Watching the debate last night, it occurred to me that Clinton just doesn’t have a “theory” or worldview regarding why things are the way they are. She just jumps from issue to issue, almost in a panic, going with whatever the public outcry of the moment is. There’s no “big picture” for her, no forest, just trees.
Notice, by contrast, how Sanders has been able to take the right side on issue after issue for decades. It’s almost uncanny and prescient. How’s he able to do this? He has a theory of society and why it has the form it has. He sees how things are linked together. This is why he didn’t support TPP, but also NAFTA, AND why he’s fought charter schools, draconian criminal justice and drug policies, etc. There’s a link between all of these things. They’re all strategies the 1% uses to exploit and extra more wealth from the rest of us. The same set of principles underlies the push for charter schools and standardized testing that underlies pushes for certain types of reform in the criminal justice and prison system. Where Clinton just hears “crime! drugs!” and concludes “we must build more prisons and make stiffer laws and penalties and private prisons is an excellent way to do this”, Sanders says “wait a minute, this is just another way of creating profit that will disproportionately impact the young and people of color.” He has a theory of the causation behind the issues.
The difference between Clinton and Sanders strikes me as akin to the difference between pre-evolutionary biology and evolutionary biologists. The pre-evolutionary biologists had no unifying theory of life, why it takes the forms it takes, and how it comes to have these forms. Instead they just endlessly looked for resemblances between different plants and animals, creating endless lists of taxonomies. Nothing unified their categorizations. With evolutionary theory everything changed. Now there was a theory of how these species came to be, how they change, why some succeeded and others didn’t, and so on. Biology moved from being a list to being a genuine explanatory theory.
Politics without a worldview or theory is completely blind. We grope in the dark as we try to produce a more just and equitable world and stumble about trying to create a society that prospers. Occasionally we get it right. More often than not we end up making the problem worse. This certainly has been the result of education reforms, prison policies, criminal justice policies, foreign affairs, and trade policies like NAFTA and TPP. Again and again Clinton has been on the wrong side of the issues because she could only see the surface and not the unifying principle. She thereby contributed to exacerbating suffering, inequality, and injustice rather than addressing it. This is what happens when you don’t have a unifying theory or map of why certain things become issues and how they should be addressed.