re: new leaked audio, clinton has it backwards

Recently leaked audio from a political fundraiser for Clinton:

Hacked Audio Reveals Hillary Clinton Sees Herself Occupying “Center-Left to Center-Right”

Personally, I think that Clinton has it totally backwards. It's not some vague, naive Millennial mindset that's affecting their politics; it's the economic realities of their actual lives that are affecting their politics.

Clinton jokes about politically-naive Millennials living in their parent's basement and working as baristas, lamenting their less-than-upwardly mobile job prospects. But it's not because they're lazy or naively idealistic; it's because those kinds of jobs are all that many can get, and Millennials are struggling to make ends meet and pay off their student loan debts while trying to find places to live in rental markets that are getting increasingly out of control, many just a single paycheck shy of becoming one of the growing numbers of the working homeless. I spent three years working in the food court of Portland State University, and can attest to that fact myself.

Clinton also jokes about not getting the idea of Bernie Sanders' 'political revolution,' and I think that's partially due to the fact that she's part of the ruling class. For one, the idea of a political revolution challenges the very status quo that she's a part of. In addition, her economic reality is very different from that of most Millennials. She possesses a level of wealth and social power that many don't. She isn't burdened with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. She isn't struggling to find a decent paying job in an over-saturated job market or a place to live in an over-inflated rental market. And when it comes to the young black Millennials she mentions, I don't think she gets their POV because she's speaking from a place of relative privilege. Yes, she's a woman. But she's also educated, white, and from a successful, suburban, middle-class family who's likely unfamiliar with the racial discrimination and inequalities faced by people of colour.

And finally, she doesn't get it because of her politics, which has always been decidedly conservative. It's well known she was a young Republican who volunteered for Goldwater back in 1964; and she admits as much by saying that she occupies the centre-left to the centre-right and criticizes the idea of achieving things like universal single-payer healthcare, universal higher-education, etc. like they have in Scandinavia. It's all about the idealization of hard work, not the socialization of opportunity.

Certainly she's progressive when it comes to many social issues, like women's reproductive rights and more recently same-sex marriage, but the rest is moderately conservative neoliberalism through and through. Hawkish record and rhetoric when it comes to foreign policy; opposition to things like universal single-payer healthcare and universal higher-education; past support for welfare reform that's hurt the most vulnerable; rhetoric about the mythical job growth in the 90s that was, unfortunately, built upon a shaky foundation that would eventually give way and cause the 2008 crisis from which we've yet to fully recover from, etc.

That Millennials are struggling with debt, limited job opportunities after college, and a spreading rental crisis while looking beyond neoliberlism for a solution isn't the result of some naive idealism, but of concrete, material, economic realities. The fact is, Millennials aren't as naive and entitled as older generations make them out to be. They're highly educated and hardworking and the beneficiaries of amazing technological innovations which give them access to the world and the world of ideas that we couldn't have dreamed of 10-20 years ago. And part of that is being able to see beyond the rules and limitations of capitalism and neoliberal ideology.

The greatest obstacle to real political revolution isn't Millennials lack of experience or political savvy, but the unbridled individualism that keeps working people of all generations from seeing the unity of their interests over that of capital and the state.