DH bemoans:
Let's see. Ralph Nader denounces Bernanke and Paulson as "socialists," which he means as a criticism I think. And Ron Paul is really happy too. I guess that's populism of a sort.
JG opines:
The evisceration of organized labor and TINA done it. In the 1980's there was a small but viable left in the US. There were a sufficient number of lefty moles in the trade unions to propagate a structural perspective on the political economy, despite the too often nativist-protectionist tint of the more "progressive" wing of organized labor. There was a notable sector of avowedly social democratic and even democratic socialist folks in the professional "middle class". 1989-1991 changed all that. The union movement lost whatever diminishing beachhead it had, and the left-liberal professionals flocked to Clintonism and the NGO's.
By the early to mid 1990's it was already evident that right-wing populist and putatively "left" (but not really left) critiques of neo-liberal globalism had started to bleed into one another. It's all chronicled in the LBO-Talk archives! Whatever meager foundation existed for the propagation of popularized soft Marxist critiques of neo-liberal globalism had disappeared. This weakness marked even the anti-globalist uprisings of Seattle and whatnot. So in light of this vacuum today we get some thematic and programmatic overlaps between Dennis Kucinich and anti-federalist goldbuggers and conspiracy whackjobs. It's no coincidence that the latter types made major strides in the early-mid 1990's.
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