I'll Never Vote for Hillary Clinton

They should be protesting all the media and pundits who convinced them Hillary was going to win.

The late unlamented Soviet union made shoddy goods no one wanted available in fairly large quantities to those in good standing with the authoritarian regime in the USSR and in the Eastern European countries on which it imposed its system after WWII (though they never equalled their capitalist competitors in either quantity or quality) . When the whole shoddy structure collapsed afteer 1989 I didn't notice much nostalga for the good old days: indeed the flight to capitalism was fairly rapid in Eastern Europe.

Having insurance subject to external bureaucratic regulation and government imposed price controls isn't the same thing as having good medical care.

True dat.

There's help for those who need it.

https://www.facebook.com/TheHookOfficial/videos/1602621373136648/

For better or for worse, there was actually quite a lot of nostalgia. Check out the reams of surveys from the 1990s in which people were asked if things were better or worse than in Soviet times. Especially in the former Soviet Union, but even in Central Europe, the % of those who said things used to be better was imposingly high.

That wasn't entirely surprising, I suppose, considering the collapse of living standards in especially Russia and other former Soviet states in the early and mid-90s (involving, in various countries, hyperinflation, collapse of industry, mass unemployment, collapse of GDP). Lot of older and poorer people decided they couldn't eat those new-found freedoms.

It didn't make them vote actual communists back in (though old-school Russian communist Zhuganov got 41% of the vote in the presidential election of 1996). It did fuel a surge of ex-communists returning to power after just a few years, though: eg in 1993 in Poland, 1994 in Hungary, 1994 in Bulgaria.

Eventually, this nostalgia seemed to wane in most countries, as especially in Central Europe the economies rebounded in the second half of the 1990s, and the Russian economy started showing significant growth a little later as well. But it was a real, wide-spread - and in a way, understandable - phenomenon, that reached well beyond the ironic "Ostalgie" of the years after/around 2000.

I agree with you there. There was some nostalga, particularly among the formerly priviledged and those who had lost their self-reliance under socialist mini poverty. However it was, as you acknowledged, fairly short lived, and there has been very little active political support for going back. I spoke too quickly and glossed over all that.

There always is. This film sums it up

Yes.. (great movie that was, too).

I'd distinguish between two different things though.

There was this kind of semi-ironic, semi-defiant "Ostalgie" in Eastern Germany which seemed to peak in the years around 2000 but seems to have faded now, which was fueled by resentment over the perceived arrogance and smugness of overbearing West-Germans, but also tended to be a bit hipstery in quality. This movie fitted in with that, but so did eg the action to keep the East-German traffic lights; songs like the "Ossi Hymne"; and communism-themed pubs that started springing up, not just in Berlin but also here in Budapest and I think in Prague. Here in Hungary around that time they also made a techno version of an old communist song which shot up the charts. That kind of stuff.

But there was also a much deeper and broader Soviet nostalgia in the parts of the former Eastern Bloc that were really struggling, especially among the old folks and among poor people. It helped the communists get back in power in Moldova, for example, and it stubbornly showed up in surveys in Russia, Ukraine, part of the Balkans, etc, throughout the 1990s.

I assume it's much faded now, since living standards have risen, a whole generation has died off, and there has been a sharp turn to the right in a number of countries. But I don't know, to be honest: I know about those surveys from the 1990s cause I had to go through them for my studies, and it's not something I've ever followed up on later.

It also depends, I think, on how the totalitarian past in question is treated, societally, officially.

The people who lived through those times as adults themselves tend to reflect contradictory, ambiguous, confused opinions and lived experiences about it. Some - the victims - damaged, angry, traumatized by their sufferings under the regime. Others, who were complicit, trying to cover up, dissemble, explain away. And a mass of rather apolitical population expressing relief about the bad things that disappeared, but also getting caught in nostalgias about a world they emotionally associate with their childhood, youth, personal memories, etc. This seems to happen everywhere. I saw some frightening survey data from Germany from the early 50s once, where many people still said that the 'old days' weren't so bad, or even better.

But then memories of the totalitarian time are formalized, ritualized, made "official" and unambiguous in commemorations, history books, TV series, school lessons... And once generation after generation grows up socialized with this straightened-up version of history, the nostalgia is cleansed away, so to say. It took until the 60s/70s before the Germans really got to grips with it all, but then "Never Again" truly became a national motto.

I think you're seeing some of that in parts of Central-Eastern Europe as well. Certainly here in Hungary. But I wonder how different it is in Russia, where Putin's regime has actively thwarted attempts to force the nation to confront the guilts and complicities of its Stalinist past. Eg by suppressing an NGO like Memorial, publishing dubious history school books that painted a rosy or at least ambiguous picture of Stalin, etc.

Maybe I should try to see if I can find more recent survey data, some time.

It wasn't all bad. Everyone had a job under communism, it may have been a mickey mouse job, but they still had one. Nostalgia makes you look back with rose tinted spectacles remember the good, the bad not so much.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the overwhelming majority of the population had never known anything else--74 years of the system, in most of the country. In East Germany, they already had a complex about the condescending attitude of the Germans in the west, so with re-unification, a lot of them felt that they were being treated as second class citizens. I suspect that there was a fair bit of exploitation of their situation, too. Some of their resentment may have been justified.

Is your mickey mouse job like this?

That's not East Germany.

You are probably right in your observations, however when the FRG government made the East German Mark equivalent to their own currency they accomplished one of the major wealth transfers in history. I'll readily acknowledge that was a practical necessity in the situation, however the Former Federal Republic was certainly fair and just to their countrymen in the East. By contrast the unlamented East German regime was in many ways the worst of former Societ Satellite states in Eastern Europe,

Oh, I would say Ceausescu's Romania gets that title on pretty much every count.

As for whether some East-Germans were justified in feeling resentful about the behaviour and attitude of some of their West-German compatriots ... I mean, people are only human. There were bound to be frictions. With the "Ossis" cast in a somewhat underdog-like role in the new Germany, it was easy enough to feel some sympathy for them. I confess that, thought not even being German, I always happily sang along with the tongue-in-cheek "Im Osten", and I did have a keyring in the shape of the East-German traffic light man ("Ampelmännchen")... I generally much preferred East-Berlin(ers) over West-Berlin(ers).

Still, I also remember a cartoon that had a Trabant car being hauled on by a big West-German Mercedes with the guy inside moaning "It's going so slow.. it's so hard", while a Polish guy on a horse-and-cart looked on rolling his eyes. And there was something to be said for that take too.

God that all seems long ago.

It does indeed seem like a very long time ago. You are probably right abouue Ceauchescu and Romania. Perhaps it's just that the East German governments pursued all that authoritarian socialist BS with such Germanic focus and efficiency,

Blistering post-mortem of Dem legion failures in 2016.

The Intercept.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/18/the-stark-contrast-between-the-gops-self-criticism-in-2012-and-the-democrats-blame-everyone-else-posture-now/

In case you missed it, haughty neoliberalism killed Hillary coronation.

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/19/neoliberalisms-epic-fail-the-reaction-to-hillary-clintons-loss-exposed-the-impotent-elitism-of-liberalism/

Just want to make sure you're on the right page...

I don't think the "haughty neo liberalism'" was the whole story and I do recognize the self-serving quality in the Salon analysis that I suspect you are referring to. However I do believe the apparent blindness of the Hillary Campaign to the forces that defeated them was indeed indicative of their too credulous acceptance of the merits of their own propaganda. Its a common enough failing, and they certainly weren't the first to fall victim to it.

No, I agree, of course. There were several contributing factors leading to Hillary's ultimate collapse, but the "haughty neoliberalism" referred to in the article and by me personally over the past year was evidenced by Hillary's elitism, servitude of Wall Street and billionaire donors, and a heartwrenching (for me) Let Them Eat Cake attitude for the people dealing with poisoned water in Flint, Native Americans fighting Big Oil for their own land (and clean water), and Hillary's nose-thumbing at the Rust Belt. The TPP - agree in principle or not - included more than trade rules. It cut the legs out from other people and entities who might want to sue the enormous and powerful
for a myriad of consumer complaints. It protected the powerful and hamstrung the average.

It's still more complicated, but I hope this snapshot explicates a bit what I mean by the neolib assignation.

People are hurting in this country - and I don't mean their feelings...

It does (explain) indeed. An anecdotal illustration was Hillary's fierce assertion that she would be putting a lot of coal companies out of business (to please her environmentalist liberal elite backers) followed (later after the outrage) by weak (and hardly believable) assertions that she would "invest" the economic development of Appalachia (How many times have they heard that before?) . It appears that she believes that by just saying the words she would csapture yet another group of voters. Unfortunately for her they are not stupid and they could easily observe where her real committments and selfish interests resided.