Curt Schilling was right, anti-Bernie Sanders liberals were wrong
First an apology (I’m Canadian). To Curt Schilling. I don’t know him personally, but on the eve of the U.S. presidential election on Twitter I bought the hype and ridiculed the former baseball player.
Although some details were off, Schilling was essentially correct about the election, while liberal pundits suffering from groupthink were left with reputations soiled worse than a sanitary sock at Yankee Stadium.
Schilling’s general worldview — often homophobic and racist — enticed me to attack what was probably just a hopeful election prediction that was against the grain.
I was being what I hate most in liberals: a self-satisfied, smug bastard.
The thing is, if you’re going to shell out mockery, you have to be prepared to consume a hefty serving of mea culpa if it backfires. That Schilling tweet started a 24-hour cycle of my personal asshattery, predicting wrong election results and never considering the reasons that Donald Trump could pull it off. I betrayed my own oft-stated instinct that Hillary Clinton is an awful person and candidate and could very easily lose. I now sit eating humble pie.
You know who else should? That group of liberal pundits I alluded to above. When it looked certain that Clinton was headed for a humiliating defeat, those who built her up as prepared, immensely qualified and invincible, began pointing fingers at others who were supposedly responsible for her political demise.
One of the more petulant claims in this regard came from New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who made Green Party leader Jill Stein the object of his scorn.
Consider that. Clinton is the wife of a former two-term U.S. president with whom she stacked the Democratic Party full of loyalists; had a $1.3 billion dollar campaign; enjoyed a seemingly endless list of news endorsements; and at her disposal was a SuperPac that hired Internet trolls to seek and neutralize Clinton sentiment online. This very powerful person, according to Krugman, was at the mercy of Stein in Florida, whose campaign coffers would probably struggle to fund park admissions for her staff to Disney World.
What Schilling believed, probably just from talking to people outside the academic bubble, Krugman dismissed months ago. The learned columnist didn’t just look past Trump this year, his penchant for being wrong began when Krugman in full disconnected elitist mode started attacking Clinton’s first presidential opponent, Bernie Sanders, as “disturbing” and “over the edge.”
Krugman refused to accept that Sanders tapped into the same vote-winning populism Schilling observed. For political convenience, take away the baseball player’s bigotry (this is difficult, understandably, because Trump helped unleash public hatred, and I’m empathetic to that), he overlaps with Sanders along areas on which the election was won and lost: that there is a deep dissatisfaction among Americans about the state of their country, that this feeling creates existential anxiety in many voters, and they were ready to take it out on people they believe helped put them in that place.
It’s true that some of these feelings can be misinformed. Reportedly, the U.S. economy is rebounding and wages are going up, but one legacy of the Great Recession is the rich have gotten richer, driving up dissatisfaction among those who lost jobs, wages and security. Someone needed to pay.
No big players paid a price for the last big economic downfall, or for the expensive and disastrous wars in which Americans signed up that are still ongoing. Sanders correctly identified that many Americans view their country is on a losing streak, while professional pundits like Krugman, Jonathan Chait, and the liberal self-parody device known as Vox — to name a few — wanted to look past that anger and take the country and world to some undefined utopia of pragmatism under president Clinton. They wanted to ignore the festering atmosphere of resentment that exists among millions of Americans spanning all demographics, still eager to punish anyone who was prominent on the scene during America’s spectacular failures of the last decade. Sanders read that right.
It’s not an accident that “Make America Great Again” guided Trump to trounce someone named Bush during Republican primaries. That should’ve been a huge warning to Democrats. This meaningless slogan resonated with Americans because many truly feel their country’s form has dipped. This viewpoint was brushed aside by pro-Clinton pundits, particularly Krugman, who accused Sanders of sloganeering during the Democratic primaries.
It also didn’t help Clinton’s cause that often when dissenting liberals expressed an opinion contrary to the official message, Clinton surrogates taking their lead from Krugman or Amanda Marcotte were readily shouting down voters’ feelings by calling them a “bro” or some other insult thought up in the Democrats’ echo chamber, followed by the obligatory linking to a Vox article to cement a sense of personal superiority.
Insufferable, out-of-touch, modern liberal pundits bullied Sanders out of the Democratic primaries, anointed and fawned over Clinton as their presidential candidate, and thought they could repeat that act in the general election against a larger disaffected populace.
Then this happened:
The 2016 presidential election had fewer votes cast than any since the year 2000, with millions of Democrats staying home. Maybe being smug doesn’t translate into votes when canvassing door-to-door. Perhaps shouting “privilege” online when someone expresses a sense of discomfort isn’t very good for dialogue. Armed with disconnected academic language and very few well-publicized ideas, Democrats simply failed to inspire their own voters.
Some Americans were inspired. Clinton’s deep unpopularity — played down often — was a major factor. More people showed up in strategic states to vote for Trump than Clinton, her “newly muscular constituencies” alone couldn’t deliver. Clinton lost in no small part because she represented the vague status quo “establishment” that Americans wanted held accountable for recent disasters. They had been warning pollsters and pundits about this all along and were ignored, so they made their feelings loudly known at the ballot box.
The mounds of data collected to assert that Clinton was on her way to an assured victory became very expensive garbage, while prognosticators who basically wet their fingers and held it up to the wind celebrated being correct.
That is where things now stand.
The Schilling types talked to enough people that they knew the polling data that was being presented felt wrong. Their feelings were anecdotal and had no scientific basis, and it could be incorrect 99 out of 100 times, but this one time they were really, truly right when it mattered most.
The pundits meanwhile, remained petulant and lashed out on a narrative of their own making. I hope they hid all the mirrors in their homes, lest they ever have to look at themselves and admit they were wrong about two things: that Sanders, not Clinton should’ve been the Democratic nominee, and they “bigly” underestimated public’s desire for political upheaval.
The Clinton camp itself was naive. One hacked John Podesta email published by WikiLeaks reveals that as early as February the Clintons were aware they had trouble in the battleground, midwestern states that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and 2012. Instead of appealing on issues, the Clintons spent millions of dollars browbeating voters about Trump’s personal indiscretions. This was a strange tactic given president Bill Clinton himself is living proof that male sexual indiscretions can’t always bring a presidential candidate down, unfortunately.
Could Sanders — who was filling stadiums during primaries while getting attacked by liberal pundits — have won the election and saved Democrats huge embarrassment, along with its policies of women and minority rights, climate change and labour that are now hanging off a cliff? We’ll obviously never know.
What we do know is that academically dismissing voters’ feelings doesn’t return votes; when a candidate is extremely disliked and is associated with systemic corruption, a party should probably choose someone who is the opposite and can attract new voters; and no amount of data on earth will ever disprove that in 2016 an ill-informed, loudmouth jock was right, while educated anti-Sanders, pro-Clinton liberals — a Nobel Prize-winning economist among them — were terribly wrong in what each side knew about their country.