#ImStillWithHer: Why Hillary Clinton’s loss was a loss for everyone
Somewhere out in the back of your mind,
Comes you real life and the life that you know,
It seems like it was the creation of all of the same old things,
It seemed to be the only thing left out in the light—“Rooms on Fire”, Stevie Nicks
When I woke up on the morning of the US election, I was excited. I was excited because America was about to elect, to the highest office in the world, its first female president. At the gym later that morning, to get in the spirit, I played Janet Jackson’s “Nasty”. Part of me played it for Clinton, but mostly I played it for what she represented: All the women who’ve had their gender used against them, in the precise way Trump did to her. This was Clinton’s turn to do as Janet had done thirty years earlier, to take control, of the White House in the literal sense, but also of the perception that women are still not capable to hold a position of power.
I also thought, naively, that it would be different to when Julia Gillard was Australia’s prime minister. She came to power via murky circumstances. Her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, had failed to deliver his three key election promises, and his approval rating had plummeted. The view within the party was that the Australian public had lost faith in his ability to govern, so Gillard challenged Rudd for the party’s leadership. She won after Rudd chose to resign, but for the next three years, she was the ultimate Judas — worse, she was a female one.
It would be different for Clinton, I thought. She’d have fought a clean, however unfair, fight against a terrible tyrant, and still prevailed. Sometime before 10am, it was predicted that there was an 82 percent chance that Clinton would win the presidency—a landslide victory. I tweeted some Stevie Nicks lyrics, along with a picture of Clinton waving enthusiastically and looking presidential, which reminded me of something Nicks told the New York Times recently:
She could, I thought, also sing “Rhiannon” by changing some of the lyrics to Hillary. She has the voice for it, and it didn’t seem implausible for her to sing at Clinton’s inauguration. Stevie’s tight with Beyonce and the Dixie Chicks, and, of course, there was Bill’s inauguration. Hillary seemed to have fun, albeit slightly awkwardly, back then. If anything, after 23 years and this campaign, she’d be in way more of a partying mood.
So when I went to bed that night, her loss sitting like a brick in the pit of my stomach, I cried. I cried for women, for minorities, and I cried for humanity. Hillary Clinton may have had her faults, but she spent her entire career championing for the rights of women, gays and lesbians, blacks, Hispanics, and people with disabilities just so they could have a chance at the opportunities she’d had. Trump has spent his entire career championing himself, and stepping on others in the process.
All your life you’ve never seen
a woman taken by the wind,
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?—“Rhiannon”, Stevie Nicks
For someone running for president, Clinton was deeply unpopular. She was disliked by a lot of people, women especially, which I found baffling. Early on in the campaign, I read up on her to find out why, and when she was endorsed by the Democrats, I looked into the source of her unpopularity further, which continued to confound me. I mean, I liked her, I liked her policies, I thought she was trustworthy, an irony I’m fully aware of.
Mostly, I found people disliked her for highly gendered, non-reasons, like how they didn’t feel they knew her or anything about her. Women, in particular, thought she seemed too ambitious or that she was smug or arrogant about her intelligence. Some women disliked the way she stood by and defended Bill, following the Lewinsky scandal. This, they believed, was the height of hypocrisy for a woman who was supposed to be the symbol of modern day feminism.
I had a discussion with someone recently about what feminism means, and how being a feminist doesn’t erode your capacity to have compassion, empathy or even forgiveness for the opposite sex. Being a feminist doesn’t mean you have to burn your house down—while your husband’s still in it—if he cheats on you. It doesn’t diminish your feminist spirit if you stay. We don’t know what transpired between Bill and Hillary. Perhaps she did remain married to him, in a very Mellie Grant kind of way, for purely political reasons, or perhaps she just forgave him. In any case, it has no bearing whatsoever on her ability to lead the country.
There were others, still, who disliked her for forging relationships with people they felt she shouldn’t have, corporate America, mostly, but also political leaders in regions of the Middle East. Julia Gillard was accused of similar when she allowed mining companies to design their own carbon tax.
In other words, as politicians, Clinton and Gillard were too political. They too often tried to find a mutually-beneficial middle ground with their opponents, in order to advance their cause forward. It’s interesting, because this, I’ve always thought, lay at the heart of what it meant to be a good leader, and a good politician. You were a person who was able to work with people, from different walks of life and who share different beliefs, in order to get the job done, rather than standby dogmatically and unwilling to back down. I guess I was wrong.
Something in my heart died last night,
Just one more chip off an already broken heart,
I think the heart broke long ago,
That’s when I needed you,
When I needed you most—“Wild Heart”, Stevie Nicks
I didn’t sleep much the night of the election. It wasn’t just that Clinton had lost to a man. If she’d lost a man who was decent, it would have been okay. You could pick yourself back up. It’s that she was the most qualified and experienced person to ever run for office, and yet she still lost to a man with no experience and no qualifications. A man who laughs about sexually assaulting women, and who openly belittles them. A man who demeans gays and lesbians, Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, Muslims, people with disabilities. A man who bullies and threatens those who disagree with him. A man, quite frankly, I’d hope to never cross paths with in a darkened street.
With Clinton’s loss, I grieve for what might have been. A world, perhaps, where women didn’t have to feel self-conscious about being the smartest person in the room, or risk being called smug, a know-all, arrogant. Or worse, just not heard at all. I can’t tell you the countless times, I’ve been in a meeting and had a man talk over me, only to say the same thing I didn’t have the chance to finish. Or the times I didn’t get jobs because they “went in another direction”, the direction, of course, being a man. Or the female friends who’ve applied for jobs at an advertised salary, only to be offered less, despite having more qualifications and experience than the job required. Or who have been paid less than their male subordinates. Or the times I’ve been asked by family and friends why I’m not married, when they don’t ask my unmarried brother the same. Or the time I applied to rent an apartment, but the female real estate agent said that, while my income more than covered it, the landlord would prefer to rent it to a couple.
I’m not completely deluded. I didn’t think Clinton’s presidency would change this overnight, but it did represent hope that it would with time. Trump’s election doesn’t just crush that hope, it fills me with a dark and foreboding sense of dread. He won’t just stifle women’s rights. He’ll actively work to repeal them, beginning with Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court decision to give women the right to have an abortion. It was a watershed moment in the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and it precipitated many other social and political changes that benefited, not just women, but also other, previously oppressed, minority groups.
Repealing Roe v. Wade is the first step, in a great many, Donald Trump will take in order to restore America to the kind of America that allowed him and men like him—the kind who commit acts of violence or who condone violence against women and minorities—to prosper, and that’s the America he promised voters when he said he would make it great again.
Reflecting on Clinton’s loss, someone said to me, “It’s a good thing we don’t live there, I guess.” That would be true, if only America didn’t wield such grand social and political influence on nearly every other country in the western world.
If you don’t think America’s DNA isn’t present in our own country, just think about the deregulation of university fees that will allow universities to charge whatever they like and leave students in debt for the rest of their adult lives. That’s a pretty good example of the continued trend toward the American way of life. So is the National Democrat’s lobbying for relaxed gun laws. Or how about our ever-widening rich-poor gap, the persistent threat that Medicare will be dismantled, or the recent parliamentary inquiry into whether the Racial Discrimination Act stifles free speech.
This is a country that still refuses to legalise same sex marriage without a prohibitively expensive plebiscite so the same kind of bigots who voted to leave the EU and to elect Trump can have a say in the private business of complete strangers whose paths they may never cross. It’s the same country that, as a matter of Government policy, routinely infringes on the basic human rights of refugees, while the response of its citizens ranges from oblique indifference to a callous disregard for anyone with the misfortune of not being white or born in Australia.
How Americans voted in the 2016 election, and how Trump chooses to govern, may not have any direct impact on the lives of Australians, but it does help normalise the kind of violent, hateful and exclusionary behaviour that, as a society, we should be trying to put behind us for good.
In the wee hours of Thursday morning, feeling kind of lost, I watched Clinton deliver her concession speech:
For people of all races, and religions, for men and women, for immigrants, for LGBT people, and people with disabilities. For everyone. I am so grateful to stand with all of you.
And to all of the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.
Clinton’s loss is a loss for women, but it’s an especially devastating loss for human decency. Once in a million years, a lady like her rises. Once in a million years, indeed.
