As Sady Doyle noted, “She can’t be sad or angry, but she also can’t be happy or amused, and she also can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is literally no way out of this one. Anything she does is wrong.” One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. “No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public,” Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. “For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.” Or, as Mary Beard put it a few years ago, “We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.”
Trump harped on the theme that Clinton had been in power for thirty years, seeming to equate her person with feminism or liberalism or some other inchoate force that he intended to defeat, and in these narratives her power seemed huge and transcendent, looming over the nation the way he’d loomed over her in the second debate. By figures on both the right and the left, Clinton was held to be more responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration, responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda rather than she his. These narratives cast her as a demoness with unlimited powers, or as a wicked woman, because she’d had power and aspired to have power again. One got the impression that any power a woman had was too much, and that a lot of men found women very scary.
Clinton’s very existence seemed to infuriate a lot of people, as it has since at least 1992. It’s complicated to talk about misogyny and Clinton, because she is a complex figure who has been many things over the decades. There are certainly reasons to disagree with and dislike things she has said and done, but that doesn’t explain the overwrought emotionality that swirls around her. Raised as a conservative (and hated by some on the left during this campaign for having been a “Goldwater Girl,” though she had stumped for him as a nonvoting high school student), she soon became a radical who campaigned for the most left-leaning Democratic candidates in 1968 and 1972, registered Latinx voters in Texas in the latter election; wrote a thesis on Saul Alinsky, who afterward offered her a job; advocated for rights for women and children; then shifted right in the 1980s, perhaps to adapt to the political climate of her husband’s home state of Arkansas or to the Reagan era.
You could pick out a lot of feminist high points and corporate and neoliberal low points in her career, but for anyone more interested in the future of the United States and the world, her 2016 platform seemed most relevant, though no one seemed to know anything about it. The main networks devoted only thirty-two minutes to the candidates’ platforms amid the hundreds of hours of election coverage. Lots of politicians have been disliked for their policies and positions, but Clinton’s were often close to Sanders’s, and similar to, or to the left of, every high-profile male Democrat in recent years, including her husband; Barack Obama; Joe Biden; John Kerry; and Howard Dean. But what had been accepted or merely disliked in them was an outrage in her, and whatever resentment they’d elicited was faint compared to the hysterical rage that confronted her as, miraculously, she continued to march forward.
Trump’s slogan, “Make America great again,” seemed to invoke a return to a Never Never Land of white male supremacy, where coal was an awesome fuel, blue-collar manufacturing jobs were what they had been in 1956, women belonged in the home, and the needs of white men were paramount. After the election, many on the left joined the chorus, assuring us that Clinton lost because she hadn’t paid enough attention to the so-called white working class—a term that, given that she wasn’t being berated for ignoring women, seemed to be a code word for white men. These men were more responsible than any group for Trump’s victory (63 percent of them voted for him; 31 percent for Clinton).
One might argue she lost because of the disenfranchisement of millions of people of color through long-plotted Republican strategies: cutting the number of polling stations; limiting voting hours; harassing and threatening would-be voters; introducing voter ID laws such as the Crosscheck program, which made it a lot harder for people of color to register to vote. Or because of the smearing intervention by FBI director James Comey ten days before the election; or because of years of negative media coverage; or because of foreign intervention designed to sabotage her chances; or because of misogyny. But instead we heard two stories about why she lost (and almost none about why, despite everything, she won the popular vote by almost three million votes, a total exceeding the votes won by any white man, ever, in a US election).
The We Must Pay More Attention to the White Working Class analysis said that Clinton lost because she did not pay enough attention to white men. Those wielding it didn’t seem interested in the 37 percent of Americans who aren’t white, or the 51 percent who are women. I’ve always had the impression—from TV, movies, newspapers, sports, books, my education, my personal life, and my knowledge of who owns most things and holds government office at every level in my country—that white men get a lot of attention already.
The other story was about white women, who voted 43 percent for Clinton to 53 percent for Trump. We were excoriated for voting for Trump, on the grounds that all women, but only women, should be feminists. That there are a lot of women in the United States who are not feminists does not surprise me. To be a feminist you have to believe in your equality and rights, which can make your life unpleasant and dangerous if you live in a family, a community, a church, a state that does not agree with you about this. For many women it’s safer not to have those beliefs in this country, where a woman is beaten every eleven seconds or so and women’s partners and exes are the leading cause of injury to women from their teens through forties. And those beliefs are not universally available in a country where feminism is forever being demonized and distorted. It seems it’s also worse to vote for a racist if you’re a woman, because while white women were excoriated, white men were let off the hook (across every racial category, more men than women voted for Trump; overall, 54 percent of women supported Clinton; 53 percent of men voted for Trump).
So women were hated for not having gender loyalty. But here’s the fun thing about being a woman: we were also hated for having gender loyalty. Women were accused of voting with their reproductive parts if they favored the main female candidate, though most men throughout American history have favored male candidates without being accused of voting with their penises. Penises were only discussed during a Republican primary debate, when Marco Rubio suggested Trump’s was small and Trump boasted that it wasn’t. “I don’t vote with my vagina,” the actress Susan Sarandon announced, then voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who one might think was just as vagina-y a candidate as Clinton but apparently wasn‘t.
“One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome,” Mark Lilla wrote in the New York Times, “is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.” He condemned Clinton for calling out explicitly to Black, Latino, LGBT, and women voters at every stop. “This,” he said, “was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them.” Who’s not on that list, though it’s one that actually covers the majority of Americans? Heterosexual white men, notably, since it’s hard to imagine Lilla was put out that Clinton neglected Asians and Native Americans.
“Identity politics” has become a dismissive term for talking about race or gender or sexual orientation, which is very much the way we’ve talked about liberation over the last 160 years in the United States. By that measure Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Bella Abzug, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Winona LaDuke, Vine DeLoria, Del Martin, and Harvey Milk were just lowly practitioners of the identity politics we’ve been told to get over. Shortly after the election Bernie Sanders, who’d gotten on the no
–identity politics bandwagon, explained: “It is not good enough to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.’ That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country.… It is not good enough for someone to say: ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’ No, that’s not good enough.” In fact, Clinton never said that, though one could argue that Trump had said, incessantly, aggressively, “I’m a white man, vote for me,” and even that Sanders had implicitly conveyed that same message or benefitted from it without having to put it in words. Vox journalist David Roberts did a word-frequency analysis of Clinton’s campaign speeches and concluded that she mostly talked about workers, jobs, education, and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost six hundred times, and racism, women’s rights, and abortion a few dozen times each. But she was portrayed as talking about her gender all the time, though it was everyone else who couldn’t shut up about it.1
How the utopian idealism roused by Sanders’s promises in the winter of 2015 morphed so quickly into a Manichean hatred of Clinton as the anti-Bernie was one of the mysteries of this mysteriously horrific election, but that raging, loathing hatred was so compelling that many people seemed to wake up from the Democratic primary only when Trump won the general election; they had until then believed Clinton was still running against Sanders. Or they believed that she was an inevitable presence, like Mom, so they could hate her with confidence and she would win anyway. Many around me loved Sanders with what came to seem an unquestioning religious devotion and hated Clinton even more fervently. The hatred on the right spilled over into actual violence over and over again at Trump rallies, but the left also had its share of vitriol.
I had seen all around me a mob mentality, an irrational groupthink that fed on itself, confirmed itself, and punished doubt, opposition, or complexity. I thought of the two-minute group hate sessions in 1984:
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
That emotion was directed at Clinton and was ready to swerve toward anyone who supported her, accompanied by accusations of treason and other kinds of invective. Many supporters fell silent or took to supporting her in secret, which is not the kind of support a candidate needs. A San Franciscan friend wrote:
Every woman I know and almost every journalist or opinion writer who planned to vote for her included in every single positive statement about her—everything from Facebook posts to lengthy major media articles—something to the effect of “She is, of course, not a perfect candidate, but …” or “I, of course, have serious problems with some aspects of her record, but …” It became the boilerplate you had to include to forestall the worst of the rage-trolls (inevitably eventually someone would pop up anyway to accuse you of trying to shove your queen’s coronation down everyone’s throat, but at least the boilerplate delayed it).
• • •
Mentioning that Clinton had won the popular vote upset many of the men I am in contact with, though they would not or could not conceive of it that way. I wrote at the time: “With their deep belief in their own special monopoly on objectivity, slightly too many white men assure me that there is no misogyny in their subjective assessments or even no subjectivity and no emotion driving them, and there are no grounds for other opinions since theirs is not an opinion.” Then these men went back to talking about what a loser Clinton was, a perspective that seemed to erotically stimulate them in the same way that her possible victory seemed to elicit an erotic and deeply emotional loathing.
There was considerable evidence that we had not had a free and fair election, evidence that might have allowed us to contest it and to stop Trump. But these men of the left were so dedicated to Clinton’s status as a loser that they wanted Trump to win, because it vindicated something that went deeper than their commitment to almost anything else. They insisted on a tautology—that Clinton lost because she was a loser—and dismissed all other factors. Trump was the candidate so weak that his minority victory2 was only possible because of the disenfranchisement of millions of voters of color; the end of the Voting Rights Act; a long-running right-wing campaign to make Clinton’s use of a private email server, surely the dullest and most uneventful scandal in history, an epic crime; and the late intervention, with apparent intent to sabotage, of FBI director James Comey. We found out via Comey’s outrageous gambit that it is more damaging to be a woman with an aide who has an estranged husband who is a creep than to be an actual predator charged by more than a dozen women with groping and sexual assault.
Hillary Clinton was all that stood between us and a reckless, unstable, ignorant, inane, infinitely vulgar, climate change–denying, white nationalist misogynist with authoritarian ambitions and kleptocratic plans. A lot of people, particularly white men, could not bear her, and that is as good a reason as any for Trump’s victory. Over and over again, I heard men declare that she had failed to make them vote for her. They saw the loss as hers rather than ours, and they blamed her for it, as though election was a gift they withheld from her because she did not deserve it or did not attract them. They did not blame themselves or the electorate or the system for failing to stop Trump.
* * *
*One of the most extraordinary days in recent American history was October 7, 2016, when the Obama administration made a public announcement that the Putin regime was meddling in the US election. This should have been earthshaking news, but it was quickly eclipsed by the release of the Access Hollywood tape, whose salacious nastiness grabbed the media’s attention instead; that was, in turn, pushed out of the center of attention by Wikileaks’ release of hacked DNC emails, which a more a diligent media might have connected back to the Obama administration’s warning.
1. A year later Danica Roem, a transgender candidate who won election to the Virginia House of Delegates, noted, “I talked relentlessly about jobs. Roads. Schools. Health care. Equality. I know this because Lee [Carter] and I saw each other on the stump constantly. And y’all went after us for [that] and ‘teaching transgenderism to kindergartners’ and ‘socialism.’”
2. If he won. I wrote later: “In many swing states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, there were extraordinary discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote tallies. Though it’s common to regard the latter as more reliable than the former, in other parts of the world exit polls are treated as important verifications of the outcome. Clinton would have won the election overwhelmingly, had she won those states. Perhaps she did. Shortly after the election, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman reported: ‘In 24 of 28 states, unadjusted exit polls also showed Clinton with vote counts significantly higher than the final official outcome. The likelihood of this happening in an election that is not rigged [is] in the realm of virtual statistical impossibility.’ I don’t know if their statement is accurate, because there has been no significant investigation, and the recount in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, initiated by Jill Stein, was stopped by a clearly panicked Republican Party.”
Twenty Million Missing Storytellers
(2018)
Most new ideas begin in the margins or shadows and move toward the center. They are often something that a few people thought, something that seemed radical or edgy or a bit too much, or just something hardly anyone noticed or felt strongly about. If they were ideas about justice, they were considered extreme or unrealistic. Then the idea kept traveling, and by the end of the journey it was what everyone always thought
. Or, rather, what they thought they had always thought, because it’s convenient to ignore that they used to not pay attention or had thought something completely different, something that now looks like discrimination or cluelessness. A new idea is like a new species: it evolves; it expands its habitat; it changes the ecosystem around it; and then it fits in as though it was always there, as though we as a nation had always condemned slavery or believed women deserved the vote or thought nonstraight people were entitled to the same rights as straight people.
In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got. This was a key part of the analysis of what the gendered violence of Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men in Hollywood had accomplished. Rebecca Traister was one of the people to say it early, when she wrote:
The accused are men who help to determine what art gets seen and appreciated—and, crucially, paid for. They decide whose stories get brought to screens…. They are also the men with the most power to determine what messages get sent about politicians to a country that then chooses between those politicians in elections…. We cannot retroactively resituate the women who left jobs, who left their whole careers because the navigation of the risks, these daily diminutions and abuses, drove them out. Nor can we retroactively see the movies they would have made or the art they would have promoted, or read the news as they might have reported it.
Many people, including Traister and Jill Filipovic, noted that some of the most powerful men in US media had been exposed as serial sexual harassers, and that these men—including Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and Mark Halperin—had shaped the hostile narrative around Hillary Clinton. The idea that had begun with the men who decided who would make movies and what stories we would hear moved on to the men who decided how politicians would be depicted and what would be emphasized (Clinton’s emails) and what wouldn’t (Trump’s mob ties, lies, bankruptcies, lawsuits, sexual assaults). It shaped an election; you can imagine another outcome, had other people been in charge of framing it.
Call Them by Their True Names Page 3
