A friend points me, approvingly, at an article by Naomi Klein for Reader Supported News asserting Neoliberalism is at fault for the election results:
hey will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.
But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
Unfortunately, just reading her prose tells me she’s hyperbolic and, therefore, wrong. “Sealed our fate“? What bullshit – we all already know Clinton lost by a hair. As Steve Benen points out, if the trivial number of voters who went for Stein and Johnson had voted for Clinton, Trump would have lost.
My conclusion is that she has something against neoliberalism and is willing to use this election result as a tool in attacking it – because Klein’s desperate need to assert the election was a foregone conclusion when it obviously wasn’t is a clear signal that her logic chain is so weak a bird could break it.
Just to put the sharp point of the pencil forward, I didn’t bother reading more than the above paragraphs. Her communications style is so poor, she’s so desperate to assert an insight, she should turn in her pen and pad and go flip french fries. Regardless of whether she’s right or wrong. Given her bright, shiny axe to grind, I can’t possibly trust her arguments. Nor am I able to judge them independently, as I’m a lowly software engineer without the time to analyze what she has to say. Isn’t this pathetic – she may have a point, but right from the get-go all I can say is that’s a knife in her hand, everyone back off.
