In your heart you know

"That is their business, not mine. I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned." Image via Haiku Deck.

I'm increasingly disturbed by the propagandistic activity on the intellectual sidelines of the Sanders campaign—not Sanders himself—as in yesterday's post by Corey Robin, of all people (given the rigor and brilliance he applies to the analysis of propaganda from the right), trying to suggest that Hillary Clinton is "still a Goldwater girl after all these years":

Here’s what Clinton said about Sanders over the weekend:

Not everything is about an economic theory, right?

Sanders, you see, wants to reduce all social and political issues to the economy. But there are other issues that matter to us in life, aren’t there? Breaking up the banks, raising the minimum wage, free higher ed, and universal health care: that won’t solve all our problems, will it?

Interestingly enough, there’s another candidate in Clinton’s lifetime who made a similar claim in his attempt to discredit the economic program of the liberal left—a program not unlike Sanders’s...

Followed inevitably by a long quote from Barry Goldwater's (ghosted by L Brent Bozell) Conscience of a Conservative.

Watch out when you hear that "interestingly enough", whether it's coming from Jonah Goldberg or Glenn Greenwald, most characteristically found in the Goldbergish "interestingly enough, Hitler called his party the 'National Socialists'," to demonstrate that socialists are "the real fascists" [invented example]. Where "interesting" means "capable of serving as the minor premise of an argument contrary to what everybody knows to be true".

Here, the thing is that the economism Clinton attributes to the Sanders camp and the economism Goldwater attributes to "liberals" come in very different contexts. When Goldwater/Bozell is decrying the liberal focus on economic issues he's complaining that it neglects our spiritual needs:

The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants. Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,—in the name of a concern for “human beings”—regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society.

With the implication that if government takes care of people's needs—with food assistance, income and housing support, medical care and so on—it is compromising their spiritual health, making them less individual, less independent, less virtuous; it's attending to their mere animal selves to the detriment of their superior spiritual natures. It's an excuse, in other words, for a conservative government to refuse to do anything to improve their economic lives.

("Liberals, he said, are the hard-hearted materialists. They care little, if at all, for the dignity and spiritual life of the less well-off. It is conservatives who safeguard the moral character and long-term happiness of their fellow citizens".)

Whereas what Clinton is talking about, as Robin knows very well, is the economism of your Jim Webb Democrats, or, yes, Bill "It's the Economy, Stupid" Clinton, which is meant to shift the conversation away from the injustices of race, ethnicity, gender, and so on, and when she says she's not a "single-issue candidate", she's talking about refusing to make such a shift:

"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?"

"No!" shouted her audience.

"Would that end sexism?"

"No!"

"Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?.... make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?.... solve our problem with voting rights, and Republicans who are trying to strip them away from people of color, the elderly, and the young?"

"No!"

"Would that give us a real shot at ensuring our political system works better because we get rid of gerrymandering and redistricting and all of these gimmicks Republicans use to give themselves safe seats, so they can undo the progress we have made?"

And did Barry Goldwater demand an end to racism, sexism, anti-immigrant violence and official cruelty, the denial of voting rights? I sure don't remember that. (I know he was relatively enlightened on gay rights, as well as marijuana, shut up.)

I'm not saying Bernie Sanders favors these evils, either, because I know perfectly well that he hates them with sincere passion, but I don't like that his program tends to minimize the remedies in favor of focusing on Wall Street, in part because I know what he's trying to accomplish: like Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, it's meant to draw in the rednecks, you should excuse the expression, or what's now the theoretical Webb and Trump vote, the undereducated and underemployed white men whose suffering is compounded by the fear that women and black and brown people are "getting free stuff". It's not a good way to do it, though. It boxed Bill Clinton into a position where he was unable to do a large number of things he ought to have done, and ended up acquiescing in a fundamentally racist so-called "welfare reform" (to the distress of Hillary Clinton's mentors along a huge political range from Peter Edelman to D.P. Moynihan), and it threatens to do something similar to a Sanders administration. Those votes aren't worth selling yourself for.

But that idea that Hillary Clinton's political thinking has had anything in common with Goldwater's since she turned 18 (still a Republican that year, she was working in the campaigns of Goldwater nemeses John V. Lindsay and Edward Brooke; three years later in 1968 she was working for Gene McCarthy and organizing a strike at Wellesley with black students toward the diversification of the college's faculty and student body, not something Goldwater would have really rejoiced in)—it's just ridiculously wrong, and it's reprehensible of Robin to try to spread it.