It's difficult to convey the feel of the Clinton culture. Like the Kennedy culture thirty years ago, it is a stir-fry of blatant self-promotion, unexamined idealism, cynical sophistication, suspect intellectual certainty and an arrogant race and class snobbery that can be oppressive to those without the necessary credentials. It comes on as hip and liberal, but it panders to the right (Clinton's embrace of the death penalty) and abhors any person or movement to its left. It is suffused with a gestural sentimentality about racial harmony, but its commitment is to white privilege. Its adherents protested the Vietnam war, if they were old enough, but they hold no internationalist values and, like Clinton, are ever-willing to sacrifice principle to 'political viability within the system'.
In many ways, Bonnie Greer was right to suggest that there has already been a second Clinton administration under Barack Obama. He has proven to be adept at triangulation as he has presented the Affordable Care Act as a progressive step towards universal coverage. Actually it shares a lot in common with the GOP alternatives to the Clinton proposal of the 1990s. The Obama administration has been even more hawkish than its predecessor as its foreign policy takes the form of reverberations on the Bush doctrine. And Hillary Clinton has played a significant part in it as Secretary of Defense.
We can expect not merely more of the same, but much worse. No end to drone strikes, or the NSA surveillance state, let alone the national security state. The reoccupation of Iraq seems well under way with airstrikes against Syria to boot. Given that she is even more hawkish than Obama and wanted to attack Syria over a year ago. That would have likely put ISIS in an even stronger position than they are in today. What more should we expect from the Democratic Party?
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