Bashing the Democratic Party with Cause — Economist Ian Fletcher’s Thoughtful Take on Why the American “Left” Is Ineffectual, when it Comes to Making Sensible Economic Policy

© 2011 Peter Free

 

12 December 2011

 

 

Four reasons why the Democratic Party (like Republicans) has become a front for plutocrats

 

Economist Ian Fletcher published an essay today that gives four reasons why the political “Left” has failed to propose workable economic policies that would address most Americans’ concerns:

 

(1) The Left’s leadership has been taken over by rich yuppies.

 

(2) These yuppies replaced the Left’s former emphasis on human “solidarity” with a focus on multi-group “diversity,” which naturally fragments the political power necessary to advance important causes.

 

(3) Yuppies’ success in recruiting corporate campaign money puts them at odds with their own pretended democratic principles, which makes them seem even more unappealingly hypocritical than their ostensible “Fat Cat” (my words, not Fletcher’s) political opponents.

 

(4) And leftists find practical economics boring, and those who don’t have a tendency to lapse into fantasy.

 

 

Fletcher’s core perspective

 

Fletcher’s initial proposition is that political power belongs to the top socioeconomic 10 percent.

 

Because the Left’s leadership yuppies belong to this elite group, Fletcher goes into more detail regarding their real and feigned perspectives:

 

Contemporary leftism is easy to decorate into a high-income lifestyle, with all the approved cultural gestures. . . . When leftism has been elevated to a lifestyle, the actual underlying politics becomes almost unnecessary.

 

I live in San Francisco, where there are an extraordinary number of people about who consider themselves liberal on economic issues. And so they are, when they write checks to liberal causes or participate in local political clubs and other organizations.

 

But the other 29 days of the month or 5 days of the week, they go back to work downtown for the same corporate economy they claim to oppose on their days off.

 

And they work hard to become rich, i.e. to acquire a nice juicy piece of inequality for themselves.

 

© 2011 Ian Fletcher, Why Is the American Left So Ineffective in Economics?, Huffington Post (12 December 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

The moral? — nothing political is what it seems

 

We are treated to two phenomena in American politics: ideologies that are radically divorced from reality and politicians who perennially lie about both.

 

To the degree that we keep supporting this dynamic, by believing and supporting both Parties’ camouflage, our society is going to remain in deep economic muck.