These thoughts on paper come from two Web log entries I wrote a couple of years ago. Here, I discuss the virtues of social democracy in relation to neoliberalism as how as how Hillary Clinton and the "New" Democrats lost the way they did to Donald Trump and the Republicans in 2016. We may see a 2016 redux, or replay, come the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

1. No need for free market utopias and thoughts on political organizing
Stephen Cheng
I'm listening to past clips of Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk and here's one on the expenses for Brazil
hosting the 2014 World
Cup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=opFrFh9W59k&feature=emb_logo
The total expenses? 11 billion U.S.-American dollars.
Think about that amount. Nine zeroes with an eleven to their left.
Take away a one from that eleven and you've still got a respectable pile of cash, denominated in a
certain currency that's also the world's most important reserve currency. Effectively global money.
11 billion dollars spent on the World Cup--essentially a soccer tournament. Kulinski muses if that
money couldn't possibly be spent on social services.
He also brings up the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, which cost 51 billion dollars. Granted,
almost 5 times the amount for the 2014 World Cup but his point still stands: That money could be spent
on more socially necessary, and thus worthier, goals.
He's not the only one to think so.
Kulinski quotes from an article on the topic: "61 percent of Brazilians oppose having the World Cup
there because the 11 billion dollars used to host the tournament detract from social services like
health care and education."
In other words, 61 percent of Brazilians value their country's social services over an opportunity to host
an international sports tournament such as the World Cup.
Talk about being grounded and keeping one's priorities in place. Good on the Brazilian general public.
Key parts of it, certainly.
And, quite simply, that's how it ought to be everywhere.
Take Greece. A little over two years ago, the Greek government, while still in negotiations over
whether it should accept a third bailout package from the International Monetary Fund and the
European Union, held a referendum on that very same package. Slightly over 61 percent of those who
voted in the referendum opposed taking the bailout. Those opposed knew that the bailout would entail
more austerity, which it did.
What does austerity entail? Cutbacks in public funding of social services for the benefit of big business
interests such as the financial sector.
It's a policy that's widely unpopular.
So unpopular that people reject it at the polls and as well they should.
They're not oblivious either.
They know that the policymakers calling for austerity are the same ones promoting "free markets,"
"balanced budgets," "privatization," "deregulation," and the like.

2. And they know what all of these policies mean.
They see all the talk about "free markets" and "free enterprise" for what it is: Corporate propaganda
giving life to classical liberalism as a zombie ideology known today as "libertarianism" and
"neoliberalism" with the goal of protecting the privileges of the wealthy and the powerful.
That's why Bernie Sanders became the most popular politician in the United States.
That's why Donald Trump was able to use right-wing populist rhetoric to win over the "Rust Belt" states
and make his way into the White House despite low popularity ratings.
On a related point, that's why Hillary Clinton and the "New" Democrats lost the 2016 presidential
election in this country, thus allowing Trump effectively to win by default (officially, yes, he won the
electoral vote).
Lastly, that's why Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party made such significant gains during the United
Kingdom's general election almost three months ago.
Theresa May and the Conservative Party wanted to give Corbyn and Labour a coup de grâce. Instead,
they deservedly got a Pyrrhic victory.
In short, "ordinary" people know what's good for them financially, and more generally, economically.
What's good for the people? Universal health care, tuition-free higher education, unemployment
insurance, pensions, disability insurance, and other taxpayer-funded social democratic programs.
To say nothing of adequate funding for public infrastructure and institutions.
Needless to say, that's not what neoliberals want. They claim that all of these policies and programs
are inefficient, wasteful, unaffordable, inflation-inducing, etc.
For now, we'll leave aside the fact that the recent financial crisis was not because of social democracy
or regulation. We'll also temporarily ignore the fact that social democratic institutions such as the
National Health Service are holding up just fine so far as their day-by-day functioning and effectiveness
in relation to their stated purposes go. Of course, none of that stops right-wingers from trying to
privatize, and thus do away with, those same institutions.
And they're still in charge now.
But as Kulinski rightly notes, deciding to allocate public spending to social needs is really just a matter
of public will. Claiming "scarcity" in this case can't possibly be convincing because if a government can
spend so much on the Olympics and/or the World Cup, to say nothing of military- and prison- industrial
complexes and financial sector bailouts, then it can spend just as much on social services. Indeed,
those services don't even need that much money.
This is a point that needs to be repeated.
Especially considering how the Democrats under Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presdiential election so
thoroughly that they basically got their clocks cleaned.
But that didn't mean Donald Trump and the Republicans won in any meaningful sense.

3. As Bernie Sanders noted, the Republicans didn't win. The Democrats lost.
Of course you can say that the Republicans won by default but that's not truly winning.
It's also quite a turnaround from the 2012 election which Barack Obama handily won, thus retaining
presidential office. The general observation in 2012 was that the Republican Party was "dying off."
Back then, even Greg Grandin, an editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, wrote: "The Democrats will
betray and Obama will trim, but the dead hand of the Confederacy is finally being pried off the throat of
U.S. politics."
I can add that NACLA, which stands for "North American Congress on Latin America," is well to the left of
the Clintons and the "New" Democrats. Let's not forget about Hillary Clinton's stance towards the 2009
coup (and the right-wing military government that subsequently took over) in Honduras.
So let's put it this way: The Clinton wing of the Democrats deserved to lose.
Yes, Hillary Clinton deserved to lose.
Bernie Sanders was, by far, the more "electable" candidate on the Democratic ticket.
Especially if you consider how, during the 2015-2016 run-up to the election, Clinton snubbed the "rust
belt" states which turned to...... Trump.
And Trump, our chauvinist-in-chief, is hardly preferable to Clinton. That's me being generous, by the way.
He's quite possibly the worst president in US-American politics. Considering how low George W. Bush
went, that's saying something.
As in how far to the right "mainstream" politics in this country has gone.
All this ranting aside, and again I'm not saying anything new or original here, these recent political events
just go to show that the Democrats have abandoned the basics and the heavy lifting of political
organizing.
What's more, they abandoned their base.
Not that that's surprising. Ever since the Clintons took charge of the Democratic Party from the 1980s and
1990s onward, the Democrats became, at best, a center-right political formation that's willing, all too
willing, to take money from corporate donors while backing lukewarm and mildly socially progressive
reforms.
As you can guess, the former was bound to win out over the latter.
Although Obama was inspiring even to those on the center-left and left in the U.S., the fact remained that
he was and still is a Clinton-style "New" Democrat.
And that's the problem with the Democrats: They gave up on the hard work of organizing the working and
lower middle classes towards a social democratic program. They honestly thought that having Hillary
Clinton, who's actually pretty right-wing on social and cultural issues, would win them the feminist and civil
rights votes.

4. They became experts at raising corporate funding while losing touch with and even forgetting how to
actually organize the, broadly speaking, progressive grassroots.
The fact that I even wrote the above is a case study in understating the obvious.