Instead of the trade war, you would have gotten the TPP. That one’s a toss-up. The trade war is worse in the short term, the TPP would probably have been worse in the long term.
Clinton is, without doubt, superior on reproductive rights. It is one of the very few issues on which she has been consistently reliable throughout her career…which is part of how she could get away with nominating Tim Kaine as VP.
The concentration camps for babies were already there. Yes, Trump is worse, and the automatic separation of children is a new policy. But the detention of children is not a new policy, and the abuse of children in that system was routine before the election of Trump.
The deportation and detention machinery was established by President Clinton, expanded and intensified by Presidents Bush and Obama, and vigorously endorsed by HRC.
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He didn’t just continue them, BTW. Drone strikes expanded under Obama. And forty-one Democratic Senators just voted to give Trump the largest military budget in the history of the world.
Given her foreign policy statements and track record, it seems likely that there would have some chance of HRC getting into a shooting war with Russia over Syria. Personally, I’d rank that as a “really horrible thing”. And there are very many issues (most obviously, climate change) on which the continuation of the status quo is a “really horrible thing”.
But, yeah; HRC is vastly superior to Trump. She would probably have continued a similar decline to what was seen under Obama, rather than the current catastrophic charge into fascism.
Which is why I spent the election campaign advocating for a Clinton vote. But I can also see the validity of the perspective of those who did not.
All of this evil was already here; Trump just made it more visible. Very little about the Trump era is actually new; it’s just more. It’s spreading beyond the traditional classes of victims, and middle class white people are beginning to notice what has always been going on.
Given what Trump’s rise has exposed about America, can you really blame the victims of all this for refusing to endorse their own suffering?
From one perspective, it is pragmatism. From another, it is privilege. Both perspectives are defensible, but it’s a lot easier to accept an imperfect system when the imperfections are mainly focused on other people.
There are always alternatives to accepting the lesser evil. But you have to be willing to cease valuing stability over justice.
