Hillary…
For anyone still struggling with the fact that half the country voted for Donald Trump, let me add my voice to those pointing to the greater of two evils. Last week, promoting her 2016 campaign autopsy “What Happened?”, the most well-qualified human to ever seek the office of President of the United States spoke these complete paragraphs to an audience in India:
If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won. I win the coasts, I win Illinois and Minnesota, places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you, is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product.
I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign — ‘Make America Great Again’ — was looking backward. You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want, you know, to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.
Maybe Trump could have avoided a lot of trouble if, instead of calling Haiti a “shithole,” he had merely said Haiti was not optimistic, diverse, dynamic, or forward-moving, and then implied that impoverished Haitian political support was of a lower moral order than that of wealthier Norway. Republicans have responded to Clinton’s remarks with a mild kind of outrage, although Paul Ryan has yet to break down in tears during a committee meeting, à la Corey Booker. The media is also conspicuously less outraged about Clinton saying that the Midwest voters are less valuable because of their lower incomes than they were about Trump making the same judgment about Haiti. When a couple of Midwestern political groups expressed outrage that Clinton had called their regions “backwards”, the neutral Washington Post was quick to point out these claims were false. Hillary didn’t call Wisconsin “backward;” she said it wasn’t forward moving, and that it was seduced by a backward looking campaign. It’s logically possible that such a region is facing forward, although stationary, and willing to look backwards. That’s hugely different from “backwards” — good reporting WaPo.
These are ugly remarks from Clinton. At least Mitt Romney, when he disparaged 47% of the U.S. as “takers,” was only trying to say that he wouldn’t try to win their support, not that their votes shouldn’t count as much as those of more productive people. And at least Donald Trump pretends he doesn’t hate average people — he loves the poorly educated, remember? Hillary seems worse than both. Anyone still wondering where Sarah Palin gets her “Real America” nonsense from should look to Democratic party leaders who go to India and say that the part of America that didn’t vote Democrat — “the middle” part — isn’t the good part of America.
There’s more than just contempt revealed in Clinton’s statement. It also shows the kind of leader we turned down in favor of Trump: namely, a self-indulgent and divisive narcissist with a poor grasp of the issues. Literally no one needs this divisiveness from Hillary, in what is likely yet another paid appearance. Her ongoing justification for her 2016 election loss helps no one but her, and probably makes life a little harder for Democrats who will have to defend her comments on the campaign trail. But this isn’t new: Clinton has been single-handedly tanking Democratic electoral prospects since 2015, when she bought the DNC and froze out Joe Biden in her always unlikely quest for personal glory.
On the other hand, at least, Democrats will be able to benefit from Clinton’s dazzling electoral analysis which shows that Trump supporters “don’t like women, you know, getting jobs.” Obviously female Trump supporters don’t feel that way, but the smartest woman in every room sees into their hearts with equal perspicacity: Middle American women didn’t support her because they face “a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Yes. Midwestern women are so dominated by their husbands, sons, and bosses, that they cannot express their own electoral preferences even in an anonymous voting booth. Clinton has repeatedly expressed her belief that women, by virtue of their identification as people who do things that biologically female persons are culturally expected to do — or whatever gender identity means — must vote for Hillary Clinton, or else they are betraying their gender and future generations of women. She told NPR in September that white women “will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’” But it is a dismal feminism that tells women they must renounce their own judgment and autonomy and vote Democrat, or else they will be perceived as lacking judgment and autonomy.
To the non-Hillary supporting Midwestern women I know, those are fighting words (or would be, if they were fighting women). Which is why I’m confident that Clinton has never actually discussed her theories face-to-face with any of the millions of male-dominated women in the low-GDP middle of the U.S. If Hillary wants to try it, she is welcome to tell my mother, who has a computer science degree and an MBA, that she doesn’t understand her own interests; that she is dominated by her half-Mexican, half-deplorable husband, who is six years younger than her and makes slightly less money; that she, who sent her daughter — but none of her sons — to a prestigious Ivy League university, is betraying her gender by not being ready for Hillary.
I give her, and middle-American women in general, more credit than that. I think they know that Donald Trump, even at his most Access-Hollywood-abhorrent, is only a real danger if he gets within grabbing distance. Whereas Hillary is less easily evaded, since she wants to immortalize her dumbed-down, degrading feminism in a vast central bureaucracy which will universally enforce her view that all women are identical. It’s an easy choice, actually. In the 2016 campaign, Clinton cheered her friend Madeleine Albright when she said “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help one another.” But if the only alternative to hell is Hillary…
