In the most compelling debate we’ve seen thus far on the democratic dilemma we face, a conversation which covered Hillary & Trump, race, the captured black vote, corporate Democrats, American Exceptionalism and much more, Princeton professor of African-American Studies Eddie Glaude made it clear that yes indeed, we must stop Donald Trump.
However, Glaude emphasized in a heated exchange with Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, Hillary Clinton is the living embodiment of the problem – the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party. No rebranding of Hillary Clinton will suffice this year, Glaude suggested, declining to advocate a vote for Clinton while suggesting the African-American community and others vote strategically.
Glaude repeatedly emphasized that the proposition that business as usual is over for the status quo be held as a primary goal every bit as significant as preventing Trump from occupying the White House. He had withering comments about Hillary Clinton to add to the stop-Trump debate that pose a stark warning to Clinton and her supporters.
There’s no real evidence in her immediate past of any kind of genuine and deep concern about the material conditions of black life, and so, in other words what I’m suggesting is that part of what the problem is we can’t infer from anything she’s done that when she gets in office she’s going to change and address the circumstances of black folk in any substantive way, or the most vulnerable in any substantive way, because at the end of the day I think Hillary Clinton is a corporate democrat. She is committed to a neoliberal economic philosophy.
A neoliberal economic philosophy involves a kind of understanding that the notion of the public good is kind of undermined by basic market logic that turns us all into entrepreneurs where competition and rivalry define who we are, and the state’s principal function, right?, is to secure the efficient function of the economy and the defense.
Part of what that does, if we only read it as an economic philosophy and not understand it as a kind of political rationale producing particular kinds of subjects who are selfish, who are self-interested, who are always in competition with one another, then we lose sight of how neoliberalism attacks the political imagination. So the interesting question that I ask of Hillary Clinton is that will she fundamentally change the circumstances that are at the heart of the problem facing this country? In fact, I think she’s illustrative of the problem confronting the country.
Through two weeks of expanded, two-hour coverage of the Republican and Democratic Party conventions – twice the program’s normal length – the Democracy Now! news program has offered some of the most compelling election coverage of this very long campaign, perhaps the best in the show’s nearly two decades. Watch Glaude and Dyson below and enjoy an excellent conversation, then get organizing. Business as usual is over and we’ve work to do.
