Invalidation
Iceaura said:
How about we wait until she has accomplished something, anything, worth doing, before we bestow the laurels.
How about we wait until the woman-hating rhetorical arsonist still clinging desperately to his Bern stops wasting our time with his typical deification of Republicans? Your manner of deseperate, ego-stroking invalidation is about on par with the Gohmerts and Bachmanns and Palins and Angles of the Republican experience.
The reality is that in order to attain this valence of politics, one generally needs to accomplish a lot; we see this year what happens when voters deliberately vilify political accomplishment. And we should remember that Republicans think this Trump thing is going over so poorly that they already started pitching toward 2020. Then again, that would be Cotton (AR), Cruz (TX), and Ernst (IA), which does have some dark implications for basic competence as a criterion in 2020.
Furthermore, Hillary Clinton has accomplished what she has against headwinds typical (sexism) and atypical (conspiracy). As
I noted elsewhere↱ earlier this month, there comes a point at which the high polling negative actually speak to Hillary Clinton's credit. That is to say, after twenty-five years Republicans have managed to create a lot of doubt that, in some contexts really can be said fair, except generally isn't applied to anyone else, which makes it rather quite unfair.
And the weird thing about you is that while your pattern describes proximity of woman when you launch ballistically into the Republican orbital valence, so also was this a year when a powerfully significant bloc of alleged liberals decided the best way to advance a liberal agenda was to adopt Republican politics of hatred and destruction. It seems worth pointing out, then, that Hillary Clinton is about to be elected president of the United States, and this weird chapter when people identifying as liberals decided to wallow in and celebrate conservative hatred in hopes of taking her down will only augment the legend of her political prowess.
After all, in addition to defeating Republicans, Hillary Clinton is about to overcome
you.
As
Ezra Klein↱ reminded last month, as Hillary Clinton acheived the nominee apparent threshold:
There is something about Clinton that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement. Or perhaps there is something about us that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement.
A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.
Perhaps, in ways we still do not fully appreciate, the reason no one has ever broken the glass ceiling in American politics is because it's really fucking hard to break. Before Clinton, no one even came close.
When she fell short in 2008, Hillary Clinton received more votes (17,493,836) than either the 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump (13,300,472) or Bernie Sanders (12,029,699); this is itself a powerful accomplishment.
And along the way, she did what other people are supposed to do; get a degree, get a job, start a family. And she accomplished other extraordinary things along the way. Between her civil rights record, and then her years in the national political spotlight, Hillary Clinton has amassed a résumé that, traditionally, impresses voters. But this is a strange year, shot through with seething, inchoate, unfocused anger, and while the numbers ought to be exciting on the liberal side, they are also worrisome for the fact of the rhetoric. It's one thing to roll on our former standards, but that's not what happened. Rather, the Bern established separate and unequal standards, which is pretty normal for politics in and of itself, but certainly didn't help itself or anyone else by throwing in with traditional sexism.
And every time Hillary Clinton overcomes these barriers, her negatives go up. Imagine that.
And yet she continues winning.
What's really interesting is that Republicans could have forced Democrats into Sanders' corner on the basis of Clinton's negatives by two simply-stated (easier said than done) maneuvers: (1) Elevate a responsible, respected frontrunner early in the nominating process; (2) execute a generally sane nominating process. All the Republicans had to do was factionalize and rally 'round Bush, Rubio, Walker, and maybe Fiorina, but hindsight suggests that last would have been risky under any circumstances given her incredibly awful rhetorical gamble; and we do run into a problem with the idea that Governor Forced Penetration equals any manner of responsible candidate, but for some reason Republicans thought they could run Rubio against Clinton and win on the basis of his youthful charisma, imagined complex dynamic, and Hillary Clinton's high negatives. And if we stop and think about the implications that this potential
worried establishment Democratic strategists, what does that say about the bar for American electoral politicking?
Hindsight also suggests this GOP collapse seems nearly inevitable; so what's really interesting about what's really interesting is a bizarre sense of impossibility that history will record as preclusion. That is, I make it sound simple, but look at Republican voters. My sympathies toward the humanity of my conservative neighbors has flipped in a very bizarre way; the RNC got themselves into this mess, yet I cannot help but pity them. Quite frankly, I don't see why the Committee hasn't resigned even for their own― ... oh. Yeah, right. Who's going to replace them? For the Republican Party, quite obviously this is a catastrophic circumstance. For the nation, we are officially in dangerous territory. Consider the irony that the best argument favoring Republicans is that people are terrified of single-party supermajority rule. That is to say, on some level we do actually need to reward their extraordinary incompetence as a hedge against potential future Democratic incompetence. There are reasons the Party constantly needing others to spot them points likes the makers and takers rhetoric.
And the master tactician? She's right there, poised to do what she does best, what she has done so well as to verge on this threshold. And we
are getting a civil rights president out of this, so I'm sanguine, especially if the Bern can form up and apply useful pressure in the sectors where Democrats and their millions of supporting voters traditionally compromise.
Because that's the thing. The numbers are encouraging. The dearth of form and function is the problem. Like I told Billy months ago, this isn't our year. And if we spend our time doing something more constructive than invalidating everyone else's lives and experiences, actually learn how to argue and advocate the policies we want, and stop wallowing in the cheap thrills of indicting the very people the left needs support from―
e.g., Democratic voters―maybe soon enough it can be.
If, however, we simply decide to stew in that Berning fury, everything will remain the same as it ever was.
It's true: You don't have to
like her.
But it would probably help to present some better face than one screwed up to petulant, invalidating tantrum.
____________________
Notes:
Klein, Ezra. "It’s time to admit Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician". Vox. 7 June 2016. Vox.com. 23 July 2016. http://bit.ly/1tgo6K5
▶ Edit: Tag correction (quote style); 23 July 2016, 15.38 PDT
This is like so many of the positions of the right: They are in fact thinly veiled biases and prejudices masked with rationalizations and masqueraded as legitimate arguments.