Glenn Greenwald traces the Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash, demonstrated completely in the case of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and in process here in the U.S. in the case of Bernie Sanders. Other than the numerical quantities, there isn’t much parallel with the Seven Stages of Grief, particularly at stage 7. In the case of grief, that stage is acceptance, in the case of backlash, as Greenwald explains it:
STAGE 7: Full-scale and unrestrained meltdown, panic, lashing-out, threats, recriminations, self-important foot-stomping, overt union with the Right, complete fury (I can no longer in good conscience support this party of misfits, terrorist-lovers, communists, and heathens).
That’s probably about right, and we have to hope that Sanders and his troops are ready to respond. When push comes to shove, the powers that be will be far more comfortable with Trump than Sanders, because they’ll ultimately conclude that Trump poses no real threat to what really matters (for them). It is disappointing to see that Krugman is among the Sanders bashers. He has every right to support Hillary, but it’s absolutely true that he is almost parodying himself when he says stuff like “as far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.” This from the guy whose always going on about the “very serious people”. (See here, also)I doubt he’d choose Trump if it came to that, but it’s disappointing that he’s repeating his (more justified then, it turns out) performance of 2008. It’s hard to see, by the way, how anyone could believe that Hillary is better on financial reform, given that she’s fully embraced Obama’s non-action, and has suggested the typical incremental changes going forward. The economic blogs I’m reading are telling me that there’s a hard rain about to fall (just one example here), a storm that wouldn’t be threatening if we’d taken effective action in 2008. And I’m not talking communism or anything, assuming we can all agree that FDR wasn’t a communist.
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