Hillary Clinton Establishment Machine Is Alive And Well And Killing Progressives

I'm not getting this at all. We already discussed the gap between policy (what I'm referring to exclusively in this discussion) and other (like who supports whom). Establishment interests as I see it are favoring owners over workers (in terms of things like shifting tax burden from capital to labor income, cutting taxes on large inheritances, reduced labor-protection regs, including MW, etc.), favoring business interests over environmental and consumer interests, preferring that the gov't spend money on stuff like the military than on social welfare, and other stuff like that. Seems very clear to me that Clinton was not pandering to people with those interests, while Trump was (not so much in his marketing, but his platform was clearly extremely pro-establishment).

We might just be arriving at our respective definitions of "the establishment" from different places. It is an unwieldy, unclear and easily manipulated term that, in truth, has little place in a discussion that hopes to be constructive.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to talk about the USA's 2016 election season without "the establishment" coming up.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but I don't see the establishment as being necessarily pro-worker or pro-owner. The establishment is the powers the be, the dominant and presiding elite. Sure, that could mean that the establishment favours owners over workers, but it could just as easily be the reverse - it depends on what the established modus operandi is.
Here in South Africa, the Establishment favours workers over owners (ostensibly, at least) consumers over creators, and black over white. If a party rose to power that was non-racial and openly dedicated to capitalist interests, they'd be anti-establishment.

In the States, I get the impression that the establishment interests are seen as being globalist, anti-nationalist, anti-white (to a greater or lesser extent), interventionist, etc.
I never really got the impression that it was even necessarily corporate interests that worried people, so much as corporations unfettered by borders or national interests.

Clinton, with her hand out on Wall Street and Saudi oil money in her back pocket, hardly did a good job of playing the anti-establishment part.
"Pandering" might have been the wrong word in this context - she appeared to have been bought and paid for.

I think maybe you're confusing how Republicans were selling her with her own self-presentation? Certainly, she was not pushing for war with Goddamned Russia.

The Syrian no-fly zone was a massive red flag.
It was both a hawkish policy to pursue and evidence of the massive disconnect between her campaign and the war-weary voter. As I recall, she doubled down on the no-fly zone during one of the presidential debates with Trump. It's hard to see a no-fly zone over Syria as anything but a decision that would go against the wishes of the electorate - which of course begged the question: "Why?" and "For who?"

She was instrumental in Obama's ruination of Libya, pressed him to arm Syrian rebels, supported escalation in Afghanistan, was a part of his expansion of lethal drone strikes, threatened to obliterate Iran, supported the Iraq invasion, opposed Iraq withdrawal, still had Benghazi hanging over her head and had an long-running and public beef with Putin.
You might not take the Benghazi issue seriously (or lay it at her and Obama's feet) and you could rightly point out that damn near everyone supported Iraq, but I'd say that it is tough to deny that with her established history as a trigger-happy harpy and the noise that had been made about it, going all-in on a no-fly zone over Syria was idiotic, and it did a good job of painting her as the warhawk that the Republicans wanted her to look like.

I guess you could say that everything on that list was a Republican twist on the truth... but that'd be a stretch and even if it were true, it would have behooved her to have been a little more aware of her own public image.
I don't think you can really blame Republicans for her own utter lack of self-awareness.

Nothing in the platform was far removed from her previously expressed views. She's always been a left-leaning Democrat. Also, none of the scandals have actually held water, have they? It was a political strategy to just throw a bunch of stuff out there that individually didn't hold up in the hopes that voters would think, "well, even if this stuff is all false, where there's smoke, there's fire."

This completely flies in the face of your assertion that Trump was aided by the volume of scandals and criticisms tossed at him.


And I disagree strongly with C. I again suspect that you've probably know more of her from what her political opponents say than from how her actual campaign was presented. That goes to the media issue I was talking about (though obviously it applies even more so if you're talking about the non-MS M).

Could be. But things like the infamous "basket of deplorables" statement hardly helped squash the image of her as a bit of a condescending cow.
Despite what she's going out of her way to claim, not every obstacle she encountered was created by someone else. She did more than enough to make herself look like exactly what her opponents claimed she was.

There's something to this (though I wouldn't phrase it that way). I've said before that I think the focus on the ways Trump was uniquely bad (temperament, ethics, intellect, experience) rather than the ways he was typically bad (the pro-establishment stuff that all Republicans these days favor) was a mistake. I get the desire to emphasize that the guy was not a normal candidate.

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: Hillary Clinton and her team were strategically incompetent in how they campaigned. If, as "the most qualified presidential candidate in history" (said the sitting president, voice of the establishment) you cannot clearly and decisively out-politic a political neophyte, then you're not going to inspire the confidence of the voter, and you're unlikely to be at the top of very many "most logical choice" lists.

I think both McCain and Romney were decent guys, and smart, capable, and experienced, but they lost because they were rightly seen as promoting policies that previously failed to deliver on promises and appeared to be pursued primarily because they led to upward redistribution of wealth with no real general-good case. Trump was promoting the same types of policies but wasn't the caliber of man of either McCain or Romney. Going forward, I hope the lesson is that the policies are what really matter.

Not sure I'd call McCain a "decent guy" but I confess, I don't know much about the policies he ran on. I got the impression that he's an interventionist warhawk, with an eye to maintaining the establishment position of America as leader of the world/world police.
Trump sold himself as comparatively non-interventionist, and one got the impression that, like Bernie, he was more interested in America refocusing on domestic issues.


I think we're straying a bit from the initial premise.
 
We might just be arriving at our respective definitions of "the establishment" from different places. It is an unwieldy, unclear and easily manipulated term that, in truth, has little place in a discussion that hopes to be constructive.

Yes, definitely something to that.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to talk about the USA's 2016 election season without "the establishment" coming up.

Yep. I think part of the great con that left us with such an embarrassing and inadequate president was that a corrupt billionaire running on a platform of upward redistribution of wealth and removing protections for workers, the environment, and consumers was able to successfully market himself to rubes as being "anti-establishment."

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but I don't see the establishment as being necessarily pro-worker or pro-owner. The establishment is the powers the be, the dominant and presiding elite. Sure, that could mean that the establishment favours owners over workers, but it could just as easily be the reverse - it depends on what the established modus operandi is.

Owners by definition are the powers that be. I think you're trying to separate state power from "private" power, but in fact, there is no separation. Ownership is defined by the state, and people who own the means of production always have disproportionate political power (in the worst regimes, they directly run the gov't--or the gov't is directly the owner of everything). I will say that if we define "the establishment" as middle-class workers, Trump was certainly the anti-establishment candidate.

In the States, I get the impression that the establishment interests are seen as being globalist, anti-nationalist, anti-white (to a greater or lesser extent), interventionist, etc.

It's kind of comically off the mark that the establishment is "anti-white" in America. The other stuff is mostly meaningless, IMO. What does "globalist" mean? Lots of different, contradictory things to different people (or even the same people). It's something that anti-semites have kind of used as code, too. "Anti-nationalist" is even more muddled. White nationalists use "nationalist" to describe themselves, even though they align more with an international ethnic category than with their own countrymen who don't identify with that.

I never really got the impression that it was even necessarily corporate interests that worried people, so much as corporations unfettered by borders or national interests.

Clinton, with her hand out on Wall Street and Saudi oil money in her back pocket, hardly did a good job of playing the anti-establishment part.
"Pandering" might have been the wrong word in this context - she appeared to have been bought and paid for.

"Appeared to" as a result of a ridiculous marketing campaign, though. That's part of the point of discussion here. I called that out. A candidate promoting increased opportunity for regular people is more anti-establishment than a candidate promoting giving more wealth and power to the already wealthy and powerful, even if the latter candidate is grossly incompetent and thus isn't able to secure much support from respectable sources.

This completely flies in the face of your assertion that Trump was aided by the volume of scandals and criticisms tossed at him.

How so?

Could be. But things like the infamous "basket of deplorables" statement hardly helped squash the image of her as a bit of a condescending cow.

Again, you're taking opposition marketing to be the truth. What was the point of that comment? She was talking about reaching out to conservatives, that there is a portion of Trump supporters who are hateful and unreachable, but also a large portion that can be reasoned with. Kudos (I guess) to the GOP for spinning it in a way that was politically harmful to her, but don't confuse how the comment was misinterpreted with the actual comment.

Not sure I'd call McCain a "decent guy" but I confess, I don't know much about the policies he ran on. I got the impression that he's an interventionist warhawk, with an eye to maintaining the establishment position of America as leader of the world/world police.

I don't define personal decency in terms of policy preferences.

Trump sold himself as comparatively non-interventionist, and one got the impression that, like Bernie, he was more interested in America refocusing on domestic issues.

Trump sold himself as different things at different times, but was clearly promoting a huge escalation of military action. And there was very little focus on domestic issues from him. Clinton had an extremely detailed set of domestic policy ideas (which you wouldn't know because the media covered the campaign as being primarily about her not following State Department IT security protocols).

I think we're straying a bit from the initial premise.

Sure. The discussion between us started with my observation that based on policy platforms, Clinton was the anti-establishment candidate in the general (based on my earlier claim that she was one of the most anti-establishment candidates in the whole race while the primaries were still active). I think that's pretty well-established by this point.

The campaign criticism stuff you added, IMO, is something that no one really knows about and people just express beliefs based on partisan or hindsight bias. I don't really bite at that stuff, as I'm more interested here in questions that can be reasonably answered.
 
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