“Why Are You Still Talking About Hillary Clinton?”
It’s becoming a common refrain: “MOVE ON! The election is over. Hillary is no longer relevant. By continuing to comment on her failure, you reveal that you’re something of an obsessive. Focus on Trump! He’s going to be president, not Hillary. Nyeh.”
Well, here’s why. For one thing, she’s still out there in the public eye, concocting excuse after excuse for why she couldn’t beat the guy from The Apprentice. Her media loyalists are also still out there in full force, spouting rationalizations of her conduct day after day, and denying culpability for their role in bringing about her failed candidacy.
They are confabulating a story to explain away the loss. If left un-rebutted, this “narrative” will eventually congeal into accepted wisdom, and it will then be cited for years and decades to come as reason why they are completely blameless. Notwithstanding their 2016 humiliation, the Clintons still have a huge, well-funded, and feverishly devoted PR apparatus, including a vast array of functionaries and loyalists inhabiting all different segments of elite society. These loyalists have made clear their desire to implant into the public psyche the idea that Hillary is not responsible for her defeat — it was the fault of a whole bevy of sinister exogenous forces. By now we all know the list: Russia, Comey, “fake news,” the New York Times, blah blah blah. Always curiously omitted from this list is the fact that the Clintons had record-breaking, virtually infinite reserves of money, and yet somehow were unable to allocate it effectively. (How much did they spend on “THINK OF THE CHILDREN” TV commercials featuring Trump saying mean curse words? I saw them on constant repeat in Ohio the final week before the election.)
Liberal media elites and their allies are so resistant to the “Hillary failed” narrative in part because they are directly indicted by it. If such a narrative were to take hold, they would be seen as complicit in the failure. So counteracting it is pure self-preservation for these characters. In a media ecosystem with a healthy incentive structure, those who failed would lose professional prestige and be shunted aside, to be supplanted by others. Instead, the chronically wrong suffer no consequences at all. They will actually gain notoriety, social approbation, and money. That’s how the system works — it’s fundamentally rotten.
If people who deserve blame refuse to accept it, and continue to occupy positions of power, then it’s rational to conclude that their pathologies will be left unchecked, and the inevitable result will be more failure. Nothing will change. That, in brief, is why we are still talking about Hillary.
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