By Andrew Sullivan
Friday, April 14, 2017
I’ve done what I could in this space to avoid the subject
of Hillary Clinton. I don’t want to be the perennial turd in the punchbowl. I’d
hoped we’d finally seen the last of that name in public life — it’s been a long
quarter of a century — and that we could all move on. Alas, no. Her daughter
(angels and ministers of grace defend us) seems to be positioning herself for a
political career. And Clinton herself duly emerged last week for a fawning,
rapturous reception at the Women in the World conference in New York City. It
simply amazes me the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party — and
on liberals in general. The most popular question that came from interviewer
Nick Kristof’s social-media outreach, for example, was: “Are you doing okay?”
Here’s Michelle Goldberg: “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and
night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?” Seriously, can you
imagine anyone wondering the same after Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or
John Kerry blew elections?
And everywhere you see not an excoriation of one of the
worst campaigns in recent history, leading to the Trump nightmare, but an
attempt to blame anyone or anything but Clinton herself for the epic fail. It
wasn’t Clinton’s fault, we’re told. It never is. It was the voters’ — those
ungrateful, deplorable know-nothings! Their sexism defeated her (despite a
majority of white women voting for Trump). A wave of misogyny defeated her
(ditto). James Comey is to blame. Bernie Sanders’s campaign — because it
highlighted her enmeshment with Wall Street, her brain-dead interventionism and
her rapacious money-grubbing since she left the State Department — was the
problem. Millennial feminists were guilty as well, for not seeing what an
amazing crusader for their cause this candidate was. And this, of course, is
how Clinton sees it as well: She wasn’t responsible for her own campaign — her
staffers were. As a new book on her campaign notes, after Clinton lost the
Michigan primary to Sanders, “The blame belonged to her campaign team, she
believed, for failing to hone her message, energize important constituencies,
and take care of business in getting voters to the polls.” So by the time the
general-election campaign came round, they’d fix that and win Michigan, right?
Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the
entire Democratic establishment, including the president (his biggest mistake
in eight years by far), and was even married to the last, popular Democratic
president. As in 2008, when she managed to lose to a neophyte whose middle name
was Hussein, everything was stacked in her favor. In fact, the Clintons so
intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all
but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she
still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly,
stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his
honeymoon in the Soviet Union. She ran with a popular Democratic incumbent
president in the White House in a growing economy. She had the extra allure of
possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate —
would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In
the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no
political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose
negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one. Her
convention was far more impressive than his. The demographics favored her. And
yet she still managed to lose!
“But … but … but …” her deluded fans insist, “she won the
popular vote!” But that’s precisely my point. Any candidate who can win the
popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and still manage to lose the Electoral
College by 304 to 227 is so profoundly incompetent, so miserably useless as a
politician, she should be drummed out of the party under a welter of derision.
Compare her electoral college result with Al Gore’s, who also won the popular
vote but lost in the Electoral College: 271 to 266. For that matter, compare
hers with John Kerry’s, who lost the popular vote by 1.5 percent — 286 to 241.
She couldn’t even find a halfway-decent speechwriter for her convention speech.
The week before the election, she was campaigning in Arizona, for Pete’s sake.
And she took off chunks of the summer, fundraising (at one point, in the swing
states of Fire Island and Provincetown). Whenever she gave a speech, you could
hear the air sucking out of the room minutes after she started. In the middle
of an election campaign, she dismissed half of the Republican voters as
“deplorable.” She lost Wisconsin, which she didn’t visit once. I could go on.
And so I find myself wondering at odd times of the day
and night: Why is Trump in the White House? And then I remember. Hillary Clinton
put him there.
***
Every day, the incoherence deepens: He’s going to cover
“everyone,” but he’s going to push 24 million people off their health
insurance. He’s going to wipe out the debt, but his tax cuts and spending spree
will add trillions to it. He’s never going to intervene in Syria, but he just
did. He’s going to get Mexico to pay for a big, beautiful wall, but he isn’t.
China is a currency manipulator, but it isn’t. The media is the enemy of the
people, but he is on the phone with them every five minutes and can’t stop
watching CNN and reading the New York
Times. He’s going to be a tightwad with taxpayers’ money, unlike Obama, but
his personal travel expenses are on track to be eight times more than his
predecessor’s. He’s going to work relentlessly for the American people but he
spends half his days watching cable news. We’ve got to be “very, very tough” in
foreign affairs, but when he sees dead babies on TV, he immediately calls
General Mattis and lobs 59 Tomahawk missiles. He has a secret plan to defeat
ISIS, but pursues Obama’s strategy instead. He is for the “forgotten men and
women” of America, but his tax plan — which is itself changing all the time —
benefits the superrich and depends on removing health insurance for the working
poor. He wants to be friends with Russia, but he doesn’t. He’s going to
challenge China’s policy on Taiwan, but he isn’t. He is against crony
capitalism, but he is for it. He’s going to keep the focus on America, but just
upped the ante in Yemen and Afghanistan. He’s a deal-maker, but he cannot make
deals even with his own party. He’s a great manager, but his White House is
consumed with in-fighting and he cannot staff his own administration. He’s a
populist who stacks his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alums. He’s going to
pressure China to take on North Korea, but “after listening for ten minutes” to
China’s dictator, he changes his mind.
I could go on. You can try to argue that Trump has simply
pivoted to the center, like so many other presidents before him. But the statements
he has made in just the last six months, and the policies he has pursued for
the last three, have gyrated so wildly, have so little consistency, and make so
little sense that there is no assurance that in another three months, he won’t
be back where he started, or somewhere even more clusterfucked.
What on earth is the point of trying to understand him
when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but
liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what
they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak,
we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for
anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser
of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the
next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just
whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes
whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or
whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look
like Abraham Lincoln. Occam’s razor points us to the obvious: He has absolutely
no idea what he’s doing. Which is reassuring and still terrifying all at once.
***
Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally
tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I
mean, what isn’t these days? That idea is from the New Republic. Yes, the cops “seemed” to be African-American, as the
author concedes, so the white-versus-minority paradigm is a little off. Yes,
this has happened before to many people with no discernible racial or gender
pattern. Yes, there is an obvious alternative explanation: The seats from which
passengers were forcibly removed were randomly
assigned. New York published a
similar piece, which argued that the incident was just another example of
Trump’s border-and-immigration-enforcement policies toward suspected illegal
immigrants of color. That no federal cops were involved and there is no actual
evidence at all of police harassment of Asian-Americans is irrelevant — it’s
all racism, all the time, everywhere in everything.
It’s easy to mock this reductionism, I know, but it
reflects something a little deeper. Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a
problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic
groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white
people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning
more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject
to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination
over the years. In the late 19th century, as most worked in hard labor, they
were subject to lynchings and violence across the American West and laws that
prohibited their employment. They were banned from immigrating to the U.S. in
1924. Japanese-American citizens were forced into internment camps during the
Second World War, and subjected to hideous, racist propaganda after Pearl
Harbor. Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous,
well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t
possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social
networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education
and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true,
positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that
the American dream still lives?
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