Political Memes

Clinton ushered in the era of the neoliberal democrats, after a series of genuinely good ones like JFK and Carter, and ones like LBJ that might have been murderers abroad but at least were aggressively progressive at home. (I know, JFK killed a bunch of people too)

I'm not saying Clinton was bad necessarily; he was certainly better than more Republicans, but he wasn't a mostly affirmatively good thing like Obama or Biden have been. The pre-internet picture of the world that most voters had was radically more conservative than today's view (in a way that's honestly hard to remember now that non-establishment news is a normal thing). I think as a result of that blinkered view, candidates too far on the left were just getting their ass kicked in the election over and over again, so maybe it was the right thing for him to do to move to the right. But even some of the stuff on that list of achievements is sinister neoliberal shenanigans (more police, less people on welfare after welfare-to-work, etc). Income at the top went up, but income inequality continued to skyrocket under Clinton's economic policies pretty much exactly as it had under Reagan's.