General Discussion

The Clinton illusion is that if you abjure true leftism and embrace some happy capitalist nonsense, occasionally criticizing "corporate overreach," you can win back working class voters who are being devastated by capitalist crisis. It is a lie, and voters know that it is a lie. So they look for anyone providing a believable explanation for the crisis. The conservatives displace the crisis to various places that are relatively plausible (the elites, the immigrants, China), and in this way at least give people something to hold on to and identify. Democrats have failed to provide an explanation for the crisis of capitalism because they refuse to say the word capitalism and refuse to provide an analysis that makes plausible sense. There's good reason to believe that Obama won because he identified capitalism itself as the basis for the financial crisis of 2008, and then identified Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist.

Trump is the clearest sign that the Clinton strategy of embracing capitalism is failed and doomed to failure. People don't believe the Democratic argument (that it is the "corporations," maybe sometimes, but we still love them) because it is weak, but also because it is not true. You have to provide an analysis for what is happening. The right at least goes through the motions of doin that. The center left is too scared to even say the word.