She should have known she wouldn’t win? Ridiculous. More crystal ball thinking.
And no, the answer is not swinging wildly left. (Gee, why ever did Obama win if that is what “they” wanted.) And Hillary did not swing “waaaaaay” to the right, any more than Obama did; she was 90% in line with Sanders.
Just because you hit a foul ball, you don’t start using a plumber’s helper for a bat.
We don’t have Trump because America is secretly racist as fuck
It’s certainly not the only reason, but it’s certainly one of the reasons.
I don’t think a Bernie Bro is necessarily even male. I saw numerous women interviewed who had an visceral, irrational hatred for Hillary also.
It never made any sense. You go down the line, policy after policy, where Sanders aligned with Clinton, they still hated Clinton. Sometimes seemingly because she aligned with him. (Because she was “copying” him? Because Bernie “got there first” but she was “taking it away from him”?) They seemed as irrational justifying their position as any Trump supporter justifying theirs.
Voting for Trump, in and of itself, was an act of racist aggression. Even those voters who were supposedly driven by non-racist motivations were willing to tolerate extreme and blatant racism in pursuit of their goals.
Not all of the racists voted for Trump, BTW; just the most overt ones. White supremacy is a bipartisan thing.
Trump’s support was heavily biased towards wealth and whiteness. The working class were the only economic group in which the majority voted Dem. All groups of white people supported Trump, but the white working class gave him less support than any other economic group.
Yes, economics had a role in the election, but not by turning the white working class to Trump. Economic issues (AKA the extreme and increasing inequality of American society, and the blatant plutocratic corruption of both major parties) had three major effects:
Suppressed working class support (note: all working class, not just white) for the Dems, and
Frightened the white middle class with the prospect of sliding into the proletariat, driving the rise of middle-class fascism, and
Frightened the plutocrats with the prospect of socialist revolution, driving the rise of upper-class fascism.
The number of Clinton primary voters who switched to McCain was greater than the number of Bernie primary voters who switched to Trump. Remember the PUMAs?
I wasn’t responding to the assertion about Sanders voters switching to GOP, but rather to the whole line of @NovaeDeArx trying to prove that, because most people who supported Sander went on to support Clinton in the general election, there could not be any such thing as a Bernie Bro. Which is ridiculous, and is arguing in bad faith. They were trying to turn my point into, everyone who ever voted for or supported Bernie Sanders is a Bernie Bro, which is most certainly not my point.
Of all the many stupid and evil things Trump has said in his life, the one that disturbed me the most was when he said, “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. Torture works!”
OTOH, let’s not pretend that Trump represents a radical departure here. The CIA has been torturing people from the day they were founded, Bush Jr expanded that and brought it into the open, and Obama provided the impunity that set the stage for Trump.
As with everything else, Trumpist America is not new. It’s just more obvious now.
Nobody here’s arguing that. I’m a huge admirer of HRC (which possibly makes me an outlier in this thread). I’m just pointing out that there could be sound feminist reasons why her supporters often went with “Hillary”. Her opponents might well have been trying to demean her when using her first name, but when they used “Clinton” they likely were also using that as an attack.
The only people to whom Americans racism is a secret are American. Some who have no idea what racism is in the same way that fish have no idea what water is, others who think their good manners, like hands over their eyes in a sick game of peek-a-boo, magically shield their shitty actions and beliefs from other people.
It is unfortunate, but with such brazen racism on display, saying that racism did not play a role in his campaign is disingenuous. In the best case you can say that people did not vote for him because of his advertised racist ideology but you cannot say that he did not advertise himself as racist and that that was not a deal breaker for people who voted for him.
You can very well say that others made mistakes, you can say that other candidates did not know how to get their message across, you cannot say that people who voted for him did not know he was racist and running on a racist platform.
The really weird part of it all is that it is possible to say that many people who saw his full frontal racism on display and voted for him would not identify it as Racism. They would see it as truth, straight talk from someone who understand how the world really works which is why we could argue whether this worldview or the one where people who liked his economic “plans” “snickers” and did not mind his racism is the one you gotta worry about, but not about how openly racist he is or whether people knew his attitude towards anybody that isn’t “white”.
Once again, Hillary Clinton had Sanders’ popularity and was the most popular American politician before the 2016 election cycle where somehow that cut cut by more than half. That wasn’t magic, and it would have easily happened to Bernie Sanders too. The idea that there was a magic candidate that would have been fine is unsupported by any sort of logic or reason whatsoever.
I think it still matters a great deal. There were 2 candidates, one of whom has a personal stance and party stance of inclusivity and equal rights, and the other whom is an open racist and supported by racist hate groups and a party that pushes voter id bills and tough on crime bills specifically tailored to target minorities unjustly. Hillary would have been 1000x better than Trump hands down, especially for the rights of women and minorities.
If anyone voted for the racist candidate, they made a clear choice and justify it for “fill in petty reason”. As if said reason was more important that the rights of most every group of people besides white upperclass.
yes i get the system is broken and we need much bigger changes.
i was fully a sanders supporter because i thought he stood the best chance of offering real change. one of the first things he pledged to do was to overhaul the voting system and get rid of the two party defacto.
I agree with this 100%. smdh. it is a shame. i blame the dems partly also. we let a chance at real change slip through our fingers and instead ended up with an orange pile of shit. i didn’t like the grumpy lady who would have propped up the status quo big washington string pullers, but i also do know where she would have made a lot of forward progress, not backslid, and been worlds better. i certainly prefer her to the actual human pile of feces we got.
Also of note, the increase black activism as a result of high-profile shootings of unarmed black people and the “immigration crisis” were both after the 2012 election cycle - and both were heavily leveraged by state and local GOP candidates in 2014. Most “conservative” media at the time launched media campaigns about the RINOs not being thought on immigration, and shockingly that machine went for Trump whose campaign literally only started moving forward when the wall became a central plank of his message.
No, she was not “90% in line with Sanders”, that was a marketing line. Her platform grafted on a lot of Sanders’ values, yes, but I challenge you to find anyone who’s active in politics that will sincerely tell you that platforms mean jack squat.
They don’t. Hillary didn’t get up and say the things Bernie did, even remotely in the way Bernie did, and she didn’t stand her ground and fight for them like he did - how in the flaming hell are they similar?
That’s like saying that because I have a hammer and a saw in my garage that makes me 90% the same as a carpenter. No. You also have to put in a crapload of effort to get to that 90% point, not hang up a few accessories and say you’re on par with someone that does that thing day in and day out.
You know what? I challenge you to find a single instance in Hillary’s short political career where she did a single goddamn thing on principle and not out of her typical horrid self-interest. Her Senatorial career was dead silent, with no bills introduced at all, and only co-sponsoring a couple bills that were the most milquetoast garbage you can imagine. She kept her head down as SoS, and spent that time trying to build bridges with the military and various right-of-center conservative factions. Basically, the woman did NOTHING for the American people when she held office, but you want to praise her as if she gave a crap about you. I don’t get it. At all. So tell me, what did she EVER do for you, how did she fight for you, that you gave her even two seconds of your time. I’ll wait.
My point was that YOU were arguing that because I prefer Bernie to Hillary, and dislike Hillary for reasons that I can list, that is the only criteria you need to apply to label me a “BernieBro”.
I’m saying that a LOT of people felt the same (I live in Denver - I saw hundreds of Bernie bumper stickers during my commute throughout the election, and many still to this day. Know how many Hillary stickers? Exactly two. I kept count because it was an event to see one.)
So no, simply liking Bernie and not liking Hillary really cuts across the liberal demographic, and you’re wildly uninformed if you think a barely-defined, P.R. generated attack label is applicable to every person like that. But you claimed that that’s enough for you, didn’t you?
Prior to the 92 campaign, she went by Rodham Clinton. But that was too much for the voters to handle, so she dropped the Rodham publicly in service of her husband’s career. Which of course, she got flak for.
Yes, I think we can safely say there were many ways in which she couldn’t catch a break.
None of those are illegitimate complaints of course and I agree with many of them. But both that she was attacked because of her gender and many didn’t like her because of her neo-liberal stance on many issues can be true at the same time.
Or it was a name she decided to take because of her marriage? Plenty of women still take their husbands name for a number of reasons. It’s not like she was forced to marry Bill Clinton.
