Since today is inauguration day, my thoughts are turning back to the last eight years and how we came to be inaugurating a Republican president, again, despite the fact that most Americans disagree with the GOP on most matters of substance.
It’s Not About Women
First off, let’s address the claim that Hillary lost because of American sexism.  Yes, Donald Trump is an unreconstructed 1950s male stereotype (i.e. a horrible human being), and many Americans — including many women, latinos, and a surprising number of blacks — chose to overlook this, but this ignores the fact that the GOP has been consistently lowering the bar for whom they will nominate for office, and it always causes outrage on the left, and it never matters.
Ike was a general. Nixon was an alcoholic witch-hunter. Reagan was a stool pigeon and an idiot. Quayle was an even bigger idiot. Palin made Quayle look professorial. Republicans don’t care if the president (or a senator, or a supreme court judge) has brains, or even sound character: they just want tax cuts and they’re pretty sure their guy is more likely to give them than the other person.
In fact, it’s quite surprising to me that the first black president turned out to be a Democrat, and the first female candidate was also a Democrat. It’s actually conservatives who tend to nominate minorities because it lets them ratchet up the crazy elsewhere. (Margaret Thatcher. Clarence Thomas. Heck, Neville Bonner.)
Incidentally, this is also the same reason that things like sexual peccadilloes and shady practices that would utterly destroy a Democrat seem to slide harmlessly off Republicans.
By the way, I should pause here and say that this has nothing to do with parties. When the Democrats were the party of White Supremacy and the Republicans were the party of Management it was the Democrats who were similarly immune to charges of corruption and sexual misconduct. When the Republicans subvert democracy today and argue that it’s something “everyone” does, they invariably point out actions of Dixiecrats — the folks who left the Democratic party after Roosevelt put desegregation into the Democratic Party platform and joined the Republicans.
A Thought Experiment
A very popular experimental template in the social sciences is to take some common process, like applying for a job or testifying in court, and compare how well candidates do if you signal that a participant is male or female, black or white, has a prison record or not, and so forth, find out there’s a different outcome (which I imagine there almost always is given a nearly inexhaustible number of disadvantaged categories of people), publish the results, and inch closer to tenure.
E.g. I heard on Radio Lab, and I have no reason not to believe, that if you apply for a job using a stereotypically black male name (such as “Jamal”) you are much less likely to be called back than if you use a stereotypically white male name (such as “Steve”), even if the white CV adds a criminal record. The white name is equivalent to eight years of experience. (This implies to me that whatever criminal record they invented was pretty minor.)
The same kind of study has shown women to be less credited as expert witnesses, less likely to be promoted, and so forth and so on. There’s no doubt a lot of sexism in our society, but I’m pretty sure women aren’t as far behind men as blacks are behind whites (eight years experience or a prison record…), and Barack Hussein Obama is more than a stereotypically non-white name. His middle name is the same as a guy we went to war with twice, and his surname is one letter away from Public Enemy Number One when he ran for office.
Obama was an exceptional candidate — he didn’t just beat Hillary for the 2008 nomination, he beat Biden (whom most Democrats think would have been a better candidate than Hillary) and Kucinich (who was a better Sanders than Sanders). And then he beat John McCain and Mitt Romney, the best candidates the Republicans have had in my lifetime.
Now, let’s look at Hillary. Imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton were in fact some random male Democrat you’d vaguely heard of with her exact track record (post First Lady, since it’s hard to imagine a man with Hillary’s baggage from being married to Bill). So, forget Whitewater and Lewinski and just think — New York senator with a typically exceptional Ivy League education and legal background but no great accomplishments or distinction who then served as Secretary of State from 2009-2012. Would you elect him?
What if I remind you that Chelsea Manning released 10M State Department cables in 2010 and that despite this our candidate continued to use outdated and insecure email practices in direct contravention of State Department rules of which, apparently, he remained willfully ignorant throughout. What if I remind you that the 2012 Benghazi attack happened on his watch despite repeated requests for upgraded security. And yes, lots of requests are made, but this was in Libya during the aftermath of a war. As yes, it was a subordinate who turned down the requests, but who hired that subordinate?
Oh, and by the way, what Good Things happened in 2009-2012 that our candidate can point to?
I’m not saying Clinton did anything criminal. I’m saying that in any reasonable political system she would have been held accountable for Benghazi, forced to resign, and her career would have ended. Similarly, the email business reflects three spectacular failures of judgement (first: to ignoring security policies, second: to continue ignoring the security policies after an epic security breach, third: to fail to improve said security policies meaningfully after said epic security breach). Again, had she still been Secretary of State when the email business came out, she should have been fired for it, and that alone would probably have ended her political career.
By the way, I choose give her a free pass on the Iraq war vote, because I think she did it as a political calculation, and it was a reasonable choice at the time. (I’m actually far more critical of the far broader, unthinking support for the invasion of Afghanistan.) But for some of my friends her vote on Iraq, alone, is unforgivable.
Trump’s done a lot of shady and unpleasant things to people over the years — spending other people’s money and saddling them with his debts, stiffing contractors, ogling pageant contestants (for sure), molesting women (most likely), but there’s no positive evidence of Trump’s ignorance or incompetence in his chosen profession. He may well be an ignoramus (and bigot) in the same mold as Henry Ford (who nevertheless was a great businessman and provided many jobs to blacks). Hillary is a professional politician and civil servant who can’t use a smartphone or a computer and has made spectacularly poor judgement calls in her chosen profession. (Kelly Anne Conway points out, in reference to Russian interference in the campaign, that the Russians didn’t make Clinton spend money in Georgia instead of Michigan or Wisconsin.)
Trump is (rightly) decried as intellectually incurious. But how is it OK for Hillary to not learn to use a smartphone, or email, or a computer when both are, or should be, a constant part of her chosen profession? Trump is (rightly) decried for having publicly sort-of supported the invasion of Iraq, but being right about that war wasn’t his job.
Trump’s an asshole and a bigot, but he seems to be good at what he does. Elizabeth Warren is a smart person but she tried to go head-to-head with him on Twitter and failed abysmally. I’m not optimistic about his presidency, but sexism is only responsible for putting Trump in the Whitehouse insofar as it was perversely responsible for Hillary being nominated.
How Do We Stop Doing This?
It’s easy to point out the failings of Hillary’s campaign in retrospect. She nearly won despite all of it. The lack of a clear or coherent message. Poor strategy. The weak VP choice. Lousy slogan (“I’m with her”). This should have been easy: the country is in good shape, it’s in far better shape than it was 4 or 8 years ago. Its signal policy is at least an equivocal success. The outgoing president is popular. What. The. Fuck?
The fact that 2012 was even close (despite Romney being a solid candidate) points to a hard truth: the Democrats fucked up Obamacare. They created a barely functional healthcare plan because they figured it would get bipartisan support even when they didn’t need bipartisan support, and ended up with something that barely worked, couldn’t be explained, couldn’t be sold, and then rolled it out slowly and incompetently. And this led to their being annihilated in the mid-terms, which meant little of consequence could be done for the remaining six years.
Remember how exceptional Obama is? He’s been a pretty good, successful president despite Obamacare, not because of it.
The solution is to think of laws as products that have to be sold. Clearly, legislators understand this superficially, it’s why a law enabling a police state is named the “PATRIOT Act”. It’s why a healthcare law that costs poor people premiums they can’t afford for lousy coverage is called the “Affordable Care Act”. But good products are more than simply clever names (and legislators aren’t even that good at names…). Here’s a hint: if you design a product where the main reason for many people to buy it is that they will be fined if they do not, then you have failed. Design a new product.