So, I did it. I read Hillary Clinton's "What Happened", ie, her account of how the 2016 election played out. I plan to respond to it more fully, but before I do, I feel a need to outline my account of the events as they took place, and explain why I thought as I did. Many aspects of my opinion should be well known as I talked about them in 2016 and you can read that stuff here, but I feel a need to go back over my own approach to the election, in order to properly address Clinton's account.
My line of thinking leading up to 2016
As you guys know, I deconverted from Christianity and left conservatism around 2012. These events are not entirely unrelated, and represent a larger worldview shift in my thinking away from my conservative Christian roots a la understanding the times, and toward a liberal worldview based in secular humanism. In my view, Christianity and conservatism we're very much the same. And of course, liberalism was based more in a secular worldview.
Between 2012 and the 2016 election cycle, I spent a lot of time fleshing out my worldview, and what it meant to be a humanist liberal. Being educated, I didn't just shift from one political tribe to another, I took it upon myself to figure out what I stood for myself. I brought some relevant lessons from conservatism to my new liberal worldview. I saw welfare as deficient at properly helping people, and divisive in how it was set up. I viewed a lot of the flaws that plagued liberal safety nets as due to the compromises made at the time. Feeling no need to moor myself to the history of the democratic party and its flaws, I approached the issues as we understood them from a new perspective. I looked at how welfare was inefficient, broke up families, and caused division, and I quickly discovered UBI was a superior approach. I became fixated on UBI, realizing that it would fix many problems throughout society, more on this a little later. I looked at the ACA and recognized it was a flawed and watered down idea, and that we should really be looking into single payer. I realized if the left just went FURTHER left, and stopped obsessing with incrementalism and bureaucracy, and embraced universal safety nets, they could ironically address core right wing issues with safety nets regarding fairness and efficiency.
Economically, I come from a city in Pennsylvania that is arguably part of the rust belt. It has suffered for decades from urban decay and job loss, and during the recession, hit rock bottom. It was considered one of the poorest cities in America. I graduated into this crap economy, with double digit unemployment and no "opportunities". Good luck finding a job in my field, it was hard to find anything at all that wasn't a minimum wage job. The economy has been an issue of fascination for years at this point, being a public policy guy, I kind of looked for my niche, and I wanted fixes for how to solve it. So I started researching. Again, I came across ideas like universal basic income, medicare for all, and free college. By 2014 my current views started taking shape, and by the end of 2014, I started publishing my first iterations of my UBI plan on someone else's blog.
For me, it seemed clear that the problem with the economy was our current paradigm. Since 1980, the republicans dominated our discourse, pushing small government and attacking our safety nets and the legacy of the previous democrat dominated generation of politicians from FDR to LBJ. While their legacy was never perfect, it was a lot better than what came after, and since the 1980s the democrats have been on defense. This reflects the mirror opposite of the previous FDR alignment in which democrats dominated and republicans had to kow tow to their agenda in order to remain relevant.
But between Reagan in 1980, and Clinton in 1992, the two party consensus went way to the right, to the point that even the democrats preached the gospel of small government. And that was, to me, the most pressing issue that I saw going into the 2016 election. We needed change, it was time. Party alignments only last 36 years or so before falling apart, and the last major realigning election was 1980. One can do the math and see that it was time for change.
If I had my way, I would have run on a "new new deal" of universal basic income, free college, and student debt forgiveness. The three core problems for me seemed to be:
1) The economy wasnt working like it was used to. Jobs were no longer providing for people like they did. We talked endlessly about creating jobs since the recession, but all we had to show for it were a bunch of minimum wage jobs that paid poorly and were wage slavery. We should expect nothing less from a market led recovery. Let's talk about what "creating jobs" actually was. It's essentially trying to incentivize rich people to give poor people something to do, on the basis that full employment is an inherent good for society. But the recession taught me that poverty is artificial and mostly due to the fact that we rely on jobs to provide for people any way. Rich people want to hire the least amount of people for the least amount of money to do the most amount of labor. The government wants rich people to hire everyone and pay them decent wages and treat them decently. This is one of those contradictions of capitalism that no one seems to notice and no one seems to care about. And the result is a workforce that is underpaid, overworked, and told that they're lucky just to have the "opportunity" to be a wage slave.
We talk endlessly about making jobs better, but there is no better. Maybe you can regulate businesses to pay people better. Or treat them better. But then unemployment will go up, or so economics suggests. To get "full unemployment", you get an economy where everyone has a job but many can't live on the jobs. It's nonsense.
Not to mention in my post christian worldview, I quickly recognized that this fixation on work and purpose is one of religious origin, stemming from the protestant work ethic. Under secular humanism, there is no objective morality, or inherent purpose. We work for nothing, and we are slaves to the economy. At least that's my understanding of it. There's nothing glorious about work.
2) We need universal healthcare. In addition to healthcare being tied to employment, a stupid system that leads to many being stuck on the margins, especially as the ACA forced employers required to pay for healthcare to start hiring people part time to evade the law. I mean, again, why tie this stuff to employers? Unless you want a society of slaves where people are forced to work to get healthcare, it makes little sense. And even then, millions work and still lack the healthcare they need, simply because the system sucks.
Much like how we need to end poverty by having a UBI, the only way to end the problems with healthcare is with single payer. And not only is this a matter of employment and unemployment. Many people who bought healthcare under the exchanges spent 400+ a month for healthcare they couldnt even use because they had $5000 deductibles. This especially hit people right above the medicaid cutoffs hard. ANd let's not forget how many states rejected the medicaid expansion or in some cases like PA, implemented it in the most passive aggressive ways to actively deter people from getting on it.
The fact is, while the ACA did some good things, it still completely and utterly failed others. It is clearly not the ultimate solution to Americans' healthcare woes, but a series of band aids and duct tape intended to hold the system together. Single payer was the ideal approach in my opinion, and if the rest of the world can have systems like this, why can't we?
3) As many people in my generation quickly found out, the economy isn't exactly producing the prosperity that was promised. For many of us, a college degree was the way to prosperity. We were told if we wanted to avoid a lifetime of working in McDOnalds, we had to go to college. Then as we graduated, we found the economy oversaturated with college grads, the jobs just aren't there, and we were then told "what are you too good to work in McDonalds now, college boy?" Many of us were left tensa of thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege to just TRY to get out of poverty. There were no guarantees, just a chance. Like we're all gambling tens of thousands of dollars with many of us failing along the way. We need a system where college is free for all who want it. perhaps student loans were a bad idea. Like many liberal proposals it meant well, but it just ballooned the cost of college and left students stuck with the bill. But, like many things, the answer wasn't to go back to the conservative status quo of only the wealthy going to college, but to have full on free college and student debt forgiveness to those who went.
I could go on and on all day about the need for those proposals, but going into 2016, this was generally how I was thinking. Of course, I was open to other solutions. Higher minimum wages, a stricter FLSA, more unionization, other scandinavian style policies like reduced work weeks, vacation time, etc. I knew UBI was a step too far for most people, but i recognized at minimum, we needed some sort of shift LEFT. We needed to, at the very least, push us away from reaganism and the "new democratic" legacy of the democratic party, which I liked to Vichy France to the republicans' "Nazi germany". Not quite as bad as the big bad, but complicit and cooperative with the people who were solving the problem.
Maybe that is a bit too far and I shouldnt godwin the republicans, given since 2016 they've trnded dangerously close to fascism, but it's just an analogy to explain how I viewed them.
Of course, I was a bit more cordial toward the democrats at this time. I talked to a lot of people since becoming a liberal in 2012, and found the democrats relatively open to change going into 2016 generally. A lot of people seemed to want change, and many who I talked to about my ideas were open to and fascinated by them.
Thinking about candidates, there were two who stood out to me. Everyone knew Hillary would probably run again, but Hillary just...didn't do it for me. She was Bill Clinton's wiife, and active in his administration. She represented the old way we needed to get away from. I was more interested in Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who both seemed to be possible standard bearers for the left flank of the party. Warren ended up not running, but Sanders did, and I preferred him anyway. He explicitly supported 2/3 of my priorities: medicare for all, and free college, and while he didn't support UBI yet, literally no one was talking about it and I considered it an unattainable pipedream in the mean time. The last time it was taken seriously was in the 1970s shortly before the country succumbed to reaganism, and it would take shifting the environment back to more left wing politics before we could even begin to discuss it. So I was able to put it aside for the mean time in the name of the greater good.
This should give you an idea of what I wanted out of 2016. A transformative candidate who shifted the discourse left, and pushed for larger, more universal solutions to ideas. We needed to take control of the narrative again and put the GOP on the defense. It seemed to me that it was time for the GOP to collapse again like they did during the FDR era, and for the left to become ascendant.
The first rumblings something was going horribly wrong
By the end of 2014, after the GOP slaughtered the democrats in the mid terms, a lot of this was going on in my head. It seemed to be the obvious problem was one of motivation. Obama was a lame duck. He had been under relentless assault since 2011 from a GOP who just wouldnt compromise. At first, as a quickly moderating conservative, I supported his initiatives to compromise, but after I realized the GOP was crazy, I quickly expected more from him. THey arent going to compromise dude, stop trying. That's the thing. All of that bipartisanship didn't work. We tried, they werent interested, we were dealing with crazed ideologues. Time to move left and move forward despite them. But instead obama just talked about job creation endlessly (yawn, JOBS ARE NOT THE ANSWER), and how democracy was hard work, and blah blah blah.
If I were president, I would have been using the bully pulpit, blaming the GOP squarely for obstruction, pushing the policies, I supported, and taking my appeal directly to the american people: GIVE ME A CONGRESS.
After all, my state, Pennsylvania, was the one that bucked the trend. We actually went blue in 2014, the only swing state to do so. The tea party got too crazy for us, and we shifted left as a result. We were fired up, everyone else was beat down and demotivated. We needed a left wing candidate to motivate and galvanize people going into 2016. THe democrats didn't do this. They talked endlessly about compromise and democracy, and just rolled over to the GOP, and it seemed obvious the reason people weren't voting for them was because they weren't DOING ANYTHING. I became frustrated, and hoped that in 2016 we would begin to shift the other way.
A month later I was watching CNN on Christmas Eve. You'll understand why I knew it was Christmas eve by the context of the story. I was watching some talking heads talk about 2016. And they were all gushing over Hillary Clinton. I was kind of lukewarm on her, I didn't hate her yet, but I didn't like her either. I wanted someone more left than her. I already supported Bernie, even back then. He was only 1% in the polls, and unknown too much of the public. I was hoping that in the coming months we would start hearing about challengers in the 2016 primary to her, like say, Warren or Sanders. Somewhere in the conversation, the prospect of a left wing challenge to Hillary came up. Suddenly the host changed the subject and had to go to commercial. Then suddenly the network was talking about NORAD tracking santa claus that night. Hence how I knew that the conversation took place on Christmas eve.
It seemed...off. I mean, they were all gushing over Hillary Clinton. Hillary, this, Hillary that, isn't hillary so wonderful. But the second the idea of someone challenging her from the left came up, suddenly they had to go to commercial. It seemed fishy. Like they didn't want to talk about this.
I always knew news has biases. Fox was conservative, but CNN and MSNBC were liberal. But I expected the networks to at least be fair to their own side. If there was a credible challenge to Hillary Clinton, I would think that should be news worth discussing. But CNN actively suppressed coverage of the study, and I could tell that they were doing it.
It was then that I knew this might be a LOOOONG election season.
"You better vote for Hillary or else"
As the race shaped up in early 2015, things didn't get any better. While discussion of a left wing challenger became more common, there was a lot of opposition to it, and a lot of it was quite hostile and vitriolic. This is completely absent from HRC's book by the way. She always talked about how Bernie supporters threw a lot of hostility at her supporters, but I am under the impression the Hillary camp threw the first punch.
The fact is, the Clinton camp acted like the race was over before it even began. Hillary was pushed early on with an air of "inevitability". We were told that Bernie and the like couldn't win. They were "too far left". We needed someone who was more "pragmatic". We needed someone with experience. We needed incrementalism. We couldn't piss off the republicans after all. Uh, hello, has anyone been watching the same past 4 years that I had? WHo cares what they think? They oppose us anyway. "Electability" was a common concern brought up.
Even more concerning was that the Clinton camp online seemed to predict problems with people not falling in line. We were told early on that no matter who won the primary, we had to support the democratic nominee. I wasn't opposed to that, but these were often the same people telling us that Clinton was inevitable and that Sanders couldn't win. By the transitive principle, what they were saying was quickly decoded by me as meaning "Hillary is going to be the nominee, and you BETTER support her, or else." Or else what you might ask? Or else a republican might win. ANd that would be bad. Quite frankly, this rhetoric was extremely alienating to me. I went into 2016 planning to support the democratic nominee whomever it was, but I expected a spirited debate over ideas. Instead the clinton camp was suppressing a lot of discussion, telling us that our efforts were futile, and we better just fall in line.
As an ex Christian, as exconservative humanist, this was deeply alienating to me. I didn't leave the GOP just to be ordered around by THESE PEOPLE. I was a free thinker. I will vote for whomever I want. The GOP couldn't control me, and these people think they can? I mentioned my grievances, only for them to get even more shrill and hostile. The mask came off pretty quickly and they often denigrated my concerns, my remarks, and quite frankly, my entire worldview. The message was loud and clear. It was her turn, and we peons better fall in line.
It's ironic. I didnt think about voting third party until these guys started pulling this crap. but the louder they yelled and the more they mocked sanders and my beliefs, the more I found myself flirting with voting third party. It was almost a form of reverse psychology on me. The more these guys told me not to do something, the more I would double down and be like "oh no, I'm going to do it." After dealing with the hostility and dripping condescension, it seemed to be the only weapon I had. And it worked in riling them up.
"But the court"
By march, the propaganda about the court already started coming out. We were almost a year from the actual primary, and these guys were already screaming about the court. Allen Clifton of forward progressives, a facebook group I had been following since 2012, released an article talking about how four SCOTUS judges were in their late 70s or 80s and how this was scary and they were going to die in office and how Trump could nominate replacements and then we would be DOOMED, DOOMED I SAY.
I didn't buy it. It seemed like outright fear mongering. The democrats just didn't get it. I cared about policy. I cared about change. But on that stuff the democrats were just talking me down and telling me all of the scary things that would happen if I didn't vote for them. As they dug in with these talking points, I dug in on not committing my vote to the democrats. I wouldn't support the GOP mind you, but I was floating voting green all the way back then. This wasn't new behavior. In 2008 as a Ron Paul supporting conservative, I flirted a lot with voting for Bob Barr. I never really had an issue with voting third party. I believed that candidates had to earn my vote. And as a conservative I felt my opinion was respected. No one bullied me into voting McCain to avoid Obama. And inevitably I did support McCain in 2008. But the hostility I experienced from the democrats just for not pledging my undying loyalty to Hillary was unlike anything I had ever experienced previously, and I found it to be in opposition to my very being. I'm sorry, but for democracy to work, we need an informed citizenry with the courage to vote as they want. A party demanding a vote is uncoming of democratic values to me. Parties may ask for votes, but ultimately it is up to the voters to support them. In a society based on consent of the governed, I wasn't giving my consent to someone just because they demanded it. That's the stuff tyrants are made of. No, candidates and parties had to earn my vote, not demand it. And bullying me out of fear not only didn;t persuade me to support them, it actually had the backfire effect. For all of the talk of russians and propaganda persuading me to not vote democrat, no, the #1 thing that made me not vote democrat was....democrats trying to bully me to vote democrat.
Untangling the democratic lexicon
It seemed quite clear that all of this pro hillary rhetoric was coming from somewhere. It was bizarre, I never experienced anything like this before. It was as if the entire discourse soured overnight and the internet was flooded with pro hillary talking points everywhere. As if there was an organized effort to flood the internet with pro hillary content. Obviously, the same arguments would come up over and over again, and the same rhetoric would be used. I would like to focus on a lot of the talking points I experienced over and over again and decode what many of them actually mean.
"Pragmatic/pragmatism"- How do you tell people we don't want to do something without telling someone that we don't want to do it, since it will alienate them? Well, you pretend you can't. You start saying things like Bernie's plans can't work, and how we need to think smaller. The whole goal was to shift the spectrum of debate away from big ideas toward small ones, creating the idea that the big ones can't be done and we need to implement small ones. Given how I studied Bernie's plans extensively on this blog, I think this is a load of BS. My only issue is Bernie's plans is compatibility with my desire for a $4 trillion UBI plan, Bernie's plans are fine. Basically this was just a bad faith argument to water crap down.
"Incremental change"- Another buzzword to talk people into settling less. Again, how do you tell people you dont want to do something while being diplomatic? Well you tell them it can't be done. You can't fool the anti work person with this stuff, because I am aware of "weaponized incompetence."
"Progressive who likes to get things done"- More focus on the political feasibility of various ideas. Ironically a lot of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. Political feasibility is a buzzword and it is made up by our choices and collective consciousness every day. All we need to do to make something happen is to change our minds. By emphasizing political feasibility it is making it harder to accomplish progressive ideas. This particular line also emphasized Hillary's connections with other people in Washington, and the idea that she could work with others better than Bernie did. But if those political connections are the problem, and in a lot of ways they are (if you think the system is corrupt getting an insider will just net you more corruption), then this ins't a positive point. I also think that this line of thinking has been debunked by the biden administration's ideas getting further watered down to uselessness. Thanks Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.
"Hillary is inevitable"- a catch phrase that basically amounted to "resistance is futile". The goal was to demoralize Sanders supporters into submission, making them give up their futile efforts to have a candidate who isn't Hillary Clinton.
"She is electable"- Again, trying to limit the spectrum of debate, taking the idea of a more left candidate off the table. Basically shocking people into voting for moderation out of fear of loss rather than voting for what they want out of principles.
"Vote blue no matter who"/"party unity"- Come on guys, we gotta remain united as a party, you have to vote for the democratic nominee whomever it is, right? Riiiight? But it's going to be Hillary. So you better be prepared to vote for her.
"If you don't vote for us Trump/republicans will win"- deflecting from their own platform/problems, and toward the opponent. If you can't win people on the basis of your ideas, you win them on the basis of what will happen if you don't support them. But isn't this...admitting defeat in winning people over on the battle of ideas and leveraging one's position in an oligopoly to force people to support you even if you do nothing for them? At this point the mask is coming off.
"I'm with Her"- Hillary's creepy logo which had the weird authoritarian idea that we should all be with her, rather than she with us. Bernie people basically made up the slogan "he's with us" in response to this.
"But the court"- Another argument explaining what will happen if you don't vote for Hillary. More fear mongering.
"But duverger's law..."- emphasizing the duopoly and pushing a false choice that you have to support the democrats or you get the republicans.
"A vote for a third party is a vote for Trump"- Basically more shaming to try to get us to support Hillary on the basis of fear of the alternative. As Obi Wan Kenobi once said, only a sith deals in absolutes.
"Democrats fall in love, republicans fall in line"- Really taking the mask off there, bud. Republican authoritarianism is nothing to admire. I joined the democrats upon leaving christianity because I supported free thought. I don't value the authoritarianism of the GOP, and we shouldn't be like them. That's what makes us BETTER. Although at this point i was seriously starting to wonder if democrats were better.
Also, it's not even true. I WAS on the right. Im familiar with their power struggles. ANd you know what? The party establishment has been losing since the 1990s and being replaced with more radical candidates. Democracy works on the right. Although it does inevitably lead to more radical voices winning. But given I was thinking "we need a tea party of the left" at the time, I kind of valued that model and wanted to replicate it on the left. Have i changed my mind on this somewhat? Perhaps a little, given the Jimmy Dore crowd are those people. But still, given where we were, it made sense.
Again, in 2008, I often floated the idea of supporting bob barr as i hated mccain. I didn't, but no one ever begrudged my choice back then. The only time i got actual hatred from conservative friends was when I started becoming an actual liberal. But i digress.
---
As you can tell, based on the words and vocabulary used, the democrats put in minimal effort to appealing to their left flank. Their concerns were ignored. We were told to STFU, keep our heads down, and vote Hillary. We were flooded with a barrage of talking points that focused more on trying to bully people into voting for a candidate they didn't want, than running a candidate that had the support of the people. It's like they knew what they were doing, expected problems, and basically just went full steam ahead, and made a gamble that they could bully people into supporting someone they didn't want to support. This gamble ended poorly.
It should be noted all of these talking points were available as early as Q1 2015. I was arguing with people in like March 2015 over this crap, almost a year before the first ballots were cast. The democratic strategy was to downplay Bernie, ignore him as long as possible, and then bully his supporters into backing Hillary. It was really crooked and sinister.
The Bernie Bro argument
Despite Hillary talking endlessly about how much she cared about policy in her book, policy really didn't seem to be her priority in the primary. Outside of talking about how Bernie's ideas couldn't work and how "pragmatic" she was, there was little discussion of policy. I found most of the discussion took a more mean spirited turn. Hillary's campaign seemed to deflect from policy, knowing she couldn't win on that front, and focused more on identity politics as a result.
Her team crafted the "Bernie bro" argument. The idea that Bernie's base of support represented mostly white college educated males, and that he didn't represent the "true" base of the party. Ie, women, latinos, African Americans, the LGBT community, etc. So...what did she do? Denigrate us as a bunch of "bros". A bunch of racist sexist people who cared little about intersectionality and blah blah blah. Was it true? Not really. Bernie started his political career marching with MLK Jr. for civil rights, and since I started his book after finishing Hillary's I can point that out. And even I, for as hostile to that stuff as I am now, used to be a lot more even handed on it. I knew intersectionality was important. I studied these kinds of issues in college, and I knew that those groups were important constituents to the democratic party. And Bernie had a decent platform to that effect. I mean, I'm gonna be honest, I never focused extensively on social justice issues, and quite frankly, I found them out of my area of perview, but as long as they weren't directly contradicting my own ambitions, I was willing to work with them. But as the Clinton campaign weaponized such issues against us, to purity test us in weird ways where we didn't obsess over social justice and pander obnoxiously to POC and the like we were bad people, I quickly cooled on them and started calling them out. I was never a die hard adherent to the "religion" of social justice, mind you. Just a casual supporter. But as I found my political camp being denigrated for being racist and sexist and not making these are #1 issues and not virtue signalling endlessly about how much we care, I started getting alienated.
The fact is, Hillary pulled a dirty one here. Because she couldn't win on policy, she played up the social justice angle, being an avowed feminist who was obsessed with that stuff, and started accusing the Bernie camp of being racist and sexist. The sexist accusations were ridiculous. I had nothing against a woman running for president. And I would vote for a woman if they aligned with my policy goals. Hillary just wasn't THE woman. But as she focused on being the "first female president" and denigrating her opponents as being sexist, I became increasingly alienated from social justice politics, and the democratic party. And now I arguably meet the stereotype of a bro and quite frankly don't care. Economics is my top priority, not identity politics, and I refuse to compromise that.
But this further drove a wedge between myself and Hillary's campaign and the democratic party at large.
Overall worldview differences
Honestly, I felt like myself and Hillary were just operating on different wavelengths for what we wanted. My views were closer to Bernie's. I wanted a "political revolution" (party realignment) to shift politics away from the status quo. Hillary was a defender of that status quo. She ran as a third term of Obama more or less and was intent on continuing his policies. But this did nothing for me. Honestly, I very desperately wanted change. I don't see a good future for myself without a significant shift to what it means to survive and thrive in this economy. All I see ahead of me is a future of poverty, wage slavery, or both. For me, the economic resentment was real, and I yearned for change. I didn't want another 4 years of the same thing. But again, Hillary was the epitome of an establishment candidate. She saw her husband's administration as saving the democratic party. She saw those politics as good, and largely seemed unwilling to move the needle at all. And while she loves to play herself up as a policy wonk, her policies quite frankly sucked, and reeked of the democratic incrementalism I despised all of my life, both as a conservative who hated "big government" and as a progressive who wants "modern and effective government".
With worldviews a la understanding the times, my worldview was primarily based on secular humanism, which evolved into my left wing understanding of the world. Hillary on the other hand was a methodist Christian, with a religious view of the world, and that worldview was mixed with postmodernism. And it just led to different policy preferences. In some ways I considered Clinton too moderate. She seemed too uncomfortable with abortion and gay marriage due to her religious roots. On economic issues, she was a full on jobist, because methodism is essentially one of those protestant work ethic obsessed christian ideologies. But then on identity issues like those involving race and gender, she was insufferable to the point of being down right toxic in my opinion. We just did not see eye to eye on politics, and she wasn't what I wanted at all. I discussed much of this in 2016, and outlined these arguments far more eloquently than I have here. But suffice to say, I was not a fan of Clinton. She was technically on my side of the aisle but didn't represent ME.
And then there were her comments about how universal healthcare would never come to pass and how we're not Denmark but the United States of America. More gatekeeping the spectrum of debate. What if I wanted to be more likeDenmark and wanted to leave the America circlejerking to the republicans? Why does arguing with Hillary remind me of arguing with a conservative? I mean, this is the left, and I know Clinton represents the side of the aisle that basically caves to the right within the left, but it just felt alienating. I literally had no representation here.
Blatant media biases
While a lot of people like to point out how negative the media was toward clinton, I honestly felt like Bernie couldn't get a fair shake at all. The media was often forced to report on clinton's problems like her emails, etc. Meanwhile, the anti Bernie coverage was a lot more insidious. As I talked about earlier, there was a systemic attempt to suppress coverage of Bernie so people didn't know who he was or what he stood for in any objective manner. When the media was forced to cover him, it was often biased and negative, with the talking heads going on and on and on about how his policies didn't work and the numbers didn't add up (total BS, and I say this as a wonk myself). In one town hall, CNN started the discussion going on quoting how Bill Clinton said in 1996 the era of big government was over....then asked how much his plans would increase the size of government. So....using right wing talking points and the words of his opponent's husband to frame the debate against him. It was BS. It was as if there was an organized effort to make Sanders look bad and to make Clinton look good, and it wasn't really that subtle.
The primary process and the "democratic kill switch"
After a year of this, voting finally started. Honestly, it was always an uphill battle for Sanders. Clinton started out in a position of having 60% of the electorate locked up, while Bernie started with 1%. This was a battle of Bernie needing to gain market share, while Clinton had to maintain it. This is what made the past year so frustrating. Bernie started with nothing. Clinton started with the winning hand. All Clinton and her cronies needed to do was to portray her as the inevitable candidate and dissuade people from pursuing other options. Sanders had to fight for every single vote he recieved. Like most early candidates, he focused on early primary states. And he did fairly well. He lost Iowa narrowly, and won New Hampshire. But then he fell apart. He never had a chance, really. Insurgeant candidates need to put all of their effort into making a breakthrough in Iowa and New Hampshire, and failing that, they often just die out. Many candidates will make good showings early on just to fall apart after that, and that's what Bernie ended up doing. Jill Stein even referred to Super Tuesday as the "kill switch" of the democratic party.
The thing is, Clinton's rhetoric about Bernie not being good for black people, women, etc. worked. And most minority demographics went for Clinton. I don't think Bernie was really a bad candidate on say, Black issues, but many of them just saw no reason to jump ship from Bernie. And for some reason these groups went for this obnoxious pandering. Given the over 50 crowd dominates elections and primaries, and they are often democratic loyalists, insurgeant candidates often have little chance of winning within the party. This is why Yang eventually formed Forward, and prioritized open primaries as one of his major policy reforms. You can't break through in the democratic party.
Super Tuesday was really the finishing blow. The democratic party front loaded southern states full of minority demographics, which led to Bernie having an exceptionally poor showing.
Pressure for Bernie to get out
And of course, once Bernie fell behind, the rhetoric changed to pushing Bernie out as fast as possible. Why? "Party unity". The party was obsessed with minimizing dissent. They were intent on locking this up as fast as possible and pushing people to unite behind Clinton. Except...by this point, I had no intention of uniting. Screw that. I was pissed off at this point. The treatment Bernie and his supporters had recieved was obnoxious and alienating, and after this, I had no intention of uniting. I was done. Maybe if the process felt less biased and more fair, and if there were more reasonable concessions to the left to win me over, but given my policy preferences were ignored and I felt bullied into supporting her, not a chance.
But, the democrats pushed anyway. They pushed constantly for Bernie to get out of the race and endorse Clinton. Bernie decided to stay in it, and the party establishment despised him for it. He did concede at the convention and endorsed Hillary, but they wanted him out in March. It was really irritating to me. Like, let the man run already, Jesus. but the democrats had other ideas.
The convention
I actually responded in a pretty detailed manner to the 2016 democratic convention back in 2016, but for the sake of summarizing it here, I think my statement about how there was a little something for everyone, but for me, was relevant here. The democrats had so many religious choirs it felt like a church show. They had feminists on about how they wouldn't shut up. People virtue signalling by speaking spanish and going on about illegal immigrants. And honestly, on economics, it was just, fall in line. Yes, hillary offered some concessions to the Bernie people, but it was all window dressing. Yes, there was talk about "the most progressive platform ever", but honestly, I don't think it was any more progressive than the platforms of the new deal era, unless you were obsessed with identity politics (and they were), and it felt very underwhelming to me. If anything, the weird Christian worldview that was present seemed to glorify perserverence in suffering, while my own worldview was about solving suffering. Given I was an avowed atheist at the time, this just reminded me of why I hated religion. Even as a spiritual person now, it was cringe since my spirituality is very much compatible with the secular humanist worldview on values, and the Christian dogma is just bizarre to me. I still believe it should be largely done away with as a society.
"Correct the Record"
Soon after the convention, the environment changed radically on websites I participated in like Reddit and Facebook. Before the convention, the environment was one of defiance and not bowing down to Hillary and the democrats. After, these sites were flooded with bots and trolls. WHole subreddits seemed to be taken over by democratic party operatives with dissent crushed. I got banned from several subs just for calling out the odd behavior and confronting obvious propaganda accounts, many of which were later banned from reddit as a whole for harassment and various other reasons. Die Hard Bernie or Busters ended up congregating on subreddits made for them, and from there, they radicalized.
Essentially what happened was David Brock made a pro Clinton superPAC that he dumped millions of dollars into to argue with people online to defend Clinton's record (hence, correct the record). While the effort seemed to work, with many dissenters being driven off of social media or otherwise shouted down by an angry mob, it just left me extremely alienated and made me even MORE likely to defect from the democrats.
Russian hacks (guccifer and wikileaks)
I feel a need to discuss this aspect here since I admit this stuff did influence my behavior. Although as you can tell, by the time this stuff came out, I was already turned off. I didn't need Russians hacking emails to know that there was coordination between Clinton and the media. I didn't need them to know that there was an inherent internal bias against Bernie in general. All this really did was give us ammo and confirm what many of us knew for months, but often lacked solid proof of. What these leaks did was give us evidence. Nothing more, nothing less. THe damage was already done and self inflicted by the party.
NeoMcCarthyism
The democrats didn't respond well to their BS being outed. They went in full damage control mode, screaming that anyone who believed any of this stuff was a Russian stooge and how we shouldn't listen to Russia. While I admit Russians did hack the servers with the intention of undermining Clinton, because they had their own foreign policy spats with Clinton, I was honestly more focused on how resentful I was for my treatment by the democratic party. Clinton mentioned in her book it was as if the country had a weakened immune system, and gee, I wonder why. Maybe because your party and your campaign sucked so bad they alienated wide swaths of the population to the point people WERE growing resentful?
Anyway, I dont think that it's fair to just accuse anyone who didnt like the democrats of being Russian stooges. My opinion would have remained the same regardless of whether the hacks happened. Because I just hated the democrats by this point. And I was still cognizant enough to point out how biased RT was despite being supposedly influenced by Russian propaganda. I know when I'm being propagandized thank you very much. As you guys can tell I can change on a dime if a faction I support goes against my better interests. Look at how I've kicked Forward to the curb in the past month. My views are my views and Ill support whomever advances my interests and I'll reject anyone who doesn't. I have no intention of being manipulated by Russians. But that doesn't mean I'll allow American propaganda to influence me either. The fact is, when you get to the point of accusing everyone who isn't on your side of being a russian stooge, I think you've doth protested too much. What the democrats were doing in 2016 onward came off as mccarthyism, and it was a common tactic to repress left wing viewpoints throughout history.
Comey and those damned emails
Honestly, this never impacted my decisions. My grievances with Clinton should be well known by now and I focused primarily on left wing criticisms of the party. I wasn't about to legitimize right wing BS about emails and Benghazi and stupid crap like that. I have principles. And those controversied were made up. As Bernie once said, the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your (her) damned emails. That's where I was at with that.
The outcome
Despite my personal opinions, I try my best to provide objective media coverage, and I could tell that Clinton was going from being the inevitable victor to being in trouble in the past few days. On election day, I reported that there was a narrow, but possible avenue of victory for Trump, and ended up giving Clinton a 56% chance of victory. Lower than any official outlet, who acted like Clinton had it in the bag. Even Nate Silver gave her a 65% according to Clinton's book, so I had it more right than him. Still, I did not really expect the rust belt to fall. I gave PA around a 68% chance of Clinton victory, Michigan was like an 84% chance, and Wisconsin a 94% chance. Seeing the rust belt fall was baffling to me, but at the same time, it seemed to demonstrate a sound rejection of Clinton's campaign in this area of the country, and I can't be surprised by it honestly.
Maybe I speak too much from my lens, but my own opinion was that the rust belt was winnable for the democrats. The margins here were narrow, and as long as the rust belt held, it quite frankly didn't matter what else happened. All Clinton needed was like one other swing state and Trump would've been unelectable. I remember in 2014 conservatives were lamenting that as long as democrats held the blue wall, that republicans would be unelectable for a generation. Losing the rust belt was, in my opinion, a tactical error. Clinton ignored the pain in this region of the country, and had poor policy prescriptions to solve the problems here. Bernie probably would have won here, and therefore would have won the election.
Honestly, I had schadenfreude over her loss. After being bullied for so long by the democratic party and its campaign messaging, I finally had a HA IN YOUR FACE moment. I didn't want trump to win. I knew a trump presidency would be a disaster. While lesser educated people who wanted a change agent rolled the dice on that, I personally could not, instead opting for Jill Stein. I didn't really like Stein policy wise. I knew she was an anti vaxxer who was blowing smoke. It was a pure protest vote against the democrats. But seeing the democrats lose by such small margins really just drove home for me the fact that this election could've easily been won by democrats but wasn't, because Clinton managed to piss off and alienate just enough people to lose.
Aftermath
I really hoped 2016 would be a wakeup call to the democratic party to get their crap together, but instead their insularity has caused them to blame everything but themselves for their defeat. They literally spent the next year screaming about Russia and James Comey rather than admitting that maybe they screwed up. And of course they STILL blame us Jill Stein supporters, despite the fact that many of us would have easily voted democratic if they ran a different campaign, with a different candidate, with different policies. No one votes third party as a first choice. We often wish the duopoly candidates were worth supporting. Voting third party is a pure protest vote. But rather than actually learn their lessons, the democrats would rather direct more hatred and derision at us rather than actually validate and empathize with our concerns, which keeps me locked in a cycle of refusing to vote for them.
The democrats may have won in 2020, but the Biden presidency is turning out to be very lukewarm like Obama's, with many people wanting Biden to not run again in 2024 and democrats having relatively low approval. While the GOP overturning roe v wade may have bought them some breathing room, I really am not sure the future of the democratic party here. Which is scary given Trump has shifted the party more openly to a form of fascism lite. Honestly, 2016 was a realigning election, but it was one of terrifying proportions, with the Clinton/Trump divisions persisting for several election cycles into the present day. Now we're looking at a potential Trump/Biden rematch in 2024, and unless democrats can keep people happy enough with their governing, the GOP may win again. It's scary, but the democrats really did dig themselves into this hole.
Conclusion
I just wanted to go through the process of explaining my account of 2016 before responding to Clinton's book. It actually was a good exercise, because it really explains the massive differences between Clinton's views and my own, and just how much she lost the plot in 2016.
Clinton blames her loss primarily on factors like Russian intervention and James Comey, while seemingly justifying her own decisions to run the campaign she did. While the book did somewhat change my views of her for the better, I still feel like she has massive blind spots. That said, I would like to respond to the book in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment