Hillary Clinton’s new paleoliberalism
Matt Yglesias cuts it pretty fine.
MY is a cosmolib who has gone on public record saying he doesn't mind inequality per se.
He is one of those people on the left who are abundantly clear they are for capitalism, but not at all for the bare-knuckle version.
Within that broad tribe he here defines two camps and discusses just where Hillary fits.
[W]ithin the left-of-center camp there is a long-running conceptual dispute between what you might call neoliberalism and paleoliberalism.
The keys to the neoliberal approach that dominated both the Clinton and Obama administrations are, roughly:
1. The main way the government can impact the pre-tax distribution of income is by providing high-quality education to as many people as possible.
2. Financial markets should be regulated to guard against catastrophe, but also should take a leading role in driving investment decisions across the private sector.
3. To the extent that the education path fails to generate a satisfactory distribution of economic resources, progressive taxes should fund redistributive programs to produce a better outcome.
The paleoliberal approach denies most of this, harking back to an era in which government regulation and labor unions played a more direct role in compressing the pre-tax distribution of labor income and the financial sector was deliberately regulated in a heavy-handed way rather than allowed to lead the economy.
This, of course, is not quite how people a bit further to the left - "liberals," as I have called them - use the term "neoliberalism."
Anyway, he says Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are both on the neoliberal side of this divide, and Hillary has publicly moved over to the paleoliberal side, subscribing to such ideas as these.
1. The government should take an active role in writing economic rules that promote high wages, rather than relying on taxes and transfer payments.
2. Financial markets do a poor job of guiding private sector investment (she will frame this as a critique of short-term thinking).
3. Increasing educational attainment is an inadequate strategy for curbing inequality.
I'm not sure about 2 but 1 and 3 of the paleo list certainly seem right, to put it mildly.
But anyway he's not sure she means it.
Politics is more about concrete policy choices than abstract philosophy, and thus far we've seen relatively little indication of how Clinton would deliver on these ideas in a concrete way that differs from her predecessors.
Joining the congressional Democratic backlash against the Trans-Pacific Partnership would have been one way to do that, but it's a step she rather pointedly declined to take.
Nor has she embraced liberals' call to expand Social Security, and she's been somewhat cagey about whether she endorses the movement for a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
She certainly hasn't joined Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley in calling for a breakup of Wall Street's biggest banks.
Many veterans of the intra-Democratic clash on economic policy doubt the sincerity of Clinton's moves to join their camp.
Ironically, the fact that leading neoliberals like Larry Summers are now singing from a more paleoliberal songbook gives the old-time paleoliberals heartburn.
They see a ploy by their old rivals to bend with the wind rather than breaking so as to retain control over the highest levels of the Democratic Party.
Clinton's team is explicitly intending to stay abstract initially.
Rather than a laundry list of policy initiatives, they want to paint a broad vision that they then fill out over time.
Only when that happens will we really get a sense of how much Clinton intends to break with the past.
So do we have any actual liberals - not "liberals" - in the running who are more credibly and clearly on the paleo side?
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