David Frum says that Canada has lurched to the left like that is a bad thing. And he sees in yesterday’s strong performance by the Liberals a greater trend. Bernie Sanders is getting a lot of traction here in America and the Labour Party in the U.K. just elected a pretty far-left leader in Jeremy Corbyn. In other words, the Clinton-Blair neoliberalism of the 1990’s seems to have played itself out and left-wing parties are reverting to an earlier model.
Of course, Frum holds up the budget balancing credentials of the neoliberals in the U.S., U.K., and Canada as some kind of unambiguous plus, but if you read between the lines of his own column, you can see that budgetary responsibility wasn’t all it was cut out to be. For example, look at his explanation for why Canada embraced Trudeau.
Even before 2014-15, however, the populist anger expressed by Sanders and Corbyn could be heard in Canada, too. Canada has done a better job than the United States of sharing the proceeds of economic growth. Yet even in comparatively egalitarian Canada, rewards have tended to concentrate at the top of the income distribution. Earlier in the decade, resentment among middle-income Canadians toward the more affluent was offset by relief when Canadians compared themselves to Americans. As time has passed, however, the relief has waned and the resentment has intensified. It was those feelings that Trudeau harnessed, by condemning many small-business owners as tax cheats and telling Canadian business leaders that if they didn’t accept higher taxation now, they’d face even more radical claims in the future.
In other words, even a country that is more “egalitarian” than the United States or Britain eventually saw too much wealth concentration at the top. This isn’t necessarily explained by budget austerity, but that’s only part of the Clinton-Blair model. Tax policies are the primary way that money moves to the top, and it’s not just historically low progressive rates that have had an impact. It’s also how we handle carried interest and capital gains, or even inheritance.
If you take less money from the top, that’s an obvious causal factor in creating wealth disparity, but just as crucial are the incentives that are created for people to use their money in unproductive ways.
Why build a factory when you get rich at the casino table playing with credit default swaps?
So, there’s a deregulatory element to this, too. The left got away from protecting the small depositor at the same time that they decided to pinch the social safety net, and this all happened at a time of accelerating globalization and increased financial competition from abroad.
It’s time now for a correction. And I don’t know if a Clinton is the right person to preside over this correction here at home. I guess the test will be how well Hillary understands and can adjust to the changed circumstances we find ourselves in.
It all depends on the meaning and direction of “left”. Sanders takes it to mean “left like jobs”. Clinton take it to mean “left like help Wall Street marginally less”. I’m with Sanders.
What actually happened is that Tom Mulcair inexplicably endorsed economically illiterate, Frum-friendly fiscal policy, and the vast anti-Harper majority of Canadians understood that splitting their votes between two centrist parties would be pointlessly suicidal.
I think its tied to the niqab thing.
NDP was leading but they are the weakest party, so when they cane out in favor of it, they lost support. But people still hated Harper, so they switched to the liberals to crush the conservatives. NDP is so weak in terms of infrastructure and die hards, all it took was a wobble. Though I think Layton would be prime minister now if he lived.
Yeah, it also turns out that the NDP bubble was tied to the personality of Jack Layton and couldn’t survive him. At this point it’s hard for me as a semi-ignorant United Statesian to see what the function of the NDP is- the Greens are there to provide the real left opposition that the NDP is no longer willing to provide(though I’m not well-informed about their actual positions).
The Greens don’t have decades of experience in Ottawa, in numbers, and haven’t run any provincial governments, ever. Neither were any of them the midwives of single-payer.
NDP had an opportunity to close the deal — and apparently instead of holding “left,” they went all UK Lib-Dem, aka not standing for coherent and integrated policy positions. So, the LIBs gained from the anti-Harper vote from the CONs and NDP.
Booman writes:
True dat.
But…here is a more accurate rewriting of what HRC will do:
Bet on it.
AG
The aggressive action by Harper allowing environmental damaging industries and suspending treaties with First Nations in order to do it forms a backdrop. The use of austerity to trim spending and lay the foundation for undoing Canadian health care likely also was a factor. And no doubt some folks just tired of Harper’s arrogance.
So back to the good ole days of a Trudeau.
There is an important opening for Biden on the economic agenda to the left of Clinton but to the right of Bernie.
Bernie’s call for big structural changes is probably not doable, nor necessarily targeted for outcomes. The big banks did not cause the Great Recession (Lehman and Bears were both about a 5th of the size of the big banks). Repeal of Glass Stegal didn’t directly cause the Great Recession.
Biden could choose a couple of important populist economic issues, such as a tax on wall street transactions to fund something or other, higher taxes on incomes above a million dollars, and stronger regulation of banks (including some of Clinton’s proposal). The tax on transactions would be something Clinton would never propose, so he would have a clear contrast with her.
One strong point for Biden is the way he creates good (sometimes) soundbites that Clinton cannot find even with a whole team, for example, “There’s something wrong with this economy.” Potentially a populism clearly articulated by a “white man” might actually have a chance of pulling in the white working class (while Biden would maintain the allegiance of the Obama coalition), and shifting alliances in a way that could help take back the House, and result in the passing of a few laws.
Of course, he’d have to be a pretty good campaigner, and many are skeptical about that. He seems to have improved, perhaps under Obama’s tutelage.
Bernie’s call for big structural changes is probably not doable, nor necessarily targeted for outcomes. The big banks did not cause the Great Recession (Lehman and Bears were both about a 5th of the size of the big banks). Repeal of Glass Stegal didn’t directly cause the Great Recession.
Hogwash. Where do you think all that toxic junk that Lehman and Bear got stuck with came from? And why do you need Biden to pitch this crap when Clinton is doing it?
Clinton is pitching a tax on transactions and also a higher tax on earnings above $1,000,000?
Oh, great earnings >$1 million.
Matt Taibbi: Hillary Clinton’s Take on Banks Won’t Hold Up”. Because he at least understands what happened.
there may be an opening there, but nothing in Biden’s history says he wants to move left on economics or anything else.
Biden’s not-Hillary.
Does anything else matter? We’re talking about the fate of the Republic here, and you’re splitting hairs?
I wonder what his meeting with Warren was about. History, including defending credit card companies, might determine Biden, or not.
The three pillars of financial capitalism are free market for labor, free international trade, and sound currency (preferably gold). Free in this case means “without regulation of the institutions involved”.
The left, thanks to Marx’s “Capital” starts out with the understanding that the system built on these principles winds up creating a production glut, layoffs, and spiraling debt that is now owed in specie. And that creates recurring economic collapses and in some cases societal collapses.
The New Deal figured the way to rig a mixed economy of regulated markets for labor, regulated interneational markets, and managed money supply that for forty years dampened the tendency towards economic collapse where it was fully implemented and brought a wider range of people into the middle class. The environmental movement of the 1970s called into question whether an ever-expanding economy to serve the advertising-generated “needs” of an ever-expanding middle class was possible with finite resources. Folks who had benefited from the New Deal reverted to thinking free markets for labor, free international markets, and gold money — and impoverished the nation over thirty years. The collapse came from some things Marx never saw because capitalists hadn’t invented them yet. And the left has not completely caught up to them either. One of the significant ones is the idea that bankruptcy should not occur to the financial class lest it bring down the entire economy; that allows the financial class to be held harmless and even improve their situation after their blowing up the economy in a very Marxian fashion (i.e. one that aligns with what Marx descibed based on the crises in British capitalism that he cites).
If the left is moving left, that means that it must be moving toward regulated international markets that hold the environment, social cohesion, and human rights as social values; regulated markets for labor that move away from not toward slavery; and mechanisms of regulating the money supply without hamstring government provision of infrastruction, which means devaluing the military and police as the baseline form of government infrastructure.
I frankly don’t see trends moving in that direction yet. What I see is the shock that the conservatives, after having completely failed with their policies, no longer in a few places have permanent and absolute power. And I am not so sure that even folks like Corbyn and Trudeau and even Sanders don’t have a tendency to bow to some pretty stupid failed conservative policies on occasion just to make the big money people and the generals think that they are safe. What most seem are a return to Eisenhower or LBJ or Papa Trudeau or Harold Wilson. Turning left you say?