Donald Trump lurks behind Hillary Clinton as she answers a question from the audience. (photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters)
Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a
reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar,
climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian
ambitions and kleptocratic plans.
By Rebecca Solnit, The London Review of Books
omen
told me they had flashbacks to hideous episodes in their past after the
second presidential debate on 9 October, or couldn’t sleep, or had
nightmares. The words in that debate mattered, as did their delivery.
Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton 18 times (compared to 51
interruptions in the first debate). His reply to the moderator Anderson
Cooper’s question about his videotaped boasts of grabbing women by the
pussy, which had been released a few days earlier, was: ‘But it’s locker
room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of
Isis … And we should get on to much more important things and much
bigger things.’ Then he promised to ‘make America safe again’ – but not
from him. That week, women and Isis were informally paired as things
Trump promised to assault.
But words were secondary to actions. Trump roamed,
loomed, glowered, snarled and appeared to copulate with his podium,
grasping it with both hands and swaying his hips, seeming briefly lost
in reverie. The menace was so dramatic, so Hitchcockian, that the
Hollywood composer Danny Elfman wrote a soundtrack for a video edit
playing up all the most ominous moments. ‘Watching Trump lurching behind
Hillary during the debate felt a bit like a zombie movie,’ Elfman said.
‘Like at any moment he was going to attack her, rip off her head, and
eat her brains.’ Friends told me they thought he might assault her; I
thought it possible myself as I watched him roam and rage. He was, as we
sometimes say, in her space, and her ability to remain calm and on
message seemed heroic. Like many men throughout the election, he
appeared to be outraged that she was in it. The election, that is. And
her space.
In the ninety-minute debate, Trump lurched around the
stage gaslighting, discrediting, constantly interrupting, often to
insist that she was lying or just to drown out her words and her voice,
sexually shaming (this was the debate in which he tried to find room in
his family box for three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual
harassment or assault), and threatening to throw her in prison. Earlier
in the campaign he’d urged his supporters to shoot her. ‘Hillary wants
to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,’ he rumbled at one
of his rage-inciting rallies, following a patent untruth with a casual
threat: ‘By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do,
folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t
know.’ At the Republican Convention Chris Christie led chants of ‘Lock
her up!’ In the spring, Trump retweeted a supporter who asked: ‘If
Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can
satisfy America?’
Perhaps the president is married to the nation in some
mystical way; if so America is about to become a battered woman,
badgered, lied to, threatened, gaslighted, betrayed and robbed by a
grifter with attention-deficit disorder.
Trump is patriarchy unbuttoned, paunchy, in a baggy
suit, with his hair oozing and his lips flapping and his face squinching
into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation.
He picked as a running mate buttoned-up patriarchy, the lean,
crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience
in government, signing eight anti-abortion bills in his four years as
governor of Indiana, and going after Planned Parenthood the way Trump
went after hapless beauty queens. The Republican platform was, as usual,
keen to gut reproductive rights and pretty much any rights that
appertained to people who weren’t straight, or male, or white.
Misogyny was everywhere. It came from the right and
the left, and Clinton was its bull’s-eye, but it spilled over to women
across the political spectrum. Early on some of Trump’s fury focused on
the Fox presenter Megyn Kelly, who had questioned him about his
derogatory comments about other women’s appearance. He made the bizarre
statement on CNN that ‘you could see there was blood coming out of her
eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.’ He also denigrated his
opponents’ wives and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina’s face; he
obligingly attacked Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe, in a
flurry of middle-of-the-night tweets after Clinton baited him about his
treatment of her; he attacked the women who accused him of assaulting
them after the grab-them-by-the-pussy tape was released.
Trump’s surrogates and key supporters constituted a
sort of misogyny army – or as Star Jones, the former host of the talk
show the View put it, ‘Newt Gingrich, Giuliani and Chris Christie:
they’ve got like the trifecta of misogyny.’ The army included Steve
Bannon, who as head of the alt-right site Breitbart News hired Milo
Yiannopoulos and helped merge the misogynistic fury of the men’s-rights
movement with white supremacy and anti-Semitism to form a new cabal of
far-right fury. After being dismissed from Fox News in July, when more
than two dozen women testified about his decades-long sexual harassment,
degradation and exploitation of his female employees, Roger Ailes
became Trump’s debate coach, though they soon fell out – some reports
said Ailes was frustrated by Trump’s inability to concentrate. The Fox
anchor Andrea Tantaros claimed that under Ailes, Fox was ‘a sex-fuelled,
Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and
misogyny’. It seems telling that the rise of the far right and the fall
of truthful news were to a meaningful extent engineered by a television
network that was also a miserable one-man brothel. But that old
right-wing men are misogynists is about as surprising as that alligators
bite.
Clinton was constantly berated for qualities rarely
mentioned in male politicians, including ambition – something, it’s safe
to assume, she has in common with everyone who ever ran for elected
office. It’s possible, according to Psychology Today’s headline, that
she is ‘pathologically ambitious’. She was criticised for having a
voice. While Bernie Sanders railed and Trump screamed and snickered, the
Fox commentator Brit Hume complained about Clinton’s ‘sharp, lecturing
tone’, which, he said, was ‘not so attractive’, while MSNBC’s Lawrence
O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone, Bob
Woodward bitched that she was ‘screaming’ and Bob Cusack, the editor of
the political newspaper the Hill, said: ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her
voice, she loses.’ One could get the impression that a woman should
campaign in a sultry whisper, but of course if she did that she would
not project power. But if she did project power she would fail as a
woman, since power, in this framework, is a male prerogative, which is
to say that the set-up was not intended to include women.
As Sady Doyle noted, ‘she can’t be sad or angry, but
she also can’t be happy or amused, and she also can’t refrain from
expressing any of those emotions. There is literally no way out of this
one. Anything she does is wrong.’ One merely had to imagine a woman
candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand
what latitude masculinity possesses. ‘No advanced step taken by women
has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public,’ Susan B.
Anthony said in 1900. ‘For nothing which they have attempted, not even
to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and
antagonised.’ Or as Mary Beard put it last year, ‘We have never escaped a
certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.’
Trump harped on the theme that Clinton had been in
power for thirty years, seeming to equate her with feminism or
liberalism or some other inchoate force that he intended to defeat, and
in these narratives her power seemed huge and transcendent, looming over
the nation the way he’d loomed over her in the second debate. By
figures on both the right and the left, Clinton was held to be more
responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for
the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration,
responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda
rather than she his. The narratives cast her as a demoness with
unlimited powers, or as a wicked woman, because she had had power and
aspired to have power again. One got the impression that any power a
woman had was too much, and that a lot of men found women very scary.
The very existence of Clinton seemed to infuriate a
lot of people, as it has since at least 1992. It’s complicated to talk
about misogyny and Clinton, because she is a complex figure who has been
many things over the decades. There are certainly reasons to disagree
with and dislike things she has said and done, but that doesn’t explain
the overwrought emotionality that swirls around her. Raised as a
conservative (and hated on the left during this campaign for having been
a ‘Goldwater Girl’, though she stumped for him as a non-voting
high-school student), she soon became a radical who campaigned for the
most left-leaning Democratic candidates in 1968 and 1972, registered
Latino voters in Texas in the latter election, wrote a thesis on Saul
Alinsky, who afterwards offered her a job, advocated for rights for
women and children, and shifted right in the 1980s, perhaps to adapt to
her husband’s home state of Arkansas or to the Reagan era.
You could pick out a lot of feminist high points and
corporate and neoliberal low points in her career, but for anyone more
interested in the future of the US and the world her 2016 platform
seemed most relevant, though no one seemed to know anything about it.
The main networks devoted 32 minutes to the candidates’ platforms in
their hundreds of hours of election coverage. Lots of politicians have
been disliked for their policies and positions, but Clinton’s were often
close to Sanders’s, and similar to or to the left of every high-profile
male Democrat in recent years, including her husband, Obama, Biden,
Kerry and Dean. But what was accepted or disliked in them was an outrage
in her, and whatever resentment they elicited was faint compared to the
hysterical rage that confronted her as, miraculously, she continued to
march forward.
Trump’s slogan ‘make America great again’ seemed to
invoke a return to a never-never land of white male supremacy where coal
was an awesome fuel, blue-collar manufacturing jobs were what they had
been in 1956, women belonged in the home, and the needs of white men
were paramount. After the election, many on the left joined in the
chorus, assuring us that Clinton lost because she hadn’t paid enough
attention to the so-called white working class, which, given that she
wasn’t being berated for ignoring women, seemed to be a euphemism for
‘white men’. These men were more responsible than any group for Trump’s
victory (63 per cent of them voted for him; 31 per cent for Clinton).
One might argue she lost because of the
disenfranchisement of millions of people of colour through long-plotted
Republican strategies: cutting the number of polling stations; limiting
voting hours; harassing and threatening would-be voters; introducing
voter-ID laws such as the Crosscheck programme, which made it a lot
harder for people of colour to register to vote. Or because of the FBI’s
intervention in the election; or because of years of negative media
coverage; or because of foreign intervention designed to sabotage her
chances; or because of misogyny. But instead we heard two stories about
why she lost (and almost none about why, despite everything, she won the
popular vote by a margin that kept growing until by year’s end it
reached almost three million).
The We Must Pay More Attention to the White Working
Class analysis said that Clinton lost because she did not pay enough
attention to white men since the revived term ‘white working class’
seemed to be a nostalgic reference to industrial workers as they once
existed. Those wielding it weren’t interested in the 37 per cent of
Americans who aren’t white, or the 51 per cent who are women. I’ve
always had the impression –from TV, movies, newspapers, sport, books, my
education, my personal life, and my knowledge of who owns most things
and holds government office at every level in my country – that white
men get a lot of attention already.
The other story was about white women, who voted 43
per cent for Clinton to 53 per cent for Trump. We were excoriated for
voting for Trump, on the grounds that all women, but only women, should
be feminists. That there are a lot of women in the United States who are
not feminists does not surprise me. To be a feminist you have to
believe in your equality and rights, which can make your life unpleasant
and dangerous if you live in a marriage, a family, a community, a
church, a state that does not agree with you about this. For many women
it’s safer not to have those thoughts in this country where a woman is
beaten every eleven seconds or so and women’s partners are the leading
cause of injury to them. And those thoughts are not so available in a
country where feminism is forever being demonised and distorted. It
seems it’s also worse to vote for a racist if you’re a woman, because
while white women were excoriated, white men were let off the hook
(across every racial category, more men than women voted for Trump;
overall 54 per cent of women supported Clinton; 53 per cent of men voted
for Trump).
So women were hated for not having gender loyalty. But
here’s the fun thing about being a woman: we were also hated for having
gender loyalty. Women were accused of voting with their reproductive
parts if they favoured the main female candidate, though most men
throughout American history have favoured male candidates without being
accused of voting with their penises. Penises were only discussed during
a Republican primary debate, when Marco Rubio suggested Trump’s was
small and Trump boasted that it wasn’t. ‘I don’t vote with my vagina,’
the actress Susan Sarandon announced, and voted for the Green Party
candidate, Jill Stein, who one might think was just as vagina-y a
candidate as Clinton but apparently wasn‘t.
‘One of the many lessons of the recent presidential
election campaign and its repugnant outcome,’ Mark Lilla wrote in the
New York Times, ‘is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought
to an end,’ and he condemned Clinton for calling out explicitly to
African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop.
‘This,’
he said, ‘was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in
America, you had better mention all of them.’ Who’s not on that list,
though it’s one that actually covers the majority of Americans?
Heterosexual white men, notably, since it’s hard to imagine Lilla was
put out that Clinton neglected Asians and Native Americans.
‘Identity politics’ is a codeword for talking about
race or gender or sexual orientation, which is very much the way we’ve
talked about liberation over the last 160 years in the US. By that
measure Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Bella Abzug, Ella Baker,
Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Del Martin and Harvey Milk were just lowly
practitioners of identity politics, which we’ve been told to get over.
Shortly after the election Sanders, who’d got on the
no-identity-politics bandwagon, explained: ‘It is not good enough to
say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have
to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class
of this country … It is not good enough for someone to say: “I’m a
woman, vote for me.” No, that’s not good enough.’
In fact, Clinton never said this, though one could
argue that Trump had said, incessantly, aggressively, I’m a white man,
vote for me, and even that Sanders implicitly conveyed that message. The
Vox journalist David Roberts did a word-frequency analysis on Clinton’s
campaign speeches and concluded that she mostly talked about workers,
jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for
neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 times, racism, women’s rights
and abortion a few dozen times each. But she was assumed to be talking
about her gender all the time, though it was everyone else who couldn’t
shut up about it.
How the utopian idealism roused by Sanders’s promises
last winter morphed so quickly into a Manichean hatred of Clinton as the
anti-Bernie is one of the mysteries of this mysteriously horrific
election, but it was so compelling that many people seemed to wake up
from the Democratic primary only when Trump won; they had until then
believed Clinton was still running against Sanders. Or they believed
that she was an inevitable presence, like Mom, and so they could hate
her with confidence, and she would win anyway. Many around me loved
Sanders with what came to seem an unquestioning religious devotion and
hated Clinton even more fervently. The hatred on the right spilled over
into actual violence over and over again at Trump rallies, but the left
had its share of vitriol.
I had seen all around me a mob mentality, an
irrational groupthink that fed on itself, confirmed itself and punished
doubt, opposition or complexity. I thought of the two-minute group hate
sessions in 1984:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was
not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it
was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence
was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a
desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer,
seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric
current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming
lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected
emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the
flame of a blowlamp.
That emotion was directed at Clinton, and was ready to
swerve towards anyone who supported her, accompanied by accusations of
treason and other kinds of invective.Many supporters fell silent or
took to supporting her in secret, which is not the kind of support a
candidate needs. A San Franciscan friend wrote saying that every woman I know and almost every journalist or
opinion writer who planned to vote for her included in every single
positive statement about her – everything from Facebook posts to lengthy
major media articles – something to the effect of ‘She is of course not
a perfect candidate, but …’ or ‘I of course have serious problems with
some aspects of her record, but …’ It became the boilerplate you had to
include to forestall the worst of the rage-trolls (inevitably eventually
someone would pop up anyway to accuse you of trying to shove your
queen’s coronation down everyone’s throat, but at least the boilerplate
delayed it).
‘I’ve come to believe,’ Sady Doyle wrote, ‘that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act.’
Mentioning that she’d won the popular vote upset many
of the men I am in contact with, though they would not or could not
conceive it that way. I wrote this at the time: ‘With their deep belief
in their own special monopoly on objectivity, slightly too many men
assure me that there is no misogyny in their subjective assessments or
even no subjectivity and no emotion driving them, and there are no
grounds for other opinions since theirs is not an opinion.’ Then these
men went back to talking about what a loser Clinton was. There was
considerable evidence that we had not had a free and fair election,
evidence that might have allowed us to contest it and to stop Trump.
But
these men of the left were so dedicated to Clinton’s status as a loser
that they wanted Trump to win, because it vindicated something that went
deeper than their commitment to almost anything else.
Trump was the candidate so weak that his victory
needed the disenfranchisement of millions of voters of colour, the end
of the Voting Rights Act, a long-running right-wing campaign to make
Clinton’s use of a private email server, surely the dullest and most
uneventful scandal in history, an epic crime and the late intervention,
with apparent intent to sabotage, of the FBI director James Comey. We
found out via Comey’s outrageous gambit that it is more damaging to be a
woman who has an aide who has an estranged husband who is a creep than
actually to be a predator who has been charged by more than a dozen
women with groping and sexual assault.
Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a
reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar,
climate-change-denying white-nationalist misogynist with authoritarian
ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white
men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s
victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed
to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours,
and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld
from her because she did not deserve it or did not attract them. They
did not blame themselves or the electorate or the system for failing to
stop Trump.
fter
the Women's March, I wrote that Donald Trump and his Republican
colleagues responded to the largest single-day protest in American
history with a big middle finger by quickly acting, in direct contradiction to the March's goals, to restrict reproductive rights, both at home and abroad.
he
“sanctuary cities” that President Trump has repeatedly characterized as
incubators of crime are generally safer than other cities, according to
a new analysis of FBI crime data.
onald
Trump is president of the United States. We can talk about how he is
not our president all we want, but those are just words. It is time for
action. Remember the Tea Party? Remember their reaction to the election
of Barack Obama?
