The United States is a female-majority nation. Women are 54%. When Clinton stepped onto the stage of the Democratic Convention exactly a year ago, she became the first representative of that 54% to assume the nomination of a major party. Not a single one of those nearly 160 million people stepped onto that stage before. Outside the convention hall in Philadelphia, Sanders' supporters chanted the same misogynistic filth that we heard just the week before from the circus that was the Republican National Convention: "lock her up"; "trump that bitch."
That moment of her nomination should've been a moment that transcended petty politics; it was a moment in which we broke another barrier as a nation. No matter who they voted for, all Americans should have felt proud of that breakthrough in representation.
But how could they congratulate her if one of the other candidates was Donald Trump, a self-admitted sexual predator. How could Clinton be congratulated by Sanders’ base; so many of them fueled by an irrational hatred of the woman?
Supporters of Donald Trump and those of Bernie Sanders did, and still do, seem more interested in complaining than engaging in this ever-imperfect Republic. The work of building that more perfect union was taken up generation after generation. It was never easy. It was never meant to be.
The generation of Rosa Parks and Harvey Milk and Martin Luther King and Buzz Aldrin... they relied on their grit and not their complaints in order to reach for the ballot box, the mountain's Summit and the moon.
We have great models: men and women who taught us by example that it is impossible to solve our problems with a "nothing matters but us" attitude.
Hillary Clinton was booed as she accepted the Democratic nomination by people who shared the same fundamentally un-democratic “all-or-nothing” inspiration with those who idealistically took on Republican Karen Handel back in June fully expecting to win. When they lost that bid, it moved them to declare that "our brand is worse than Trump."
Georgia's 6th Congressional District hasn't gone to a single Democrat since 1979. Not a single one. But the youthful “insurgent candidates” were so sure of their own perceived superhumanity that they genuinely believed they alone could fix it.
Sound familiar?
For their loss, this cadre of sometimes-blue folk lashed out against the “system” which, once again, provided the salve of a scapegoat to their egos and demanded no real action moving forward.
Hillary Clinton represents a “system” that so many Americans abhor. They despise it for not working quickly enough to respond to the needs of too many who have to go without (this is a broken system that people like Clinton worked decade after decade to improve and they did so with certifiable results.
Others dislike the “system” because it takes effort to participate in civil democracy. There are parts of the United States where punctuation is treated as public enemy number one and the broader pursuit of functional literacy is a scourge to be avoided. This environment manufactures souls who'll buy the notion that a plutocrat can be anti-elitist because he eats junk food.
Hearing Sanders’ supporters proclaim that Democrats “don't succeed” because they've built a “brand that is worse than Trump” reveals not simply a tolerance but an affinity for one of the worst hallmarks of Trumpism: a transactional approach to politics that spurns the values of good governance and trades them in for the quick and cheap high of winning a race that has no immediate meaning beyond the symbolism of narrowly “showing them” that “we” are capable of coming out ahead in this pissing contest.
“Winning” isn't the only thing that must motivate public discourse. Doing the right thing matters too.
Or at least it should…
Then there's the long game. We in the United States aren't exceptional in our belief that we are exceptional. We need to tone that down and start fixing problems. And in this area we can and should allow credit where it's due: when it comes to mending flawed or ruined systems, we've proven time and again that Americans, like many others across the world, have consistently risen above our shortcomings to incrementally build a future that is cumulatively more just and kind than our past.
“Nothing matters but us” is the anti-anthem of every faction in America today. When we obsess over attaining the instant gratification of a quick fix, we miss the point of our bigger national picture. That wider view is at least as important as the demands of the present moment seem desperate.
Take Ruline Steininger. She waited through a pandemic, two world wars, two international depressions, the discovery of a cure for polio, the first Catholic president, a man on the moon, the end of smallpox, two attacks on American soil, an African-American president and the digital revolution. The sheer span of her life puts the arch of history into perspective:
Ruline was born a full seven years before women had the right to vote. As she witnessed President Obama command two resounding victories, she and all of us understood the historic significance this carried to black Americans who make up 13% of the population and form a foundational mark in the identity of the United States. When they took that step forward in representation at the highest office of government, we all took that step in solidarity and pride. All of us; every single mainstream leader and every mainstream constituency in every non-lunatic community in America.
President George W Bush was able to reach beyond partisan politics because he understood that the moment demanded it. Aware that history had it’s eyes on this transition, he addressed the nation:
"No matter how they cast their ballots, all Americans can be proud of the history that was made yesterday. Across the country, citizens voted in large numbers. They showed a watching world the vitality of America's democracy, and the strides we have made toward a more perfect union. They chose a President whose journey represents a triumph of the American story -- a testament to hard work, optimism, and faith in the enduring promise of our nation.
Many of our citizens thought they would never live to see that day. This moment is especially uplifting for a generation of Americans who witnessed the struggle for civil rights with their own eyes -- and four decades later see a dream fulfilled."
John McCain seemed to take genuine consolation from his own loss because he understood that a journey which began when African Americans gained the right to vote in 1870 had reached a point that could finally be acknowledged:
“In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans, who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president, is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.
This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight”
Senator McCain concluded by thanking his opponent for doing “something great for himself and his country.”
A woman who may have wanted to go to the polls in 1870 could not have cast her vote together with her black and white male compatriots. But we can reached a moment where it's easy to imagine Ruline thinking “we women are next.”
Citizens who believe in the promise of a more perfect union and committed to work towards it understood that these thresholds aren't just abstract theoretical History.
Anyone who met Ruline Steininger understood that.
She was a living, breathing example of one of those people who never thought she'd see a woman nominee take the stage at a national convention.
Donald Trump began his victory speech like this:
“I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton.
(APPLAUSE)
She congratulated us — it’s about us — on our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign. I mean, she — she fought very hard.”
At no point in his speech did he mention the historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy and the special significance it had for the 54% of our population who are women and for the rest of us as well.
As for his supporters, do we really expect people who distinguished their political rallies with witch-trial chants of “lock her up” while sporting t-shirts emblazoned with the words “trump that bitch” to congratulate Clinton on the historic nature of her candidacy?
How can we expect our compatriots who voted for a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women to even realize that history was made?
How do we call people who formed the October 8th Coalition our compatriots at all?
Following Donald Trump’s electoral victory, millions on the other end of the insurgency spectrum marched in the largest single day of protests in US history. The contemporary movements that inspired the Women’s March were identified by the organizers to include currents as diverse as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street; movements that, like Trumpism, share a deep distrust in our systems and institutions.
The organizers also invoked a list of 27 women who “paved the way for us to march.”
The absence of Susan B. Anthony spells a terrible irony. She marched and protested; sacrificed and got arrested… all so that she could pave the way for women to do more than just march: she effected a change in the system leading to their ability to vote.
And, as though that was not enough, the first woman we ever had the ability to vote for as a presidential candidate of a major party is also absent from the Women’s March pantheon of inspiration.
The organizers of the Women’s March had the opportunity to reclaim that moment in a rebuke to the omission by the president-elect. Their rebuke would have been amplified by the five million people who showed up to march. They failed. The 2016 election gave us everything from collusion and Russian trolls to Wikileaks, pussy tapes, FBI bombshells and quips about political assassination. But in the whole self-deprecating circus one thing was supposed to be simple. A student of mine who came in to see me the day after the election wanted to debate the validity of her vote in an age when the popular vote has so rarely decided the outcome of the election. Then she starting crying as she told me that her vote didn't matter.
This wasn't about the popular vote or the electoral college or any political issue at all. She wasn't crying because Hillary Clinton did not win the election. She was crying because she was devalued by the way that our society dealt with the entire process; by the behavior we tolerated from the Republican nominee and the atmosphere that we allowed to develop around it; by the fact that so many adults chose to blame Donald Trump for his behavior and then neither shut it down nor choose to stop emulating it. My student was crying because of everything that led up to the night of the election and everything that has come since. My student is a smart and sensitive woman. She never expected more from Donald Trump. She, and many of our other compatriots, expected more from us. And I mean all of us. On all sides of this factious moment in our nation’s history.
Trump failed his first presidential test as president-elect less than 88 words into his presidency when he moved on from thanking his opponent for a hard-fought campaign without acknowledging what her campaign meant at it’s deepest level. The Women’s March failed before it took it’s first step by by not correcting that and partially reclaiming the meaning of that moment. I first found out about the omission when I ventured into cyberspace on January 20th, 2017.
America: if a 14 year old girl can understand our messaging deeply enough to cry then this should not be complicated for us as fully grown and supposedly mature adults. Until we address this, We’ve got nothing.
We have to cross that bridge before we enter the traditional American political spectrum. And once we do cross that bridge, we should be prepared to deal with the mess productively and collaboratively in the spirit that the Republic demands of us.
Evan McMullin, who operated as chief policy advisor for the House Republican Conference and served with distinction as an advisor on the Committee for Foreign Relations, understood that the Republican Party did not legitimize Donald Trump when they embraced him. They delegitimized themselves. So McMullin left the party. In December 2016 he tweeted: “… in the fight for basic equality and liberty in America, I do not believe the traditional political spectrum applies.”
Indeed. Those are things that the framers enshrined as self-evident truths.
There are those who avidly reject the traditional political spectrum as a failed system. I became intimately familiar with their passions on the campaign trail. We cannot engage with them if they substitute petulance and death threats for democratic debate. We have all signed up to social contracts that are laid out fairly explicitly in our founding documents and constitution. Once those people join the rest of us in our most basic understanding of who we are as Americans we should make no delay in following the advice that people like McMullin laid out in ten points back in December.
Back in August, when Hillary Clinton was on track to win, it was the “other side” that was feeling demoralized and discouraged. A National Republic opinion piece, sensing the growing discomfort that many Americans felt with the understanding that Donald Trump did not fit, nor had he any intention to fit, on this spectrum warned that McMullin was not “the savior” that conservatives were looking for. He wouldn't give them exactly what they wanted.
That cuts to the heart of the problem. Americans don't seek political saviors. We work collaboratively with everyone on that traditional spectrum to mitigate one another’s weaknesses and amplify each other in our strengths. “We the people” solve problems together. Or, as President Obama put it in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, “Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order. We don’t look to be ruled.”
Hillary Clinton was the only choice in the 2016 election. That, in itself, is undemocratic and un-American. Republicans put forward a candidate who was, by any objective metric, unqualified for the presidency. By doing so, they robbed the American people of any chance at a serious national debate. As an independent thinker, I should have been afforded the ability to ask questions throughout the campaign and weigh merits of both candidates. The Houston Chronicle, a paper that has rarely endorsed Democratic candidates for president, put it like this in their endorsement of Clinton: “An election between the Democrat Clinton and, let's say, the Republican Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Marco Rubio, even the hyper-ideological Ted Cruz, would spark a much-needed debate about the role of government and the nation's future.”
That debate is more than “much-needed.” It is existentially vital to the functioning of the republic.
The Dallas Morning News, endorsing a Democrat for the first time in their history which has spanned over three quarters of a century and 20 presidential recommendations summed up the rationale behind their break with tradition: “There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.”
Those conservatives and many more would have cherished the opportunity to vote for a Republican candidate. They deserved a serious champion. Those of us who were partial to Hillary Clinton from the start, deserved to be able to engage critically with our candidate of choice and ask her the hard questions about how she would that, if elected, would have been vital to accountable government. From Republican-sponsored government shutdowns and endless filibusters to the immovable stubbornness of Bernie-or-Busters, the loss of the art required to conduct respectful debate made it impossible for independent thoughts to take root. When the Republicans put forward an untenable candidate, they check-mated America into an undemocratic position that all the gerrymandering and voter suppression in the world couldn't match.
Many said they opposed Hillary Clinton because they perceived her as symbolic of “the system”. That's exactly why I continue to voice my support for her: while her opponent broke all our norms and railed against the basic tenets of the system of liberal democracy, she came to symbolize both adherence to our norms and regard for our systems.
Our first female candidate for president was robbed of the opportunity to run and be judged on her credentials alone because she couldn't seriously debate policy while her opponent peddled nothing but snarl and sneer. Clinton's life, one of a civil-servant, was no match for the pure show-business that awarded Trump with the ratings he seems to value above anything else. But the pursuit of ratings, like the pursuit of a better “brand”, is worth less than nothing if we can't make courageous choices and sacrifices to upload a nation worth standing for.
Bernie Sanders criss-crossed the country explaining “that's how democracy works” while attempting to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton. His acceptance of the will of he people in the Democratic Primary took courage. But after their candidate spent a healthy portion of those primaries railing against how “the system” was massively rigged to favor the worst caricatures of Mr Burns from The Simpsons, its no surprise that many “Bernie or Bust” bros remained implacably resistant. They made great efforts protecting the inflexibility of their views by refusing to debate anything or look more carefully at debunking their favored conspiracy theories. Then, on Election Day, they walked into a voting booth in order to engage our broader system with a middle finger. Having gotten to Election Day, our decided that they wanted to show us all what “bust” looks like.
Sanders supporters were extolled for their passion. His hardline base proved itself to be rife with conspiracy theories and blatant misogyny. Their candidate who worked hard to inform people that the system was stacked up against them, suddenly wanted them to embrace our form of democracy. When they didn't get what they wanted, their response took the form of death threats and chaos.
The Arizona Republic was yet another publication that faced a crisis that rocked at the foundations of their fundamentally conservative outlook. They had the guts to face it down and, breaking with well over a century of practice to endorse a Democrat for the first time in their history.
Instead of saluting the paper’s independence of thought, Trump’s supporters caustically spurned the opportunity to give a hearing to the paper’s painfully considered point of view. They were out for retribution. The Arizona Republic said something these people didn't want to hear so they punished the paper with cancelled subscriptions and a shower of death threats:
“YOU'RE DEAD. WATCH YOUR BACK.
WE WILL BURN YOU DOWN.
YOU SHOULD BE PUT IN FRONT OF A FIRING SQUAD AS A TRAITOR.”
The 2016 election was populated with Americans who refused the contest of ideas. They threw tantrums and issued death threats when they saw something they didn't like and when they didn't get what they want. That's how a democracy dies.
If the main theme on all sides is to blame Hillary for what happened in 2016 then we are having the wrong national conversation.
The body-politic of the United States will remain immobilized for as long as the need for discourse is met with death threats. For two years, I've been astonished by how little my compatriots actually know about Hillary Clinton and the system she represents. No amount of rebranding, anger or petulance will accomplish the restoration of debate nor will locking a woman up for invented crimes absolve people from the learning required to make informed decisions. Donald Trump did not create 60 million new Americans; he got 60 million people to vote for him. Deflection is a lazy substitute for looking in the mirror. And looking in the mirror is what tens of millions of Americans need to do right now if we the intention is to still participate in a functioning republic. We also need to do it so that we can honor an election that, no matter the results, was supposed to be a step forward in the story of our nation's fabric.
When the Dallas Morning News made the decision to endorse Clinton, they were facing down the weight of their entire historically recorded outlook. They also knew they'd face the very real risk of being punished and they were, both in terms of sanctions on their income assaults on their personal safety. When the news editor at the paper was asked about the blowback, he offered the following: “Certainly we've paid a price for our presidential recommendation, but then, we write our editorials based on principle and sometimes principle comes at a cost. We know we're doing the right thing. "We feel very good about this decision."
Clinton may have started the campaign as a normal candidate. By the end, she had been forced to evolve into a symbol of everything that stalwart conservatives cited time after time as they made the agonizing choice to spurn ancient party allegiances. The issue at hand for America in 2016 was “not merely political. It is something much more basic than party preference.”
I stand by Hillary Clinton as an American. I stand by her as the candidate who honors our flawed system; a system that allowed her to win millions of votes over her opponent and not assume the office of the Presidency. I stand by her as someone who has served the United States with loyalty and distinction for decades. My stance is necessary as she and her party were dealt the blows of infiltration by a hostile foreign government; one that has upped the tensions in recent days rather than make any effort to diffuse them. I stand by Hillary Clinton because I believe in our system and I prefer the hard and often frustrating work of effecting change to the impulsive burning down of our house.
But most of all, I stand by Hillary Clinton in the face of all the inappropriate and hurtful conduct of the 2016 election and beyond; conduct such as booing rather than cheering her nomination; conduct like the hurtful omission of this step forward in Donald Trump’s victory speech; and the omission of her name from the women's march.
Ruline waited a full century for November 8th, 2016. That does not mean that she's entitled to have the candidate of her choice win the election. But it does mean that she and all the other women who never thought they'd live to see his day are entitled to the basic respect of having this pivotal moment in their part of the American story recognized and honored. They are entitled to basic decency. The decency that was awarded Barack Obama and every single other president who accomplished an historic feat. They didn't get it. Our daughters and granddaughters will not be able to reclaim this junction in history. It's tainted.
The most astonishing irony to be found in that primer that the Women’s March put together in order to map out their inspiration isn't the omission of two women who offered their lives to the slow, hard and persistent labor of making the system bend further towards justice. The section titled “Values and Principles” really amazed me.
The organizers of the March identified “the basic and original tenet for which we unite to March on Washington.” They spelled out their mission with words that were first illuminated by a defiant Hillary Clinton in a her Beijing speech. Donald Trump might choose to ignore the message behind this simple statement just as he and his supporters have chosen to treat the historic nature of her candidacy as an inconvenient truth. The organizers of a March were fueled by a mission to realize the dream of a day when these words will apply in reality. As of now, they remain an aspiration:
“We believe”, said the organizers, that “Women's Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights.”
