Written by Allen Jones   

John Carpenter’s 1983 cult-classic film, The Thing, portrays an alien that possesses and assimilates every organism with which it has contact. By digesting and then assuming the outward appearance of its quarry, the alien lowers the defenses of its would-be victims. An aura of paranoia hangs over the arctic outpost that provides the setting for the film. The most horrifying moments of the film are not those in which we see the thing for what it is—a many-tentacled monstrosity that defies all of our morphological categories. These scenes are met less with fear than intense disgust. Our fear is really aroused when the each looks distrustfully at the other for the subtlest signs of his assimilation, not knowing whether he is friend or foe.

Carpenter refrained from indulging his viewers’ curiosity about what the alien represents, suggesting that the film is an allegory for whatever the audience chooses. Given the director’s much more overt critique of capitalist ideology in the cult-classic, They Live, we can assume that this film has a similar subversive message. The alien is late capitalism itself, which is, as Mark Fischer has remarked, “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination is the latest iteration of the Thing. The differences between Clinton and Sanders’ positions on trade, the environment, foreign policy, immigration, energy and criminal justice diminishes by the hour. She seems even to mimic his rhetoric and his tone—to such a degree that we should not be surprised to wake up one day to find that Clinton has become Sanders in outward appearance (an observation was not lost on the writers of Saturday Night Live). For an understanding of just when this neoliberal Thing took hold of the Democratic Party, let us recount a bit of recent history.

Beginning with the presidency of Reagan, we’ve seen United States shift away from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy that is comprised chiefly of financial services, the information economy and the service industry. Neoliberal Economists like Alan Greenspan, who began as chairman of the Federal Reserve under Reagan and remained in this position until 2006, argued that this shift was inevitable. Labor and trade protectionism would limit the growth of the American economy and diminish competition with emerging economies where wages were already low. If the United States were to remain the strongest economy in the world, it would have to liberate capital from state regulation.

Bill Clinton would continue the financial and monetary policy of the Reagan and Bush years. In 1999, on the advice of Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Clinton pushed for the repeal of provisions of Glass-Steagall act. This New Deal era law limited the power of the financial industry and created a firewall between commercial and investment banking, thereby insulating the savings of the American people from the fluctuations in the stock market. Rubin and Greenspan’s argument was that, because the law was out of sync with recent innovations in financial capital, the law created uneven results. Moreover, financial capital could regulate itself.

And like his Republican predecessors, Bill Clinton also did little to slow the liquidation of the industrial base in the United States. On the contrary, he accelerated this process with the enactment of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement on January 1, 1994. These policy shifts would yield a period of booming growth for the United States. The increase in prosperity was greatest among college educated white-collar workers, the vast majority of whom were white and already relatively prosperous.

However, blue-collar laborers and poor blacks, who had been left behind in the wake of deindustrialization, were lacking in the resources to take advantage of this period of boom, and their wealth and wages stagnated. Clinton’s modest tax increases after George H. W. Bush and Reagan’s deeply regressive tax code did little to offset the effects of the liquidation of the industrial base on the working class, who would be increasingly forced to rely on the availability easy credit to maintain its quality of living. This easy credit would of course dry up with the 2008 financial crisis.

In the wake of NAFTA, the Clinton’s new brand of upwardly mobile democratic politics had lost some of its shine for the working class, who found themselves increasingly disenfranchised from a party that had once been synonymous with labor. The Clinton administration sought new ways to consolidate their political power. To recapture the support of the white working class that had been lost with this agreement, the Clinton’s calculated that they might stop their poll numbers from falling further by appealing to fears about the rise of urban crime and gangs.

In September of 1994, they pushed for the strongest crime bill since the creation of the FBI and prohibition, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which accelerated the trends of mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty. January of 1996 is probably the high-water mark for this effort to shift the focus away from changing conditions in poor communities toward the neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility. This is when Hillary Clinton gave her famous press conference. Referring to urban youth, Clinton declared, “They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

This comment is noteworthy for several reasons. Far from an unfortunate choice of words, careful examination reveals that she was very deliberate in her usage of language, even invoking the pseudo-scientific terminology of contemporary criminologists to lend authority to her campaign to impose order on urban youth. Leaving aside the obvious racist implication of the phrase “bring them to heel” that urban youth are like dogs that must learn obedience, even more remarkable is the order of priority between the necessity for forcing obedience on these kids and “talking about how they got there.” Conveniently, all discussion about the cause of urban disorder must be postponed until this disorder is brought under control.

The history of dog-whistle political rhetoric, which involves the use of coded language to stoke negative attitudes toward minorities without being explicitly racist, really begins with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon’s famous “Southern Strategy,” which sought to bring to the Republican Party Southern whites that had become disenfranchised by the Democratic Party’s connection with the civil rights movement. In this case, it represents an effort to triangulate and manipulate the opinions of a narrow cross-section of the population in order to consolidate their political power. Clinton’s poll numbers had been falling, and the administration was desperate to stop the bleeding.

In the 1960s, the Democratic Party was genuinely struggling to strike a balance between identity and class politics. In 1961, Martin Luther King emphasized the natural affinity between unions and the civil rights movement with his declaration, “If the Negro wins, labor wins.” Labor unions were instrumental in organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, which called for an end to racial discrimination and the creation of new economic opportunities. King would deliver his “I have a dream” speech here, but you could be forgiven for not knowing about his effort to wed the interests of labor with those of poor minority communities. This dimension of the civil rights movement has been all but erased from our collective memory. So absent is this layer of history that all that remains today is an image of MLK as an early martyr in the culture wars, someone who appears to have represented black interests alone.

Clinton’s super-predator remark reflects a change in the character of the Democratic Party. What this little rhetorical device signals is the end of the effort to strike this balance. Now what we have is shape-shifting regime that says whatever it must to maintain political power. Just as the Thing secretly morphs into what it has just consumed in order to lower the defenses of its next target, neoliberalism likewise morphs into whatever it must in order to extend its dominion. Donning the appearance of racial fear in one moment and of indignation about racism in the next, this constant playing of cultural and racial identities against one another proves effective in giving cover to the transformation of the American economy into one that works for the wealthy few.

This attempt to exacerbate tensions along cultural and racial fault lines is obviously not exclusive to the Democrats. The Republicans are complicit in this elaborate ruse of identity politics, constantly playing to whites’ anxieties about loosing their wealth and status in American society. In many ways they have been even bolder in their subservience to wealthy elites. They are they the true master’s of dog-whistle politics, which they have used to great success in an effort to induce the white working class to pull their wealth back from social institutions. In the 80s and 90s it was fear-mongering about urban black ‘welfare-queens’ who deliberately have as many children as they can so that they can receive more government assistance. Today its stoking fears about urban ‘thugs,’ terrorism and illegal immigrants who have ‘anchor babies’ so that they can stay legally in the US. In any case, these tactics have been extremely effective in inducing the white working class to go along with the dismantling of the very social welfare programs that once served them. Once these social programs are liquidated the resources which once went to secure the poor against the worst forms of deprivation, are then expropriated by the wealthy elites.

Notwithstanding their rocky relationship with labor, the Democrats have for the most part been careful to maintain their appearance as champions of minorities and the victims of discrimination. In fact, Hillary’s super-predator comment is a rhetorical outlier for the party. However, their advocacy for these groups has largely taken the form of appearing to create inroads for them into corporate power, to make a place for gays, blacks and Hispanics at the executive boardroom table. Where this boardroom diversity has been achieved, it is held up as a sign of the egalitarian accomplishments of Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the party establishment is always careful to take the pulse of the American people before taking up the fight for equality. Hillary Clinton provides a perfect example of this with her shifting positions on gay marriage, the policy of “don’t ask don’t tell” regarding homosexuals in the military, and her positions on immigration. The key is to always stay just ahead of the republicans on these issues, and to be the first to proclaim your support for them the moment that it becomes politically expedient to do so.

The Democrats have also presented themselves as the protectors of social security. But to the degree that they advocate for the maintenance of the social safety net, they appear to do so largely at the behest of the financial elites. It is as if the techniques of risk assessment are deployed to make calculations about the threshold at which unrest among the poor becomes a danger to the status quo, and enough resources are allocated to keep surplus labor docile. Likewise, it is necessary to maintain the ugliness of their condition insofar as their presence is held out as an implicit threat to the rest that if the do not toe the line then a similar fate awaits them.

This is politics as theater and social engineering, where the oppositions between the two sides are largely performative. Behind the scenes directing this performance are PR firms and pollsters that work for a single class of financial elites, who are happy to have the rest of us fighting amongst ourselves over cultural values, sexual differences and identity politics while they scheme to expropriate what little wealth remains in the hands of the middle and working class. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have become two heads of the same financial hydra. Testifying to this is the fact that Alan Greenspan—that avowed disciple of Ayn Rand and staunch warrior for financial deregulation—had a tenure as Federal Reserve chairman that lasted for a period of almost five presidential terms, four presidents and two changes of political party.

The reforms to social security, trade agreements, concessions to the wealthy elites regarding labor and taxation—these are invariably presented by Democrats as the pragmatic concessions of progress. However, it’s precisely these so-called pragmatic concessions of progress that have caused the left to utterly lose its political center of gravity. The Democrats became more concerned about occupying the center and maintaining power than articulating a strong political vision. Just like the Republicans they have become middlemen for the elites, maintaining order and managing the workers for their shadowy superiors, who promise them a place at the table as long as they continue the ploy.

It has taken a relative outsider who maintained his commitment to his values and refused to chase the center to restore this sense of ideological orientation for the left. Bernie Sanders has steadfastly refused to participate in the dumb show that is politics in America, and has maintained his commitment to his values even in periods in which it was not politically expedient to do so. The Sanders campaign has diagnosed the real problem with American politics: that is, the disproportionate power of the wealthy elite. He has punched through the many veils of identity politics to reveal the hard core of political corruption.

Clinton now perceives the depth of the anti-establishment frustration that is gripping the country. In the absence of a strong ideological vision of her own, Clinton has hewed closer and closer to the policies and rhetoric of Sanders, whose campaign represents the best challenge to the hegemony of the neo-liberal Thing that we have seen in recent times. Now the question is whether this Thing is capable of metabolizing the opposition of Sanders and his supporters, or whether this shape-shifting monstrosity has finally met its match.