Queen Bey

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hillary

I have a confession to make. I never liked Beyoncé. This is an opinion I kept to myself for years, because hating on Beyoncé is even less socially acceptable than dissing on Mother Teresa or slandering Michelle Obama (who I have always loved, less you think I am a complete sociopath).

I didn’t like her music. I found her personality cold and clinical. Her eyes soulless. Obviously, there was something deeply wrong with me.

The idea that she could be capable of making my favorite album of the year was completely inconceivable. But here we are in 2016, and Lemonade is without question my favorite album of the year.*

Equally improbably, I’ve also undergone a startling transformation into an avid, unapologetic Hillary Clinton fanatic. Though it was almost always a near certainty that I would support the Democratic nominee for president, especially when faced with the alternative of Donald Trump’s end-times demagoguery, I could not imagine myself casting anything more than a reluctant vote for Hillary.

I volunteered for Obama in 2008 and vociferously argued that Hillary’s values and judgment proved that she was ill-equipped for the presidency. My greatest criticism was reserved for her vote in favor of the Iraq War, a decision I felt was based on political calculation and revealed her lack of moral conviction.

So, I voted for Obama, and again in 2012 (I didn’t bother to volunteer that time out). And though I think he has been a fine president, probably the best we could ask for in these times, I’ve been profoundly disappointed that despite his admirable foreign policy restraint, he failed to extricate us from war. In fact, shockingly, Obama will be the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.

When Bernie Sanders mounted his galvanizing run for president, I was skeptical of his chances for defeating Hillary, but excited that his ideas were resonating so strongly with such a large swath of the electorate. If anything, I am even more left-wing/radical than Bernie in my political stances — I support complete nuclear disarmament, a guaranteed living wage regardless of employment, the decrimilization of all drugs — but it is tremendously exciting that socialist beliefs are finally entering the U.S. political mainstream for the first time in well over fifty years.

I sincerely hope that Bernie’s revolution continues to transform our political discourse, and that democratic socialist candidates begin to infiltrate every level of government from local elections to Congress and eventually the presidency. But when it comes down to it, I’m glad — thrilled! — that Hillary is our nominee.

Donald Trump represents the worst aspects of masculinity — the narcissism, the bullying, the greed, the misogyny. He’s losing every other demographic, but he’s winning white men by enough of a margin that he could really win this election.**

I want a woman to bring him down. The first American woman ever to secure a major party’s nomination.

I worked on a congressional campaign in 2006, and from that experience I learned that once a person has made their decision about who they are going to vote for, you can’t really change their mind. It’s sad to say, but those Trump supporters are a lost cause; don’t waste your time trying to reason with them. Whether it is a failure of education or empathy, it is an irreversible condition. They are like people who watch Back to the Future and root for Biff.

But you can turn up the dial on the enthusiasm for a candidate, and sometimes you can even convince someone of the folly of casting a protest vote for a third party, or worse, abstaining completely.

My mission between now and November 8 is do my part to turn up the enthusiasm on Hillary.

First, let me dispel this ridiculous complaint that we are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. Don’t you realize what an incredible privilege it is to be able to choose at all? Many people around the world just get evil with no choice in the matter whatsoever. We don’t have two candidates just handpicked by Satan (well, maybe one) or anointed by military coup or theological decree, but people that went through a primary process in a participatory democracy. One of those people just happened to dedicate her life to public service, while the other pursued only his own self-aggrandizement.

And for those of you who think that Hillary and Trump are nothing but two sides of the same corrupt coin, and that Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally interchangeable, you must either be too young to remember the George W. Bush presidency or need to test your reading comprehension by comparing the two parties’ written platforms.***

Many people I’ve talked to and seen vent over the Internet also seem to be under the misguided impression that casting a vote for Hillary implicitly signals that one endorses every aspect of her candidacy and character. Yet, there is literally nothing to stop you from casting a vote for Hillary on November 8, thus helping save us from the waking nightmare of a Trump presidency, and then going out on November 9 to protest her warmongering, her Wall Street connections, or any other bone you have to pick. In fact, you would be making our democracy stronger by doing so. Voting isn’t the end of our political participation; it is the very start. Non-participation is not an act of noble defiance, but solipsistic laziness.

While I believe mightily in the importance and relevancy of alternate parties, the way to effect change is not by voting for hopeless third party presidential candidates. Effective American democracy is about building from the ground up. The last real “third party” to rise to political prominence was the Republican Party, and though they elected Abraham Lincoln only six years after the founding of the party, they already had over 100 members serving in the House of Representatives alone by the time of his election in 1860. So, Greens, Libertarians, if you want your party to have credibility, put in the work needed to put candidates in power throughout the country; don’t just cast your vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson every four years and call it a day.

Personally, I think it is more effective to work within the existing system. If anything good has come from Trump’s rise, it at least goes to show that political parties can be infiltrated and subverted. Maybe we can do the same with the Democratic Party, but move it even further towards love and progressivism and away from moneyed interest.

One of the most frequent complaints against Hillary is that she will say or do anything to get elected, but history has proven that she tends to evolve towards more progressive positions. She moves from opposing gay marriage to being a strong advocate on LGBTQ issues. She goes from labeling groups of young black men as “super predators” to being a supporter of Black Lives Matter, and inviting Mothers of the Movement to speak at the Democratic National Convention. We should be thankful that we have a candidate so malleable to a progressive way of thinking, tempered with one of the most pragmatic political minds in the game. Vote for Hillary, become a part of her constituency, and keep moving her in the right (meaning left-wing) direction.

I know that many of my loftiest ideals will never be achieved in my lifetime. I’ll keep fighting for them, but I know that Hillary is at least a small step in the right direction. Few people know better than her the long, arduous, often boring path to change. Few people have also achieved as much by committing themselves to that path.

Perhaps you are still unconvinced. You will respond with a litany of Hillary’s unforgivable sins. Fine, I concede to all your rebuttals. If I need just one indisputable position, one justification for my vote, it is this: Hillary Clinton, like Beyoncé, is a strong woman.

The two are similar in other ways, too. Both emerged stronger from their famous husbands’ infidelities to go on to become the more culturally and historically relevant partner. Both got hot sauce in their bag.**** I’ve finally opened my eyes to their undeniable power. I hail Queen Bey and cast my vote for Hillary Clinton.

I want a strong woman as president. A woman who fought her way to the top, wasn’t just handed a VP position like Sarah Palin (the primogeniture to Trump’s bizarro world kingdom). In fact, I want to know a world where the patriarchy has fallen. I’m in agreement with Ruth Bader Ginsberg that there won’t be enough women on the Supreme Court until there are only women on the Supreme Court. If you want to improve the economy, make more women CEOs, it’s been proven that women-led companies perform three times better than the S&P. I long for a police force that is exclusively made up of female officers. Imagine how the dynamics of power, authority, and violence would change.

I’m not a self-hating man, but I’ve seen the white male privilege show long enough, and it’s just one long war movie. Maybe Hillary will be no better, but let’s find out. People say they want to vote for Trump to ‘shake things up’, like voting for a rich white guy is shaking things up. Some liberal friends of mine can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary because her track record on military intervention, though they had no compunction with voting for Obama twice. Somehow, Hillary has to not only be the first women president, but a perfect pacifist with no baggage. We’ve elected male slaveholders, war criminals, and thieves, and put some of them on Rushmore, but now that a woman has a shot at the presidency, the standards having suddenly risen much higher.

In this brave new world of feminine power one of two things will happen: either things will get better or we’ll realize that we’re the same destructive, power-hungry species regardless of what gender rules. Either way, it’s kind of a win.

The one thing I know with certainty is that Trump and his supporters represent the worst aspects of the masculine psyche. He must not only be defeated, but destroyed in a landslide. We must make his ideas of hate (his Wall, his call for a Muslim ban) no longer tenable for debate at the presidential level. Every so often, we as the American people get the opportunity to forever strike an ugly ideal from the political discourse — for instance, no longer can a candidate openly advocate for slavery or oppose a woman’s right to vote. Let’s consign Trump to the dustbin of history, and realign the poles of not just the Democratic party, but the nation as a whole, between the pragmatic progressivism of Hillary Clinton and the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders. Though, I hope that the next democratic socialist candidate is a woman.

Ladies (and gentlemen), now let’s get in formation.