Editor’s note: Tikkun as a 501-=c-3 non profit does not take stands in support of candidates or political parties. But our readers do have positions and we are happy to put any coherent and insightful piece of writing about the elections, candidates (for president) and political parties up on this website and/or to send it out to our broad readership. But what we put up here or send out does NOT represent Tikkun’s position though it may represent the position of some of the members of our editorial board, but may not.
Meanwhile, Steve Weisman, whom I haven’t seen for many decades, was one of the brightest leaders of the Free Speech Movement. It was he who asked me (21 years old and in my first year as a graduate student in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley), on December 2nd, 1964, to lead the Chanukah service at 1 a.m. in Sproul Hall during the FSM sit-in to shut down the university, and then around 6 a.m. he asked me to climb down a rope with him from the second story of the building so we could explain to the thousands of students standing outside what we were seeing as the police arrested and brutally hurt many of the nonviolent demonstrators who had taken the nonviolent resistance pose sitting on the floors of the hallways of this University of California administration building. This was the first time I ever spoke to thousands of people, and I was humbled and honored to be able to represent the many who were being arrested (as I was planning to be till Weissman asked me, who was a member of the executive committee, to come with him outside). –Rabbi Michael Lerner
Hillary’s No Neo-Con. She’s Far More Dangerous
By Steve Weissman, 18 January 2016
Back in September 2013, well before Bernie Sanders decided to run for president, the “liberal” journalist Peter Beinart called attention [ hhttp://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/19416-the-rise-of-the-new-new-left?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page= ] to the leftward swing among Democratic Party voters, marked by Elizabeth Warren’s popularity and Bill de Blasio’s victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. More to the point, Beinart explicitly challenged Hillary Clinton to move left and ride the new wave to power – or risk getting overwhelmed by what he called “The Rise of the New, New Left.” The following month, I responded [http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/19837-dont-let-hillary-housebreak-the-new-new-left?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page= ] with “Don’t Let Hillary Housebreak the New New Left.”
Beinart’s choice of labels was wildly misleading. For those who missed his reference, the original New Left of the 1960s – best embodied by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) [ http://www.sds-1960s.org/ ] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society ] – initially looked toward the kind of Democratic Socialism that Bernie Sanders now proclaims. We gave radical, mostly white support to the civil rights movement, usually leaning toward the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) [http://zinnedproject.org/materials/sncc-the-new-abolitionists/ ] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee ]. We opposed both sides in the Cold War, seeing both as promoting nuclear disaster. We broke with the mainstream refusal to cooperate with Communists, an ideological prohibition that encouraged witch hunts, red-baiting, and the stifling of thoroughgoing social and economic reform.
And perhaps best known, we played a leading role in organizing the campus-based opposition to the War in Vietnam, which Beinart’s liberal heroes [http://www.amazon.com/Good-Fight-Terror-Liberal-ebook/dp/B000GCFXD6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1381432055&sr=8-3&keywords=Peter+Beinart ] – former vice president Hubert Humphrey, labor leaders Walter Reuther and David Dubinsky, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin [http://www.amazon.com/Bayard-Rustin-American-Dreamer-African/dp/074254513X/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1381499632&sr=8-8&keywords=Bayard+Rustin ], and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr – condemned us for doing.
Though Hillary and Bill opposed the war at the time, Beinart correctly places her in the same political tradition as his “liberal” heroes, who forged “the dominant ideology in American public life” long before the neo-cons emerged. These “liberals” believed with FDR “that government should intervene in society to solve problems that individuals cannot solve alone.” And they zealously insisted that the U.S. should have, as I put it, “a muscular, hyper-activist foreign policy, one with all the multilateral trappings of UN resolutions and NATO-led coalitions, but stilldecidedly neo-colonial and inescapably in the service of Big Oil and the merchants of death.”
Hillary embodies this “liberal” imperialism and will do her best to groom the new political generation that sees itself as “liberal” to follow her into endless war, especially in the Middle East. That is why she is so dangerous. She can do what neo-conservatives and paleo-conservatives and theological conservatives never could. She can sell imperialism as a “liberal”, humanitarian imperative.
Domestically, before Obamacare, Hillary fought for something approaching universal health care, no matter how corporate and inadequate it was. By contrast, America’s number one neo-con, William Kristol, made his bones as a hard-ass Republican right-winger by leading the fight to destroy what she was trying to create. Which of them do you think will do better selling self-identified “liberals” on war?
No doubt, many neo-cons will support Hillary. Some will serve as her advisers, and one of their top leaders, Robert Kagan, has already started calling himself a “liberal” interventionist. He sees the future if Hillary becomes president, and he realizes she will build that future by drawing on what the Democrats did in the past, not on what the neo-cons said and did under George W. Bush.
Support for Israel? Woodrow Wilson, who preached “the self-determination of nations,” went along with Britain’s Balfour Declaration, offering Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people. Harry Truman quickly recognized the new Jewish State, and whenever it counted, the Democratic Party has sided with Israel against the Palestinians.
Support for the Saudis? FDR forged Washington’s initial alliance with the Saudi monarchy to secure a supply of oil for the coming world war. Jimmy Carter funded the mujahideen, the holy warriors, months before Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and pledged to defend the Saudis in case the Soviets extended their activism. His “Carter Doctrine” also committed the U.S. to use military force if needed to ensure the flow of oil and natural gas from the entire region.
The Cold War? Harry Truman certainly pumped it up in Greece in 1947, though historians have traced the conflict’s origins back through decisions made during FDR’s alliance with the Soviets in World War II and Woodrow Wilson’s decision to join allied troops to fight against the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918.
And Vietnam? The American “Friends of Vietnam”, the loudest cheerleader for interfering in the former French colony, was headed by a “New Deal” Democrat, Leo Cherne, who also ran the International Rescue Committee and served as Chairman of the Executive Committee of Freedom House. Two of his strongest backers were Democratic senators John F. Kennedy and Mike Mansfield, who joined with New York’s right-wing Cardinal Spellman to help impose the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem to rule over the largely Buddhist South Vietnam.
These are just snapshots of the Democratic Party’s past, which we all need to understand in much greater breadth and depth. But trying to make the neo-cons our number-one bogeyman is to make them far more important [http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33308-focus-rethinking-the-neo-con-threat?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page= ] than they were. It absolves the “mainstream” Democratic Party from the blame it so richly deserves. And it makes it so much easier for Hillary Clinton to shape a new generation of Democratic voters in her own imperialist image.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement ] and the New Left monthly Ramparts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramparts_%28magazine%29 ], Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, “Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold.”
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link [ http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34679-hillarys-no-neocon-shes-far-more-dangerous?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page= ] back to Reader Supported News.