Kopkind on Clinton Culture

Andrew Kopkind nailed the essence of Clintonism way back in 1992, when it was brand new under the American sun, sort of. Reading this filled me with deja vu and deja entendu, malaise and despair. Nothing has changed.

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 off as hip and liberal, but it panders to the right 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 power and privilege.

And it is “ever-willing” he continues, to sell out any principle for the sake of achieving “political viability within the system.”

And here we are, forced to choose between these calculating yuppy slicksters and Donald Trump. What a world. Does this rise to the level of a crisis of democracy yet, or are we to take this as politics as usual in a country that’s become thoroughly corrupt and mediocre?