‘Progressive rhetoric’ long dead in US

Hillary Clinton’s hasty adoption of a “progressive rhetoric,” as Bernie Sanders claims, does not make sense as such a discourse does not exist in the United States anymore, an analyst says.

Sanders, a Democratic candidate who calls himself a socialist, told reporters in Massachusetts on Monday that US voters “need to know the difference between hastily adopted campaign rhetoric and the real record and the long-held ideas of the candidate."

“The term [progressive rhetoric] has almost no meaning in the United States anymore,” Don DeBar, a journalist and radio host based in New York, told Press TV in a Monday phone interview.

Raising issues rejected by the “self-appointed” mainstream might have been helpful for the country once but it has been “long dead,” DeBar said.

“The fantasy is that the way that the US political system works is that if you have a marginal candidate in electoral politics raising  an issue that’s been neglected by the  ‘mainstream’ … you can actually influence the direction of policy by raising these things.”

The thing is, DeBar argued, that economic problems are now “at the center” the US politics although they have been around for a long time.

“So, they are attempting to deal with it within the political system with Bernie Sanders even calling himself a socialist,” he said, stressing that the liberal candidate should “analyze the condition” and “provide a prescription” instead.

“Unless someone addresses the expenditure for maintaining the [US] empire and addresses the contradiction intrinsic to neoliberal capitalism, then it can’t be fixed,” he concluded.

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