Hillary’s Clinton explanation of why she lost, is why she lost.
“If you look at the map of the U.S., there’s all that red in the middle, places where Trump won,” Clinton told an overseas crowd recently. “Now I win the coasts, I win Illinois and Minnesota, and places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you,” she said, “is that I won the places that represent two thirds of America’s gross domestic product.”
She went on, bragging, “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards.”
She then characterized the message that she says won over President Trump voters in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Ohio: “You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever your problem is, I am going to solve it.”
It was a perfect expression of two unfortunate dogmas that infect America’s Left today. First, social changes over the past generation or so should be uncritically counted as progress; second, poor white people deserve their poverty.
The sneering at “Make America Great Again,” and its implication, has been ubiquitous. “Turning back the clock,” after all, has negative connotations. But if you look closely enough at American culture, you see — alongside undeniable progress — plenty of signs of cultural decline, even social decay. And if that decline is pronounced, and continuing, in these backwaters that Clinton curses, then can we blame the folk for looking backwards for positive signs?
Marriage, for example, is a good thing, most people agree. It is now in retreat, particularly among the working class. “Marriage rates are … more closely linked to socioeconomic status than ever before,” the Pew Research Center found in 2017. Among those over 25, gap in marriage between the college-educated and non-college-educated has doubled just since 1990, and now only half of all non-college adults over 25 are married — and the number is falling.
Out-of-wedlock births and divorce, similarly, are rising, and rising much faster among the working class. Life expectancy, shockingly, has taken a downward turn in the U.S. The driving factor is deaths of despair among middle-aged working-class whites.
This is all in addition to the economic woes hitting the “backward-looking” places that, after voting for President Barack Obama, often twice, turned to Trump in 2016. Yet Clinton posits that anyone in Washington County, Pa., who says things were better in 1990 or 1960 is simply expressing his own perfidy — bigotry, misogyny, and nativism.
Clinton’s argument seems to be that nothing good was lost — that progress came at no cost. It’s not merely wrong, it’s demeaning. It’s arrogant. It’s why millions of Obama voters couldn’t stomach her.
The corollary here is that the poor people in these noncoastal, non-Illinois-or-Minnesota places somehow deserve their economic affliction. The wealthy parts of the country aren’t just wealthy in Clinton’s account, they’re the ones responsible for the GDP! The poor parts of the country aren’t just poor, they’re unproductive.
It’s not a terribly effective stance for a politician, blaming the less successful 50 percent of the electorate — or even just 47 percent of the electorate — for not making enough money.
This stance takes us beyond the particular (and monumental) shortcomings of Clinton as a candidate. It brings us to a problem endemic in liberal circles. The problem is that they’re not even willing to accept that they are elites. Liberals’ egalitarianism won’t allow it. But elite faith in America as meritocracy also forbids it.
“The ruling class,” conservative writer Patrick Deneen wrote in the current issue of First Things, “denies that they really are a self-perpetuating elite that has not only inherited certain advantages but also seeks to pass them on.”
The funny thing is, liberals are better than conservatives at acknowledging the existence of “privilege” in theory. They are just too shallow in their understanding of it to see that the privileges they inherited aren’t merely material. Most importantly, our elites have come out of the cultural tumult of the past 60 years still holding on to the best values of mid-century America — marriage, monogamy, valuing work, exalting education — while those values eroded among the working class.
When our elites can’t accept that they are elites, they come up with another explanation for why some people are doing worse. When that explanation is essentially “You are struggling because you are bad people,” and when it comes from a person running for president, it’s no surprise if the blue-collar vote goes the other way. Mitt Romney could have told Clinton as much.
