. Until then, expect her to keep insisting that national security considerations require us to treat the exposure of crime as a more grievous offense than the perpetration of it.

None of these arguments stand up to scrutiny, but the neoliberals can make them because the neoliberal media refuses to challenge such nonsense. However, thanks to the Sanders insurgency, more Americans are "woke" in 2016 than I ever thought possible.

More precisely, I believe we were always woke. We just had no idea how many of us there were until Sanders exposed us to each other.

Our problem is that with Sanders out of the race for the presidency, we're not sure what to do with our collective energy. Some of us are supporting Jill Stein and the Green Party. Others are more interested in Brand New Congress. Still others are throwing themselves into local politics. The one thing all of us have in common is a growing awareness that we're not using the current lull in the political cycle as effectively as we should be.

Even if we're aware, as Anoa Changa is in this video, that we have to go through the growing pains associated with figuring out how best to organize ourselves, that doesn't necessarily make us feel less frustrated about the fact that what was once a clear plan ("Let's get Sanders elected!") has become much murkier ("Let's continue the political revolution!").

So I want to call everyone's attention to an insight that Tim Black shared last night in a live broadcast on YouTube:

Tim is absolutely right to observe that if this disappointing time is good for nothing else, it is good for revealing who our true friends and allies are. We're learning that many of the people who seemed to be champions of the Sanders movement (such as Robert Reich, Shaun King, and Jim Hightower) are plainly less committed to the cause than they pretended to be.

Here's the problem with our fair-weather friends: Focusing on the danger that Trump poses to the present is simply a distraction from the danger that Clinton poses to the future. When Reich calls Chris Hedges nonsensical for pointing out the many policy particulars that are identical between Trump and Clinton, he is engaging in the same sort of neoliberal water-carrying as King and Hightower when they choose to become alarmist about connections between Trump and Russia.

Even if we don't all agree on what we should do next, I think most of us do agree about what we have to recognize, which is that neoliberalism is the chief threat to our future and that the people who insist on tilting at neoliberal windmills are not trying to help.

Instead of arguing with them, we need to figure out how to move forward without them.The question isn't whether the neoliberal powers that be are going to install Clinton. They are. The question is: What are we going to do about it? We won't find an answer by lamenting the betrayals of presumed allies; we'll find it by debating amongst ourselves, which is why it's even more important to pay attention to YouTubers such as Black and Changa now than it was before Sanders dropped out.

H.A. Goodman's Desperation Is Showing

I didn't cry foul back in May when H. A. Goodman released a video entitled "FBI Will Recommend Indictment of Hillary Clinton Soon." I didn't need to say anything. Plenty of people offered uncharitable criticisms of the piece based on weak arguments (e.g. nobody can predict the future) and strong arguments (e.g. Hillary Clinton can't be indicted because she is above the law). Besides, I decided to construe that title charitably--as a rhetorical counter-punch to equally polemical and misguided headlines from Goodman's colleagues at The Huffington Post, such as Vincent Intondi's "No, Hillary Clinton Is Not Worse Than Donald Trump" in March.

In fact, I thought there was a strong case to be made for the hyperbolic headlines that Goodman relied on throughout the primary (from "Hillary Clinton Should Concede to Bernie Sanders Before the FBI Reveals Its Findings" to "Yes, Bernie Sanders Will Win the Contested Convention"). The corporate media's campaign of condescension towards Sanders for the past year has been so suffocating that Goodman's headlines could reasonably be interpreted as crude but necessary skewers meant to poke holes in the airtight narrative of Clinton's inevitability.

Even those of us who found Goodman's arguments poorly researched (as when he condemned a Clinton endorsement by "Ms." Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone--subsequently corrected) or soul-crushingly repetitive (indictment take #1, indictment take #16, indictment take #116 )--even we understood that Goodman was playing the role of a motivational speaker rather than a journalist. For many Sanders supporters who felt betrayed by every media outlet from NPR to the New York Times, Goodman's arguments didn't need to be compelling as long as they were sufficiently uplifting.

Goodman's fans believe he speaks truth to power. But now that he can no longer bludgeon the Clinton camp with a looming FBI indictment, it's plain that power shouldn't listen to him because he doesn't know enough about the 2016 election to speak the truth, as he demonstrated in this interview with Tim Black:

Even though Goodman has long championed the Bernie-or-bust movement, with its focus on either writing in Bernie Sanders or voting for the Green Party's Jill Stein in November, he clearly considers Stein a tool that can best be used to threaten the Democratic Party--especially by those disinclined to dwell on policy particulars. Goodman doesn't appear to have an opinion about (or an awareness of) substantive differences between Stein and Sanders beyond their personal stances on drones and their parties' stances on Black Lives Matter.

At the thirty-minute mark, Black gave Goodman the opportunity to spew a bunch of misinformation about Gary Johnson. Goodman obliged by telling Black's viewership that the Libertarian Party opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and champions Wall Street regulation (which comes as a surprise, I suspect, to many Libertarians). Contrary to Goodman's claim, Johnson is an avowed proponent of the TPP, as he reiterated in a CNN interview just last weekend: "I'm being told that the Trans-Pacific Partnership would, in fact, advance free trade, and so I would support that document."

Of the five most important candidates (Clinton, Trump, Sanders, Stein, and Johnson), Johnson is the only one who is showing overt support for the TPP at this point in the campaign cycle--a fact worthy of attention for anyone paying attention (and especially those being paid to pay attention). Clinton knows she has to lie about her support of the TPP until she gets into office; Trump knows he needs to pretend to be outraged by it to authenticate himself as a populist; and Sanders and Stein both genuinely oppose it. But Johnson doesn't even feel compelled to lie about his support for the deal--apparently because he can count on people like Goodman not to hold his own words against him.

The problems aren't confined to Goodman's flawed and superficial understanding of third-party candidates. Earlier in the interview (at around 21:10), Goodman deliberately distorted FBI Director James Comey's remarks about Hillary Clinton's carelessness with classified information. According to Goodman, Comey conceded that people responsible for less significant security breaches than Clinton had been jailed for their offenses. While it's true that others have faced criminal charges for lesser offenses, that isn't at all what Comey conceded when he remarked:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

This concession from Comey has nothing whatever to do with the criminality of Clinton's actions and everything to do with how security breaches in various government departments routinely result in demotions, firings, or the revocation of security clearances--but Goodman is only interested in what he wanted to hear, not what Comey said.

There may have been a time when Goodman's insistence on seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses was helpful (or perhaps even emotionally necessary) for some Sanders supporters, but that time has passed. Despite all the setbacks we've experienced, we must recognize that no matter how painful things are right now, sobriety and honesty are much more effective tools for moving us forward than ignorance and fantasy.