It's too long to re-post here, so I'll try to summarize the first part. Taibbi understands his editor's reasons for supporting Clinton, which are the reason the centrist Democrats, led by the Clintons, have moved away from the leftist, progressives like George McGovern and now Bernie Sanders. It was, basically, an attempt to stop losing to fringe candidates by adopting a socially liberal, fiscally conservative position.
Here, picking up Taibbi's own words:
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"And that was the point. No more McGoverns. The chief moral argument
of the Clinton revolution was not about striving for an end to the war
or poverty or racism or inequality, but keeping the far worse
Republicans out of power."The new Democratic version of idealism . . . . was about getting the best deal possible given the political realities, which we were led to believe were hopelessly stacked against the hopes and dreams of the young. . . . saluting the value of "incremental politics" and solutions that "stand a chance of working." The implication is that even when young people believe in the right things, they often don't realize what it takes to get things done. [RR note: This is the position I've been taking too in my defense of Obama.]
"But I think they do understand. Young people have repudiated the campaign of Hillary Clinton in overwhelming and historic fashion, with Bernie Sanders winning under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins, as high as 80 to 85 percent in many states. . . . the millions of young voters that are rejecting Hillary's campaign this year are making a carefully reasoned, even reluctant calculation about the limits of the insider politics both she and her husband have represented.
"For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others.
"And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues. . . . You can go on down the line of all these issues. Trade? From NAFTA to the TPP . . . . Then of course there is the matter of the great gobs of money Hillary has taken to give speeches to Goldman Sachs . . . . Her answer about that — 'That's what they offered' -- gets right to the heart of what young people find so repugnant about this brand of politics.
"One can talk about having the strength to get things done, given the political reality of the times. But one also can become too easily convinced of certain political realities, particularly when they're paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. Is Hillary really doing the most good that she can do, fighting for the best deal that's there to get for ordinary people?
"Or is she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that, while taking tens of millions of dollars from some of the world's biggest jerks? I doubt even Hillary Clinton could answer that question. She has been playing the inside game for so long, she seems to have become lost in it. She behaves like a person who often doesn't know what the truth is, but instead merely reaches for what is the best answer in that moment, not realizing the difference.
"This is why her shifting explanations and flippant attitude about the email scandal are almost more unnerving than the ostensible offense. She seems confident that just because her detractors are politically motivated, as they always have been, that they must be wrong, as they often were.
"But that's faulty thinking. My worry is that Democrats like Hillary have been saying, 'The Republicans are worse!" for so long that they've begun to believe it excuses everything. . . . But in the age of Trump, winning is the only thing that matters, right? In that case, there's plenty of evidence suggesting Sanders would perform better against a reality TV free-coverage machine like Trump than would Hillary Clinton. This would largely be due to the passion and energy of young voters.
"Young people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an honest politician, and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem that she can't even see it anymore.
"They've seen in the last decades that politicians who promise they can deliver change while also taking the money, mostly just end up taking the money.
"And they're voting for Sanders because his idea of an entirely voter-funded electoral 'revolution' that bars corporate money is, no matter what its objective chances of success, the only practical road left to break what they perceive to be an inexorable pattern of corruption. Young people aren't dreaming. They're thinking. And we should listen to them."
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I'm still on the fence -- still not wanting to have to decide, as I have been thinking, between idealism and pragmatism. But Matt Taibbi has almost convinced me that it's time to stand with idealism and make it win.
It's just that -- more than any time in my memory, even considering Richard Nixon, the Republicans really are so much worse, and the consequences so much more dire, that I'm afraid to take the chance of losing to them. If for no other reason than the direction of the Supreme Court for decades.
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