Live from La Farine: : America Is Becoming More Liberal: "Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually...
...by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.... Centrist Democrats had argued that Reagan’s decisions to cut the top income-tax rate... had spurred economic growth. When Bush cut the top rate to 35 percent in 2001 and further weakened regulation, however, inequality and the deficit grew, but the economy barely did—and then the financial system crashed. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam. If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster....
By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed. Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough....
If George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further.... Given the militant opposition Obama faced from Republicans in Congress, it’s unclear whether he could have used the financial crisis to dramatically curtail Wall Street’s power. What is clear is that he did not. Thus, less than three years after the election of a president who had inspired them like no other, young activists looked around at a country whose people were still suffering, and whose financial titans were still dominant. In response, they created Occupy Wall Street.... 40 percent of the Occupy activists had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign, mostly for Obama. Many of them had hoped that, as president, he would bring fundamental change. Now the collapse of that hope had led them to challenge Wall Street directly.... ‘This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.’...
The Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about). Overall, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias has written, Clinton appears ‘less inclined to favor a market-oriented approach than a left-wing approach, a real change from the past quarter century of Democratic Party economic policymaking.’ Her ‘move to the left,’ notes Kira Lerner of ThinkProgress, ‘distances her policies from those of her husband and Obama.’
