This is more so a question for average liberals, the people who show ongoing enthusiastic support for Obama's right wing economic/foreign policy. The people excited about a Clinton presidential campaign. The ones cheering on 80% of the Democrats in office and or potential candidates who adhere to Bill Clinton's "Third Way" (which is a euphemism for Neoliberalism). The question is, why do you support Neoliberalism? You know, the idea that Americans are enamored with Reagan era economic/foreign policy. You'd think that lie would have been put to rest by now. Or at least we'd be fed up with the sort of bait and switch tactics as we saw with the Obama administration. Hope and change was simply more of the same Third Way, more like third rail Neoliberal political economy.
Great, they support gay marriage, but did they really? Not until a tidal wave of social change was pushed by grass roots efforts to fend back religious fundamentalist domination in Washington. During this process we watched Obama and Hillary reluctantly or slowly change their stance on gay marriage. It took pressure from below to force them from their prior stance against gay marriage. And now that they have reversed course they get to wear the progressive crown. Champions of gay rights they are! It's a rather dubious claim. Anyhow, the point is, 80% of the Democratic Party aren't going to cave to such pressure when it comes to economic and foreign policy. They're firmly in the pocket of concentrated wealth and hellbent on facilitating Neoliberal policies no matter what sort of opposition they face at the grass roots level.
Since Bill Clinton's two terms it has been a matter of marginalizing grass roots opposition, even coopting it- deforming and manipulating reality itself. This process has been most obvious with Obama's administration, with Clinton, everything was new. It was the new Third Way, a way to stick it to Republicans by adopting their right wing economic views. To become Ronald Reagan's Democratic Party. How's that working out for the working class in Chicago? Obama's home state, the state Obama's former chief of staff is now destroying with Neoliberal Third Way market ideology. And Rahm doesn't seem to be off limits for criticism, from within the liberal base. But somehow Obama is off limits. When he's facilitating the same privatization scams, pushing the same corporate friendly healthcare scam, which, by the way, was crafted by the old DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) in collusion with the health insurance corporations who at one time sat on the DLC's board of directors.
Why do liberals sit silently by and support Democratic Party right wing education reforms? Massive privatization scams in infrastructure, military privatization, prisons, Wall St deregulation (thanks Clinton), welfare reform, privatization of NSA spying (as if it weren't bad enough already), Obama's talk of privatizing OSHA, privatization of water supply and services (how's that working out in Detroit?), NASA privatization, Obama talking about completely privatizing Freddie and Fannie, same talk of privatizing FOIA. new talk of "public private partnerships" that will hand over huge amounts of public space and services to the private sector. The list goes on and on.
On the international level it's even worse. The policies of World Bank and IMF are a whole different ball of wax but it's all sustained by US politicians and their political base, both Democrat and Republican. The trade deals such as NAFTA/CAFTA. Obama's new TPP and other secretive Neoliberal corporate handouts. These are major policies meant to transfer wealth from the worlds working class into the bank accounts of a shrinking financial aristocracy and many liberals seem content in cosigning this agenda. Why? What is it? Political expediency? Pragmatism? Are we ignorant or is it a sort of political anomie? Lets hear the excuses in the comment section. Why year after year, election after election, millions of people line up and feed from the Neoliberal trough.