For all its dully sane functionality, Clintonian neoliberalism, like Clinton herself, is shocking in its interminable conformism and cognitive inbreeding. Trump’s convention at least broke up its rank apparatchikism with novel forms of cognitive dissonance, such as Peter Thiel’s idiosyncratic call for new human frontiers. Clinton’s festival of stunted thinking will present as her party’s and country’s future Tim Kaine, the Associate Dean-type senator lobbied for hardest by Clinton’s own prince of cronies and inexorable bagman, Gov. Terry McAuliffe — himself, by incredible coincidence, just now beginning his long sought-after term as chief of the National Governors Association. (Such is the purity of Team Clinton’s shamelessness that McAuliffe’s debut initiative is cybersecurity.)
See how this works? Isn’t it wonderful? It just screams progress!
For the Clinton campaign, and the ideology she incarnates, the secret motto is simple: The fix is in, and you will like it. Because it really doesn’t get better, except insofar as Clintonism rules longer. Clinton is the Pollyanna of power politics, for whom there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what’s right with her and her squad. Clinton has twisted her husband’s homey maxim about America’s inner goodness into a tribute to her own — an unseemly funhouse reflection of Trump’s own preposterous claim that “I alone can fix it.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member