I’ve been watching the “I could never vote for Hilary”
people with great interest, trying to figure out the basis for this stance,
which on the surface is just plain bizarre when not voting for Hilary amounts
to a de facto voting for an unstable,
clownish, megalomaniac.
This is what I have observed: there are primarily two groups
of people who won’t vote for Hilary: the Bernie-or-Bust people and the
Nostalgic-for-Reagan people. I am not sure the same analysis can be applied equally
to both groups. The Bernie-or-Bust people are the smaller group, so I am not
primarily concerned with them.
The vast majority of the anti-Hilary people are in the other
group. But their own affection for Reagan makes it very difficult to take their
hatred of Hilary seriously. Reagan, among his many sins, sold weapons to our
enemies in order to fund an illegal war in Central America. Either of those
acts is far worse than anything Hilary has ever been accused of doing or ever
would do. (I mean of course “seriously accused,” since there are those who have
accused her of being in league with Satan.) And in fact the vast majority of
the reasons these people give for hating Hilary are demonstrably specious—essentially
made up (the whole Benghazi “scandal” for example, for which there is literally
no basis in fact).
Now I don’t want to excuse Hilary. She has done some stupid
and even perhaps reckless things—but nothing that any thoughtful observer could
use to suggest either that she is either unqualified for the presidency or, more
importantly, that she is not an infinitely better choice than the befuddled
sociopath who is her opponent, even if all the stories were true.
In other words, the hatred for Hilary, the “I could never
pull the lever beside her name” talk in fact has little if any relationship to
any honest evaluation of Hilary as a potential president. That does not mean
that those who come to this conclusion don’t believe they come to it honestly. But it does mean that in fact they do not.
So what is really behind this hatred of Hilary? Some will
say it is a conscious or unconscious bias against the fact that she is a woman.
There may be something to that, but I don’t think it accounts for much. I don’t
think that that alone explains the vitriol or resentment. In fact we see this
same vitriol in every election and on both sides. Sure, there is misogyny
against Hilary as there is racism against Obama, but in fact at this level all candidates are hated beyond any reason
by a large swath of voters who don’t vote for them.
Trump is the exception of course. He’s hated with good
reason by both sides. So perhaps to understand the hatred of Hilary it will be
useful to understand the acceptance of Trump. An acceptance of Trump has to be
to some extent pathological, since there can be no reasonable justification for
it. In fact he’s the reverse of the same impulse that produces the hatred of
Hilary.
I don’t think this pathology is limited to those who accept Trump
or hate Hilary. In fact it is pervasive (if not necessarily universal) on both
sides.
I have entertained the idea that the problem is the rhetoric
that is used to get these people elected, which is full of the trumped up
hatred of the other with exaggerated language and absurd conclusions. Until
Trump came along, this language, as most of us knew, was primarily “just
politics.” We knew enough not to take it seriously. If to win an election the
Democrat said of the Republican “He’s not qualified to be president,” we winked.
We dialed it down without thinking. So that now when we actually do have a
candidate who is not only not qualified but comically unqualified we out of
habit dial that observation down as though it were the typical political hyperbole.
The “cry wolf” syndrome. That may have something to do with how it is an
otherwise reasonable person could bring herself to vote for Trump, but it doesn’t
explain the hatred of Hilary.
I think that what does explain not just this bizarre behavior
but the bizarre language and behavior surrounding every American election is
simple ego-maintenance. The voters think they are thinking, think they are
thinking for themselves, think they are thinking their own thoughts. But
thoughts are not driving either votes for the sociopath or the refusal to vote
for the qualified candidate. Rather the voter who won’t vote for Hilary even in
this unprecedented situation are simply finding it impossible to see herself as
someone who can belong to the group of people who vote for Hilary. In her mind she
is part of a tribe, and this is a tribe of people who hate Hilary. These Hilary
haters are like sports fans. Sports fans can get violent in their preference
for their team or their hatred of the Yankees. Any thoughtful person knows that
there is no rational basis for the preference of any sports team over any
other. It’s a matter of autonomic loyalty, pure and simple. Still there are
fans of the Red Sox who would not root for the Yankees for any amount of reward.
And there are members of the American electorate who could not vote for the
obviously qualified candidate even when not voting for her is a threat to the
stability of the republic itself.
In fact that is, essentially, the American electorate.
This is a fact of what we have gotten used to calling “human
nature.” I doubt there’s any way out of it, though individuals might learn at
times to put it aside (they will be few and they’ll have to do something that
feels like tearing off a piece of their identity to do it). I do still believe
that individuals can come to recognize, at times, the irrationality of their
prejudices and can successfully fight to overcome them and grow from the act. But
it’s getting harder to maintain that optimism. And without that optimism, it
becomes very difficult to hold on to the theoretical basis for this 18th-century
formation of democracy.
