Even though, as I pointed out in my previous diary, the "Left" is at best a point of pride on a few Facebook profiles, the Right feels obliged to restrain any sort of deviance because, you see, austerity planning has its beneficiaries. So they run articles in places like Vox warning us that phenomena like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are not the solution to our problems.

So for instance one can read this piece:

No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism

Let's go over this one, shall we? In its own stumbling way this Vox piece reveals the full caliber of the intellectual might put to work for the neoliberal narcissism that is Vox. Never mind the ambiguity of Bernie Sanders or of his legacy so far -- the trail of slime left behind by Vox is not ambiguous at all, as follows.

First we start out with the notion of Sanders-ism -- offer the masses a few benefits and maybe they would have outvoted Trump had they been granted a chance or something. Our Vox mouthpiece (not to be confused with the Mouth of Sauron, hard as that may be) starts off with a quaint appeal to authority, to show us all how wrong Sanders-ism really is:

“[It’s] a kind of liberal myth,” Pippa Norris, a Harvard political scientist who studies populism in the United States and Europe, says of the Sanders analysis. “[Liberals] want to have a reason why people are supporting populist parties when their values are so clearly against progressive values in terms of misogyny, sexism, racism.”

Of course Vox is not permitted to examine the counter-argument that "populist parties" offer themselves as the primary alternative to neoliberalism, which the traditional "welfare state parties" have embraced. Perhaps the Vox editorial board remembers the most frightening moment of the 2016 Presidential campaign, when neoliberal candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton promised us all that she was going to put her husband Bill "Peterson Foundation keynote speaker" Clinton in charge of the economy. Of course the Vox editorialists don't remember it the same way as we do -- that and Clinton's paling-around with Henry Kissinger were big disqualifiers. For us, not for them.

Meanwhile, the Mouth of Vox dazzles us with this factoid:

The problem is that a lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements.

I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the ruling parties' embrace of neoliberal austerity planning, budget-cutting, and privatization in those countries with more robust welfare states.

At any rate, the Mouth of Vox could not utter truth even if it were clever enough to do so, and so we run into this data-supported question:

Why did voters who by and large benefit from social democracy turn against the parties that most strongly support it?

Never mind that "the parties" don't really support social democracy now, and that perhaps their opponents on the "far-right" might in some cases be further left than said "parties."

But the Mouth of Vox is not ready to shut up just yet. There follows an "exposition" of the rise of the populist Right and a disparagement of the social-democratic deviants, beginning with this gem:

Corbyn’s year-plus of Labour leadership has been something of a test case for this theory. So far, it has failed utterly.

Yeah, never mind Corbyn's failures in dealing with a hostile mass media despite public support for many of his positions. We've given him a year and a half -- he's toast.

Then the Mouth of Vox shifts the argument to a portion on the American scene, in which it is argued:

There’s at least suggestive evidence, as my colleague Andrew Prokop writes, that Sanders misread the election results — that embracing left-wing populism won’t, in fact, win over Trump voters.

Those who did an ounce of research on the 2016 Presidential election know, on the other hand, that failing to "win over Trump voters" was not the cause of Clinton's election loss. Rather, in November large numbers of voters, many of whom voted twice for Obama, decided not to cast a vote for either of the major-party candidates.

Scrolling down further, we can then be lectured by the Mouth of Vox on the racial divide in the US. The discussion, however, is meant to reinforce Vox's preconceived notion, as follows:

The upshot is that a significant shift to the left on economic policy issues might fail to attract white Trump supporters, even in the working class. It could even plausibly hurt the Democrats politically by reminding whites just how little they want their dollars to go to “those people.”

So there you have it, folks. Better vote for the triangulating neoliberal politicians, because otherwise -- okay, where were we?