By Thomas Frank
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
A month ago I tried to write a column proposing mean
nicknames for president-elect Donald Trump, on the basis that it would be funny
to turn the tables on him for the cruel diminutives he applied to others.
I couldn’t pull it off. There is a darkness about Trump
that negates that sort of humor: a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so
profound that no insult could plumb its depths.
He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns
ever. In saying so I am not referring to his much-criticized business practices
or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a purely technical sense:
this man fractured his own party. His convention was a fiasco. He had no ground
game to speak of. The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his
side on the campaign trail was extremely short. He needlessly offended
countless groups of people: women, Hispanics, Muslims, disabled people, mothers
of crying babies, the Bush family, and George Will-style conservatives, among
others. He even lost Glenn Beck, for pete’s sake.
And now he is going to be president of the United States.
The woman we were constantly assured was the best-qualified candidate of all
time has lost to the least qualified candidate of all time. Everyone who was
anyone rallied around her, and it didn’t make any difference. The man too
incompetent to insult is now going to sit in the Oval Office, whence he will
hand down his beauty-contest verdicts on the grandees and sages of the old
order.
Maybe there is a bright side to a Trump victory. After
all, there was a reason that tens of millions of good people voted for him
yesterday, and maybe he will live up to their high regard for him. He has
pledged to “drain the swamp” of DC corruption, and maybe he will sincerely
tackle that task. He has promised to renegotiate Nafta, and maybe that, too,
will finally come to pass. Maybe he’ll win so much for us (as he once predicted
in a campaign speech) that we’ll get sick of winning.
But let’s not deceive ourselves. We aren’t going to win
anything. What happened on Tuesday is a disaster, both for liberalism and for
the world. As President Trump goes about settling scores with his former
rivals, picking fights with other countries, and unleashing his special
deportation police on this group and that, we will all soon have cause to
regret his ascension to the presidential throne.
What we need to focus on now is the obvious question:
what the hell went wrong? What species of cluelessness guided our Democratic
leaders as they went about losing what they told us was the most important
election of our lifetimes?
Start at the top. Why,
oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive
resume; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the
wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country
was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the
country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn
and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up
a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something
that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern,
several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with
his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and
largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but
neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate
even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war,
and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited
to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private
email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton
Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.
To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that
the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a
fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest
player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn.
Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about
Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s
well-being, or maybe both.
Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much,
either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed
such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of
the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that
really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three
times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the
newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.
Here’s what it consisted of:
• Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless
leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and
children, a warrior for social justice.
• Her scandals weren’t real.
• The economy was doing well / America was already great.
• Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
• And if they were, it was only because they were botched
humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the
Republican candidate.
How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate
came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting
the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed
opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly
have gone wrong with such an approach?
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Put this question in slightly more general terms and you
are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar
class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who
really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone
who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to
consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted
from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
The even larger problem is that there is a kind of
chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a
hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver
nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those
nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere
else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds
that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of
the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and
now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these
comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism
and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!
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