MATTHEW BOOSE: Hillary’s sore loser act shows exactly why she lost

MATTHEW BOOSE: Hillary’s sore loser act shows exactly why she lost

March 17, 2018

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Hillary Clinton’s comments in India last weekend sparked a backlash from conservatives and liberals alike. Predictably, she blamed her electoral loss on bigotry rather than her own inability to appeal to voters in states left behind by rapid social and economic change.
By characterizing the inhabitants of flyover country as morally backward, Hillary Clinton absolved herself of any blame for her loss — while intimating that Middle America deserves its plight.

But it is just this attitude that made Clinton unappealing to voters in the key states that cost her the election.
Bigotry didn’t win when Clinton lost. A part of the country that had long been ignored responded to Donald Trump’s promises to make their economy and culture whole again.

The idea that globalism’s losers deserve their plight excuses the elite class from acknowledging the destruction wrought upon Middle America over the last several decades. Going forward, we can expect this elite narcissism and detachment to continue to drive populist anger.
Hillary’s tone-deaf elitism
Speaking in Mumbai last weekend, Clinton made it clear that she still has nothing but contempt for the losers of globalism. Despite having previously walked back her “deplorables” comment in the final weeks of the presidential election, she once again exposed her true feelings by doubling down on her distain for the hoi polloi.

“I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” she said. “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.”
There’s a signal tone-deafness to this statement. Saying, “I won the places that are doing well, I lost the places that aren’t,” is not a good way to show concern for America’s struggling heartland.
Nowhere in the former secretary of State’s comments is there any sympathy for the waning economic power and worsening social problems that afflict Middle America. Instead, she congratulated herself for winning the states where the wealth and economic growth are concentrated.
It is just this attitude of complacency and self-congratulation that led her to fail in the states she most needed to win.
Clinton minimized her own fault by characterizing those voters as bigots, sketching a cartoonish depiction of the benighted occupants of the heartland.
“You didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs,” Clinton said in Mumbai. “You don’t want, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. Whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it,” she said, referring to Trump’s messaging.
The attitude of moral narcissism on display here is typical of the liberal elite. Hillary Clinton, like many elite liberals, sees globalism’s losers as deserving of their fate.
Revolt of the elites
Elites typically describe the losers of globalism as either lacking enterprise and talent, or suffering from moral ignorance that prevents them from joining the new, progressing, globalizing world.
We hear this again and again. Whether through trade agreements or automation or both, manufacturing jobs have gone away. And those jobs aren’t coming back.
The America our grandfathers knew, where a working-class man could support a family on a factory wage, has been consigned to the dustbin of history. And according to Clinton, those who fail to adapt have no one but themselves to blame.
But this way of thinking conveniently leaves out the often unearned class privilege that the liberal elite enjoys. Here, the American cult of self-reliance and meritocracy comes in handy.
While there is usually a way for a talented and motivated person to move up in society, the barriers to entry to the middle class have narrowed. Emphasizing the backwardness of the underclass allows the liberal elite to deny its role in allowing the economy and culture that once formed the backbone of Middle America to fall apart.
While manufacturing has declined significantly, economic factors alone did not drive Middle America to choose Donald Trump. Rapid, alienating cultural change played a significant role as well.
Many Trump supporters find themselves in a society that they do not recognize from their childhoods.
In place of the patriotic, optimistic, and largely Christian world they grew up in, many of Trump’s followers find an increasingly atomized, cynical, and fluid one where nothing is set in stone, no moral law is absolute, and zero-sum competition for entry into a shrinking middle class has replaced social solidarity with a war of all against all.
Decades of social and economic change have swamped the domestic working class with cheap, foreign labor, as the bourgeois values of decency and goodwill to one’s neighbor have been eviscerated by a culture of narcissism, selfishness, and license.
The working class has been especially hard hit by numerous social pathologies resulting from these rapid changes, not the least among them being the opioid epidemic and family disintegration. Rates of divorce and single motherhood are higher among the poor than they are among the elite, who enjoy comparatively prosperous, stable marriages.
Clinton characterized Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” as backward looking. What she fails or chooses not to understand is that many Trump voters do not see “backward looking” as a bad thing.
They want America the way it was when they were growing up.
If change is the law of history, then yielding to this nostalgia is not only childish, but counterproductive.
Nothing can bring back the prosperity of the post-war boom. We have to move forward. But we can also recognize that America had something in the past that it has since lost.
The loss of that mysterious thing — religiosity, morality, community, a unifying culture, a reasonable expectation of security — has left vast swathes of the population in despair.
A noble lie
Writing for First Things magazine, political theorist Patrick Deneen describes the way in which the liberal elite absolves itself of class guilt in “The Noble Lie.” His essay illuminates the indifference and detachment evinced by Hillary Clinton’s self-satisfied Mumbai speech.
In The Republic, the philosopher Plato sketches the idea of a national myth that would allow the citizens of his utopian city to simultaneously believe in their equality and difference. While everyone in the city is believed to have the same mother, the members of different classes are imagined to have different grades of metal imprinted on their souls.
While the underclass have souls of bronze, the elites have souls of silver and gold. This noble lie justifies class differences while at the same time fostering a sense of common fate among the citizenry.
While recognizing that they have been consigned to an inferior position in society, Deneen argues, the underclass benefits from the myth of common kinship, which obliges the elite to look after the common good.
The elites, on the other hand, benefit from the myth that justifies class differences. These two myths dovetail in a kind of social contract that allows an unequal society to hold together.
America, Deneen writes, was built on twin streams of Christianity, which emphasized our basic unity in the body of the church, and liberalism, which highlighted our diverse talents and gifts.
Ironically, today’s elites largely deny the part of the contract that emphasizes commonality, absolving them of any obligation of stewardship towards the underclass.
Railing against identity-based rather than class-based forms of inequality, students at elite institutions take their own demonstrations against racism, sexism, and xenophobia as proof of their commitment to the common good.
These shallow commitments allow them to perpetuate their largely unexamined structural advantages in the class system while believing they are fighting for the good of all.
While claiming to fight inequality, the liberal elite unconsciously reinforce it. They conveniently ignore the part of the myth that obliges them to the working class on the basis of common kinship while perpetuating that part which justifies their own unearned advantages.
Here, meritocratic ideology functions as the updated version of Plato’s myth of the metals to buttress the class system from which the elite benefits. The idea of meritocracy meshes with identity politics to blame working class whites for their disadvantaged position.
Since identity politics views race and gender-based impediments to opportunity as the chief obstacle to equality, signaling opposition to those prejudices enables elites to believe they are fighting inequality while unconsciously entrenching their own status.
Underlining meritocratic identity politics is a belief that absent identity-based constraints, society will sort into winners and losers who more or less deserve their social position.
This way of seeing things allows the elite to believe that the advantages they enjoy, and the disadvantages the white working class face, are deserved. “Deplorables” choose to lose.
Clinton’s attitude toward the “deplorables” is clearly the workings of this perverted form of Plato’s noble lie. By signaling a shallow commitment to fighting forms of identity-based inequality, Clinton casts the “deplorables” as the true villains holding back progress.