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Thomas Frank: 'Donald Trump Is Moving to the White House, and Liberals Put
Him There'
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/donald_trump_is_moving_to_the_wh
ite_house_20161109/
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Posted on Nov 9, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump. (Gage Skidmore
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/) / CC BY-SA 2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/) )
"What the hell went wrong" on an election night that gave the United States
President Trump, asks Thomas Frank
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/donald-trump-white-ho
use-hillary-clinton-liberals) , author of "Listen, Liberal
(http://www.truthdig.com/tag/listen_liberal) " and one of the Democratic
Party's most able critics, at The Guardian.
Trump, who will soon go about "settling scores with his former rivals,
picking fights with other countries, and unleashing his special deportation
police on this group and that. ... 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. .
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?
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!
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly (http://www.truthdig.com/alexander_kelly)
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