There has been a meme going around Facebook that purports to settle the Trump-Clinton battle — but just leaves me shaking my head. The argument here is that we have, on the one hand, a dangerous disaster of a candidate while on the other we have someone whose only flaw is this email thing.
I can buy the first part. Donald J. Trump is exactly what this meme says he is, and probably worse. But Trump’s absolute horribleness should not obscure the fact that Hillary Clinton is far from a perfect candidate. It’s not just the email, and pretending it is will set progressives up for some rough times during a Clinton administration.
Let’s be clear: I will voting for Hillary Clinton. Without reservations — she’s no worse than most mainstream Democrats, and better than many. But I’ll be doing so without enthusiasm. She is the best option we have available, and keeping Trump away from the White House should be the goal, but we should not have any illusions.
As I wrote in a recent column for The Progressive Populist:
She is a hawk. We know she’s a hawk, and the fact that she’s surrounding herself with like-minded hawks should be of great concern. She’s also a corporatist and, while I think concerns about her honesty are overblown, she does not inspire confidence.
I know that’s not exactly an endorsement but, as I wrote in the same column, my goal is not to endorse her. “Clinton, in this election, is a means to an end, a defensive vote.”
I want to offer something that the journalist Jeff Sharlet wrote on his Facebook page (see full Facebook post below) that I think sums up how we should be approaching this election. Sharlet is a long-time Clinton critic (as am I), who is “very critical of Clinton’s corporate centrism, cronyism, elitism, and militarism,” which he outlines in some detail.
My track record as a critic of Hillary and Clintonism in general is pretty good. In 2007, Kathryn Joyce and I teamed up to write a sharply critical story on Clinton’s deep-rooted corporatism and affiliations with a fundamentalist movement known as The Fellowship. She wouldn’t speak to us — her infamous press secretary, Philippe Reines, cursed and screamed at me just for asking, the most unpleasant encounter I’ve had in my years of Washington reporting — but we interviewed many significant figures from her life, read nearly every published thing she ever wrote, and reviewed the entire history. The portrait that emerged was about what most critics would expect — lip service for progressivism combined with a penchant for “compromises” nobody but the far right asked her to make. Most telling, to me, was her collaboration with then-Senator Sam Brownback, as conservative as they come, and the late ideologue Chuck Colson on an effort to unnecessarily water down a human trafficking bill to suit the demands of the religious right — to the extent that many NGOs and activists in the field saw the bill as an attack on their work. Bad stuff.
I teamed up with Kathryn again to write a piece for Religion Dispatches on Hillary’s surprising backroom dealing on abortion — again, what’s sometimes described as “centrist” seemed to reflect the kind of purely political triangulation that has always made Clintonism antagonistic to the left. I followed that up with an expansion on the two articles for my bestselling book The Family. The work got some attention: NBC Nightly News did a lead segment on it in 2008, and much of the progressive press picked up on it, while conservatives — and Hillary partisans — attacked Kathryn and I for suggesting that she’s anything less than the reincarnation of Dorothy Day.
And yet, Sharlet is not just planning to vote for her. His rational is simple: Trumpism must be stopped. He doesn’t define Trumpism, so I will: It essentially boils down to a politics of resentment merged with a proto-fascist longing for a strong man to right the nation’s wrongs. Some of its grievances are legitimate; as
Gary Younge, in The Nation, points out, “the fact that the messenger is deranged doesn’t mean the message itself contains no significant truths.” The anger over trade deals, for instance, is based on workers (or at least their concerns) not being at the table, and the collapse in confidence in institutions is based at least in part on a bipartisan consensus that has given us NAFTA and GATT, the Iraq War,
Simpson-Bowles, austerity, college debt, and so on.
The viability of Trump’s candidacy owes as much to economic anxiety as it does to racism. Trump. Younge says, “identified (what) remains a politically salient fault line that doesn’t just go away if Clinton wins. If these problems are not tended to, a less erratic and more focused right-wing populist than Trump could easily exploit them.”
This brings me back to the meme above and its seeming insistence that the only baggage Clinton carries is an over-hyped email controversy — and, yes, the email issue is overhyped, and much of the more extreme stuff (murder accusations, etc) being tossed at her by both the right and the left is garbage. We need to be honest about who Clinton is — a status quo Democrat, a centrist who is progressive on some issues, a hawk on foreign policy, a deal-cutter, a wonk. But we also need to acknowledge that she does have some progressive instincts and, as the Sanders challenge in the primaries proved, she can be moved in a more progressive direction. It’ll take work — protests and activism, intellectual challenges, etc. — but it is necessary work, work the left failed to do during eight years of Obama. If we go in to a Clinton administration admitting her flaws, we won’t be caught sitting on our hands.
Here is Sharlet’s Facebook post:
Send me an e-mail.
