Is Hillary Clinton One of Us?
Much ink has been spilled — and even more electrons agitated — about Hillary Clinton’s email. At the core of the controversy, and the part that just sticks in so many craws is: “A normal person would never have gotten away with this.”
The nuclear core that fuels the engine of Clinton hatred is that she is not one of us. She is an elite, privileged insider who gets special treatment from the FBI, who gets away with felonies on the regular, who can raise millions speaking to banks and tens of millions from foreign governments for her “charity.” The arguments we’ve been having for a year and a half now are about whether or not each instance of so-called corruption or elite villainy is true, but we rarely argue the core question: is it right to hold Clinton to the standards of the average citizen? Is she one of us?
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who will argue that Clinton should in fact get to live by a special standard. The very idea is pretty fundamentally un-American. We have no monarchs here.
And yet, if it is true that we all agree Clinton should be held to the same standards and laws as the rest of us, then shouldn’t that cut both ways? When she is attacked, when crimes or misdemeanors are committed against her, should we consider these as we would consider attacks on our neighbors and ourselves?
Representation
We are a representative democracy. When one of us commits a crime, twelve representatives come together to consider that crime and decide the verdict in accordance with the law. They do so for all of us. Our congress represents us at local levels in our House and state levels in our Senate. And the President is the representative of us all, at home and abroad, which is why we all have voice in their selection.
Since the beginning of our democracy, we’ve seen allegations of corruption, sex and scandal bring candidates down (I refer you to a musical currently running in New York and Chicago called, “Hamilton.”). More rarely, we have seen crimes committed against our representatives and had to struggle with the question of how we, the people, will respond. When Gabby Giffords was shot a few years ago, was it an attack on Congress? Or was it an attack on a citizen? Do we view it as political matter — a domestic terrorist attack on our government — or as a simple criminal matter? Both?
In an 1832 congressional debate about how Congress should respond after a Congressman was attacked by a citizen (the first time that had happened in our country), William Drayton, a representative from South Carolina, had this to say:
“What does the House consist of? The representatives of the people. What are our rights and privileges? They are the rights and the prerogatives of the people… If [Congress allows such an attack to go unpunished], the country might have a constitution which embodies the will, not of those who appear to be represented, but of a small junta of nefarious men who with a strong arm, interpose to domineer over it.”
If we allow attacks on those who represent us because we agree politically with those doing the attacking, we hasten our own demise. We sanction attacks on our neighbors, on our family members, on ourselves in the name of partisan politics. Where does that lead? To a society where we allow a few with power (a junta of nefarious men) to domineer over us because they can attack our representatives — or threaten to — and bend them to their will.
Just as we cannot allow our representatives to act as though they are above the law (as so many are concerned is the case with Clinton), we must equally demand that our representatives be treated in the way we, the people, wish to be treated.
If She is One of Us…
We have allowed the country to thrill over private details in emails stolen from her colleagues. If we cheer for Wikileaks in this matter, we cheer for our own email to be stolen and publicized. If we scoff at the idea that Russia has stolen these documents and given them to Wikileaks, as Trump and most Republicans seem to, despite the findings of our national intelligence agencies, then we scoff at foreign powers stealing our personal information and using it against us. What world are we inviting? One where we are each blackmailed by foreign entities and it’s considered fair game? Where all of our information is released for someone else’s gain and it’s fine as long as the information is newsworthy and interesting? Or as long as someone sufficiently loathes us to justify the release?
We have spent the past 48 hours speculating and roiling over a statement by the FBI that there are emails somewhere that might have something to do with her. If we cheer for the FBI in this matter, we cheer for limitless, endless investigations of each of us for crimes real or imagined, with public disclosures not of our acts, but of the suspicions of others about acts undisclosed. Think about that: this letter from Comey is the equivalent of law enforcement holding a press conference saying they are investigating your mother and they found some stuff in someone else’s house that might have to do with the investigation of your mother. When do we, the people, feel our government is entitled to publicly announce we may have done something wrong because there might be some evidence somewhere of that? Are there any limits to that authority?
We have heard her opponent say — and half the country has cheered for it — that she should be imprisoned, despite there being so little evidence of criminal behavior that there hasn’t even been a Grand Jury. There certainly has never been a trial. And yet, a man seeking to represent us has said in national debate that she would be in jail under his administration. Yes, let us hold our leaders to a high standard, but let us also remember they represent us. Is that how we want to be treated? A leader can publicly declare we should be imprisoned because he says so? Because he lacks the faith in our justice system and knows better?
If Hillary Clinton were your neighbor, your mom, your teacher, your friend — if you were to look at her through the eyes of “one of us” it would be nearly impossible for any but the coldest partisan to look at this treatment and think “that’s how we should all be treated.”
I’ve heard so many times that Clinton’s email scandal is about how she’s being treated differently than an ordinary citizen and it’s true. She is. She is being treated worse.
This election has turned into a referendum on our democratic institutions, on the very foundations of our system of government. If we choose to elect a man who has threatened to sue and imprison his enemies, to reject the results of our elections, to ban us, deport us, divide us based on religion, then we are voting to be treated as he and his proxies have treated Hillary Clinton: as a people with fewer rights than our constitution grants; as a people domineered by a junta of nefarious men.
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