Shortly after the end of the Cold War, we were sold the illusion that the neoliberal order was going to be the harbinger of indefinite prosperity for all, allowing the markets to bestow their blessings upon the wider populace as governments mostly tended to matters of civic life, with a ballot being cast every few years to decide who’s at the helm of a well-oiled and self-sustaining machine. Many were left by the wayside as profiteers of the neoliberal order kept reaping the rewards of their complicity–as wealth inequality grew wider, and as the downtrodden awakened to the needlessness of their suffering, neoliberals have suddenly realized they can no longer play coy with their decades-long con, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re forever unseated from the power they’ve so lustfully desired.
A microcosm of this happening was the night before Super Tuesday, when recent drop-outs of the Democratic primary Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar both drew support behind whom they’ve spent months calling unfit for presidency–this is a normal occurrence for politics, but what gives it further symbolic meaning, is that they’ve banded behind the candidate whose platform would be a maintenance of the status quo. This includes a climate plan that’s far less ambitious in its scope than the Green New Deal, a vision for compromise with Republican elected officials that can only be described as amnesic — especially considering what Barack Obama went through prior — and most important of all, a measly expansion on Obamacare that does nothing to ensure that the United States views the health of its citizens as essential to its function, and not a vacant spot for the insurance industry to bury the most vulnerable under mountains of insurmountable medical debt.
Among that group, is what can only be described as a demographic whose vying for change has been substituted for chronic despair–that’s boomers and up. The age breakdown of Super Tuesday backs this up, but this trend isn’t only limited to America’s electoral landscape–due to a function of staggered expectations, the oldest have a tendency to vote for the most outwardly-conservative platforms. There’s plenty to criticize about a search for an orthodoxy that never existed, but it’s…
