Schmuck of the Week: Larry Summers and the Billionaire Caucus in the Democratic Party

By Jacob Weindling  |  August 16, 2024 | 12:35pm
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Billionaires Democratic Party
Schmuck of the Week: Larry Summers and the Billionaire Caucus in the Democratic Party

Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House wasn’t some outlier event or a one-off, but the culmination of the post-1968 Democratic Party completely breaking down in service to the billionaire class. Bill Clinton overturned two of the fundamental planks of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during a second term spent removing what little chains were left on Wall Street after two(plus) Reagan administrations, helping to cause the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and lead us down a path to our modern Gilded Age.

If not for Monica Lewinsky, Larry Summers may have been successful in making his longtime dream of privatizing Social Security a reality during Clinton’s second term.

For those newer to politics who were shaken awake when Donald Trump entered the White House, Summers is a name you may have seen before, but likely exists in the broader confusing constellation that is American politics and is difficult to place.

For some of us who were poisoned well before 2016, Larry Summers is a name that instantly sends shivers down our spines. The Black Death sent from neoliberal hell. Trickle-down economics with an awkward smile and a Harvard branding (and a no-confidence vote from Harvard faculty!). I am not afraid to admit that I have had more than one nightmare that he played a prominent role in.

Fuck Larry Summers.

He is both an avatar for and an author of the American imperial monster emboldened by the supposed End of History. Summers was the Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993, the Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 1993 to 1995, the United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999, and the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001, when he left to be the 27th President of Harvard University until 2006.

Summers was forced out of Harvard a year after the no-confidence vote and two years after Illinois elected a new Senator who would go on to challenge the Clintonian dynasty at the top of the party during an economic crisis their policies had a hand in creating. Barack Obama ran against the status quo, buoyed by his vote against the Iraq War burnishing his credibility, and defeated Hillary Clinton. He then ran a historic general election campaign which rallied the nation around Hope ™ and Change™ leading us into a new era.

Then he named Larry fucking Summers the Director of his National Economic Council, letting the baron of billionaire friendly policy oversee a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform a fundamentally broken system, and helping lay the groundwork for the creation of the history altering Obama-Obama-Trump voter. Everything is more expensive these days and wealth inequality is at historic levels, so now I’ve caught you up to why Larry Summers is such a schmuck.

But his and his wing of the party’s reign of terror may really be coming to a close. I have written before about how Joe Biden dropped this Clintonian banner that Barack Obama carried in favor of practicing actual big tent politics that engaged every major voting bloc of the party, and today is the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act — or as I like to call it, the day the Democrats re-learned how to do good politics. Larry Summers was already on his way out of the inner spheres of party influence, but now, there is real hope that one day we could lock him out of the building altogether.

Kamala Harris has been slow rolling out her domestic policy platform this week, and while the Democratic National Convention next week will (hopefully) bring the details needed to adequately assess them, one thing is clear in what has been released so far: she also thinks that Larry Summers can go fuck himself. There’s nothing for him in here. She’s taking a lot of the good stuff from Biden’s domestic agenda and either taking it further or giving it more money.

It’s not Larry Summers’ or Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s schmucky world anymore. Time will tell whether these policies are enough to win an election, let alone whether Harris will have the skills or even a pliable Congress to pass them. It’s also incredibly naive to believe the donor class won’t eventually have a say on policy, but everything the vice president has done since the Tim Walz pick suggests her intent is to leave Larry Summers’ trickle-down economics in the rearview mirror and focus on the working class, allowing history to remember him and his allies for the schmucks their policies prove them to be.

 
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