Missing the Point, NY Times-Style: You Can't Blame 'Special Snowflakes' For Clinton's Loss
By Kurtis Bright
Sorry, NY Times: As Annoying As Special Snowflakes Are, It's Not Their Fault Trump Won
A recent opinion piece from the New York Times, “The End of Identity Liberalism” posits yet another reason for Hillary Clinton’s historic
loss to He Who Shall Not Be Named to add to the litany of rationalizations that
have emerged from the desperate consternation of the left.
Author Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia,
pins the blame squarely on what he sees as the separating nature of
“celebrating” the increasingly granular differences between people based on
race, gender identification, sexual orientation, etc. He suggests that Clinton
lost because white men were not on the list of those to whom she appealed on
the campaign trail.
While no doubt the more extreme aspects of modern “special
snowflake” life of identity politics are laughable to anyone with half a
brain--please, do yourself a favor and look up the subreddit r/TumblrInAction
for equal parts laughter and hair-tearing frustration that young people really
think this way today--for the NY Times to blame “identity liberalism” for
Hillary Clinton’s epic meltdown is laughable.
So, let’s get this straight: those two-thirds of non-college
educated white people and the 80 percent of evangelicals who voted for Trump
instead of Clinton did so because she “left them out” of her speeches on the
campaign trail, unlike African-Americans, LGBTQ people, Latinos and women?
Really?
Any thoughts on how the consequences of the past 20-plus
years of her and Bill’s disastrously venal, pro-business, anti-working class,
militaristic triangulation nonsense are coming home to roost, heavily
penalizing the working class while benefiting those who live like the Clintons
do--that is to say, in multiple mansions, flying between them on private jets?
But no, liberal identity politics. Okay, so people obsessing
over what bathroom to use or squabbling over what pronouns they want to be
called is what caused Hillary to lose.
Somehow.
We will of course never know, but one wonders what might
have happened had the Democratic party not stymied debate over Bernie Sanders’
overwhelmingly popular proposals for changing the neoliberal path which
presidents of both parties have dutifully, disastrously followed for the past
30-plus years. What we do know is that in every pre-election poll, Sanders ran
light-years ahead of Clinton in hypothetical races against any and all comers
from the Republican side, including Trump.
Most polls had him winning by close to double digits, with
Clinton running closer to even against The Orange One. And while Sanders had
some early hiccups getting groups like Black Lives Matter on board, he didn’t
shy away from identity politics--that is to say, inclusion of all Americans in
his vision of uplifting the many against the few.
Much hay has been made of the fact that Clinton has now been
estimated to have won the popular election by more than two million votes. And
the truth is that a discussion over the undemocratic nature of the Electoral
College must happen, sooner rather than later if The Republic is to survive in
anything but name only.
But rarely is it mentioned that Clinton underperformed
Obama’s 2012 turnout in nearly every category. (Trump, for his part, won
slightly more votes than Romney in 2012.)
Fully two million votes that came in for the Democratic side
in 2012 went up in smoke in 2016. Why? Because Clinton was hewing closely to an
identity politics line? Let’s look at the numbers and see if that fits.
She was down five percentage points compared to Obama’s 2012
election among young people 18-29, and down three points for people 30-44.
To be sure, she was down four points among white men
compared to Obama’s 2012 turnout. However, Clinton also underperformed Obama
2012 by seven points among black men, two points among black women, three
points among Latino men and fully eight points among Latino women.
If this was a white, non-college-educated exodus based on
identity politics it was a passing strange one.
In fact you could say it was a Rainbow Coalition of rejection of her
policies and personality.
Sorry gang, the Democratic party lost this one all on its
own. They and their apologists will continue to cast about with increasing
desperation looking for someone to blame--that is until we all forget about
their massive, blundering, blindingly arrogant miscalculation in backing a massively tainted, elite favorite in a year
when people were clamoring for change.
Soon enough they will begin anew the cycle of
conditioning us to vote for the lesser of two evils in 2020 and we will forget
what happened here.
But let it be said, the real crime of rigging this election
came straight out of DNC headquarters, not Putin’s Kremlin.
And to blame Special Snowflakes, easy as they are to mock,
is ludicrous, even for a hoary mouthpiece reliably cheering for the status quo
like the New York Times.
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