Apr 22, 2017
Playing the Blame Game
In the nearly six months since the election, we’ve seen conjecture after conjecture from sources and pundits both reliable and unreliable trying to explain how someone with as much political experience as Hillary Clinton could lose an unlosable campaign to an bloviating, boisterous, bigoted self-proclaimed “outsider” like Donald Trump. One of the better conjectures I’ve seen is this article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi about the new book Shattered, which takes a deep inside look at the tumult of the Clinton campaign and how Clinton’s inability to waver from her gameplan ultimately diverted resources away from key states in the months leading up to the election. This weighs alongside the many valid cultural critiques of men hating women to such an extent that they would voted for a blowhard like Donald Trump before they would think of voting for any woman, let alone a prominent woman like Hillary Clinton.
I do think a lot of why Hillary Clinton lost is because people didn’t want to vote for a woman and that a lot of the backlash about emails was a reaction to her being a woman vying for power (and that if it were a similarly situated centrist like Joe Biden, the email thing would have been a non-factor). I also think it could have been overcome in the necessary swing states with way better campaigning in poorer communities and focusing on her bona fides and her relatively superior policies instead of Trump’s temperament. This country is clearly full of people depraved enough to even consider voting for Donald Trump, so appealing to their morality, especially in swing states like Michigan or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, was a dead-end move from the start.
Potential voters saw ad after ad after campaign speech after ad after news sound byte after ad of Hillary Clinton and her campaign pointing out nothing but the off-kilter words of Donald Trump (with the occasional child watching TV viewing these words). These ads did not contain a peep of Hillary Clinton’s actual views or policies. While Donald Trump’s ads contained empty policy platitudes mixed with aggressive bigotry, his ads at least contained hints of policy, giving potential voters an idea of the concrete things that he allegedly stood for, which could have been the deciding factor for those two million or so people who were on the fence for whatever reason.
Her campaign focused on the tone of Donald Trump’s bigotry and misogyny instead of the bigotry and misogyny themselves, knowing fully well that bigotry and misogyny persisted in droves in Democratic Party ranks and knowing fully well that they just did it all quietly and calmly. How else would you explain the droves of Democrats who compromise on abortion, deport and support the deportation of millions of Latin American people, support bombing the non-white people in the Middle East and Africa, oppose LGBT protections in red states, and call the Jill Steins and Susan Sarandons of the world crazy bitches just because they didn’t support Hillary?
Jill Stein didn’t cause Donald Trump to win. Susan Sarandon didn’t cause Donald Trump to win. Russia didn’t cause Donald Trump to win. Right-wing Libertarians, Gary Johnson, or Evan McMullin didn’t cause Donald Trump to win.
Bad messaging and a bad ground game in swing states caused Donald Trump to win. Democrats staying in their comfort zones and echo chambers in academia and pop culture caused Donald Trump to win. Democrats’ inability to adapt their obsession with data and turn it into a targeted effort in swing states caused Donald Trump to win.
We live in a culture where people don’t take responsibility for their actions and then project their inadequacies onto others. Clinton voters called Stein voters privileged even though pretty much every poll leading up to the election debunked that argument, not to mention how pro-Stein activist circles were predominately composed of women, LGBT people, disabled people, people of color, poor people, and people who were some combination of those identities.
They consistently pointed to a mixed interpretation of a quote about vaccines as evidence that Jill Stein was anti-science and anti-health, even though Clinton’s reluctance to back single-payer health and desire to inhibit foreign civilizations by assert U.S. hegemony in the Middle East and Africa would have had an even more detrimental effect on science and health than a few (admittedly bad and problematic) wishy-washy answers that one could construe as dog whistles about vaccines.
Clinton supporters blamed Stein voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for swinging the election to Donald Trump without considering all of the Johnson and McMullin voters who would have otherwise voted for Trump, all of the Stein voters who would have otherwise voted for Trump if not for the tireless progressive activism of Stein supporters, or even all of the registered Democrats who crossed over and voted for Trump.
Ever since Ralph Nader in 2000, who did not not spoil the election for Al Gore, Democrats have used the Green Party and other progressive candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders as scapegoats to avoid dealing with their lack of substantial platform and their perception as being out-of-touch with the average American. They know, with all of the ballot access laws favoring Democrats and Republicans, that they can continue to trek to right and unabashedly support capitalism, militarism, and imperialism without the Green Party or the Socialist Party or any new potential well-connected center-left party (think of the NDP in Canada) rising up to mount a successful challenge to the Democratic Party’s artificial monopoly on the left.
It is profound how Hillary Clinton’s inadequacy when it came to the nuts and bolts of campaigning turned what should have been a promising, if not white-washing, narrative of a woman working hard to rise above a sea of male dominance in spite of male inadequacy into a blatantly false story of a chest-beating white male billionaire populist overcoming institutional barriers to defeat an identity politics-preaching woman who was mired in corruption and only ascended to political relevance because she was a highly-visible First Lady who won two terms in the Senate merely by living in a deeply blue state where she wouldn’t actually have to campaign and who then became Secretary of State as a consolation prize for losing a bitter primary. The election became about how a white man earned success that a woman was entitled to instead of being about transforming coherent policy into a narrative that could uplift the most marginalized among us and reach those voters who just needed something substantial to latch on to. Clinton’s message became not one of everyone’s entitlement to a prosperous future free of oppression and bigotry, but one of her own entitlement to a position that she had worked to obtain (perhaps ironically at the expense of poor women, foreign women, LGBT women, and women of color).
Hillary Clinton’s emails should have been irrelevant to the campaign, but that doesn’t excuse the surface-level and devoid-of-substance campaigning by Hillary Clinton and her team. The Democrats refused to listen to the people and they refused to dictate a coherent message to the people, instead relying on odious and smug celebrities and television shows to project a message of what they think the Democratic Party is (instead of being honest about what the Democratic Party actually is).
Now we’re stuck with Donald Trump.
