We are missing something when we talk about the broken political system. Yes—Washington disproportionately responds to money and special interests, leaving most Americans unrepresented. And yes--the dominance of two parties restricts a voter’s options.
But one of the biggest cracks in the system has gone largely undiscussed:
Lots of people do not vote! In the 2012 elections, just over 50% of voting-age Americans turned out to vote. In non-presidential elections, turnout is even lower. So who is voting? A 2015 Demos report shows that voters are disproportionately affluent, older, and white. The least likely to vote? Young people, low-income people, and people of color. The report argues that: “while money in politics is increasingly a focal point for explaining why the US policy landscape leans so heavily to the right compared to those of other wealthy democracies, the data we look at here suggest that our country’s cumulative voter turnout gaps—historic and contemporary—are also an important factor in the growing misalignment of public policy with the concerns and needs of working-class and low-income people, particularly in communities of color.”
One could therefore argue that the system is not broken. It is working quite well for those who choose and are able to participate. So making the US more progressive, actualizing the Sanders-inspired political revolution, begins with simply voting.
But of course, that is not so simple. Since the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby decision, states have raced to enact laws that make it harder for people of color, low income, and young people to vote—taking the form of voter ID laws and restrictive voting periods.
These states recognize the power of our votes. We should too. Deciding not to vote because ‘the system is broken’ is self-defeating. By not voting, we become complicit in rigging the system. We cannot not wait until we feel excited and inspired. We must vote, and vote, and vote until we make system more exciting and inspiring---consistently, in every local and state election, for those elections determine how the streets are policed, the strength of the social safety net, funding for schools, the force of local environmental initiatives, and whether the criminal justice system punishes or restores.
And it also means voting in this presidential election. According to top pollsters, the tightening of the presidential race in past few weeks has occurred because millennials are flocking to third party candidates while Republicans are coalescing around Trump. It increasingly looks like we millennials will decide if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be our next president.
I consider myself to be fairly progressive. I believe the distribution of wealth presents us with the moral and political issue of our time, that the reality of climate change demands immediate and dramatic action, that money must be flushed out of the political process, that immigrant families should not be torn apart, that deciding to use a public restroom should never induce anxiety or fear, that the state must stop executing violence against people of color during every stage of the criminal justice system. Heck, talk to me about a universal basic income. And I believe all of that means voting for Hillary this November.
Please, hear me out. I know discussing Hillary can be emotionally weighty and provoking. To make it easier, we’re going to play a game!
If there is one thing that we can all agree on, it is that we understand the real Hillary Clinton. More than understand her political views, we claim to understand Hillary deeply as a person. She’s a crook, corrupt. Or, a pragmatic crusader, policy master. Either way, most people today discuss Hillary’s innermost motivations and character with more conviction than I would have describing my closest family members and friends.
Where do we find such deep certainty about a person we have not met? Either she is exceptionally transparent and forthcoming (ha!), or we are making inferences that we cannot confirm. We can denounce Hillary’s lack of transparency, or we can claim to fundamentally understand her. We cannot logically do both.
As voters, it is our job to try to understand her. That’s where the game comes in. If all goes well, we leave able to talk about Hillary as if she is a human with human complexity, not as if she is a cartoon character villain.
This game is challenging because we compete against ourselves. Good luck! Here we go:
1. Say “Hillary Clinton” out-loud. Note the immediate, visceral and passionate reaction you have. To continue playing, you must do your best to set that reaction aside. Don’t worry, you can reclaim it when we’re done. Just give it a shot—it’s just a game!
2. Now ask yourself, what do you currently think of Hillary Clinton? Your answer will fall somewhere on a spectrum between crook and role model. To proceed, you must get that answer to neutral. This is a challenging but crucial step. Psychological research has demonstrated that we are actually pretty bad at objectively processing political data—we seek out and interpret information to confirm what we already believe. This helps explain why about one fifth of US registered voters continue to believe that Obama was not born in the United States despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a powerful mental force—do you think you are immune?
To confront our own confirmation bias, it’s helpful to take stock of where we get our information. There are many people working full time to shape how we view Hillary. As a recent piece in the Atlantic put it: “no other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—have fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.” The depiction of Clinton as a plutocrat that prioritizes wealth above all else originated as an attack narrative from right-wing opposition research groups – which doesn’t prove the depiction false (she without a doubt has strong ties to big money), but it should give us some pause before we so fervently embrace it as the core of her identity.
3. Next, absolve Hillary of all prior misdeeds because she is a woman.
Just kidding! Don’t do that! But let’s acknowledge that gender is another reason we are bad interpreters of Hillary Clinton—assuming that you agree that it is not a coincidence that all previous presidents have been men.
To proceed, answer the following questions:
Does Hillary’s gender influence your perception of her? Are you sure? Do you also think Obama’s election ushered in a post-racial era?
Some sexism is blatant, some is subconscious. The latter is more insidious because we all think we are immune. We are not.
“Women have told me they find her hectoring, they don’t like her attitude…And they want to like her — that’s the shame of this. They want to like her…I’m asking her to be more authentic. I want her to just sound like a human being,” That was a Democratic analyst reflecting on the problems facing Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign. Sound familiar?
One Harvard study had participants react to the biographical webpage of a power-seeking and fictional politician. For half of the participants the politician was female, and for the other half, male--everything else remained the same. More than half of the study participants were women. In an article in Quartz, Sady Doyle summarizes the results: “power-seeking men were seen as strong and competent. Power-seeking women were greeted by both sexes with ‘moral outrage.’”
Does gender explain all of the outrage directed at Hillary? Of course not. Has her gender had zero effect on her campaign? Of course not. Hillary stepped out of the role of Secretary of State as arguably the most popular politician in the country. Within two month of announcing her candidacy, her approval ratings dropped to the lowest they had been in over a decade. An analysis from FiveThirtyEight confirmed that throughout Hillary’s career, her approval ratings plummeted whenever she ran for office or engaged in partisan battles in congress. As one might expect, perhaps, for any politician facing the scrutiny of an election. But with Hillary it seems different—as measured both by the numerical change in her approval ratings and the intensity of people’s disdain for her.
4. Finally, assess your proximity to Clinton. How fluent are you in the decisions she has made during her decades-long career? Just the highlights? Do you have special insight derived from working closely with her?
For most of us, the answer is not that fluent, not personally close. People who know her better offer a different picture than we get from our Facebook feeds. As Ezra Klein writes in a Vox piece that is well worth a full read:
There is the Hillary Clinton I watch on the nightly news and that I read described in the press. She is careful, calculated, cautious. Her speeches can sound like executive summaries from a committee report, the product of too many authors, too many voices, and too much fear of offense…
And then there is the Hillary Clinton described to me by people who have worked with her, people I admire, people who understand Washington in ways I never will. Their Hillary Clinton is spoken of in superlatives: brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective. She inspires a rare loyalty in ex-staff, and an unusual protectiveness even among former foes.
Jill Abramson, the former editor of the New York Times—who oversaw countless investigations into the Clintons and who was responsible for uncovering lies and corruption—concluded that Hillary is “fundamentally honest.” Which is not to say she never lies. Clearly she has. Close Hillary observers agree that her lack of transparency is a reaction to years of negative media coverage, not an attempt to cover up a hidden agenda. Based on public statements made during this election cycle, the Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact found Hillary to be the most honest candidate in this election cycle—including Bernie Sanders.
Fun game, right? Play again with friends.
So how about this: we don’t have to like everything she has done. We can and should be concerned about the level of transparency she will bring to the White House. But let’s talk about Hillary Clinton with more humility and more nuance. Let’s be humble enough to acknowledge that keeping up with the news and talking with like-minded friends does not make us Hillary Clinton experts. Like any politician, it is important to call her out when she lies. But at this point it is just intellectually lazy to dismiss everything she says as a lie, or to dismiss anyone supporting her as corrupt.
Let’s get back to this November’s vote. Why Hillary?
A Hillary victory will guarantee that for the first time in decades, the Supreme Court is controlled by its liberal wing. Recently we have watched the court strip away regulations on campaign finance and protections for voting rights. Imagine instead a Court open to considering the work of liberal legal scholars. As Jeffery Toobin suggests: “the Court might adopt the idea, which Sotomayor has suggested, that the Constitution forbids incarcerating individuals who are too poor to pay fines. Several scholars have proposed a constitutional right to education, which might force increased funding for poor districts, or, even more speculatively, a right to a living wage.’ This may not be the political revolution described by Bernie Sanders, but it sure could come close. And unlike most parts of the progressive agenda that would have to pass through a Republican controlled House, we can easily achieve a liberal Supreme Court. All it would take is electing Hillary Clinton. (Obama, who like Hillary got elected with the help of super PACS and ties to Wall St., appointed Sotomayor, who dissented in Citizens United). We are tantalizingly close. Let’s not throw it away.
The hopes of the Bernie revolution now depend on continued organizing, participation, consciousness-raising—and ultimately policy change. Check out the website of "Our Revolution" that seeks to carry on the work of the Sanders campaign. Among other things, they are calling for: higher taxes on the wealthy, taxing Wall Street more effectively, increasing the federal minimum wage, investing in infrastructure, paid family leave, universal childcare and pre-k, strengthening the voting rights act, overturning Citizens United. Hillary’s campaign is the only one to put any work into thinking through and publishing detailed policy plans to make these goals more than aspirational (“Our Revolution” has not endorsed Hillary). Her campaign has put out an astonishing number of detailed policy papers: on advancing equality for Muslim Americans, expanding opportunities for people with disabilities, making college affordable, stopping unjustified drug price-hikes, improving how we treat mental health, supporting community banks and credit unions, supporting small businesses, addressing wealth inequality, AIDS, healthcare for all, addressing the student debt crisis, keeping kids healthy, conservation, caring for military families, investing in infrastructure, affordable childcare, Puerto Rico, environmental justice, addressing climate change, Central American migrants, reducing gun violence, ending the school-to-prison pipeline, LGBT equality, ending Alzheimer's disease, to name just a few. They are all lies? Well, then it is the most exhaustive, thorough, and helpful set of lies any politician has ever produced. Sure, she has no plan for implementing a single payer healthcare system. But if even a fraction of her agenda makes it through Congress, that would be a dramatic step forward. She’s the only one with the experience in Washington to make any of it happen.
If nothing else, the prospect of a Trump presidency lends this decision moral clarity. There are many Americans who have already been hurt by Donald Trump. I want to use my vote to say to them that this is not a country that views the billion people in your religion as a monolith, or views your country as full of rapists and drug dealers, and that this is not a country that will elect a man that evaluates you based on how big your breasts are, or who will mock your disability for personal gain. Will we really tell Muslim Americans, immigrants, women, people with disabilities, that there is no difference between Trump and Hillary because they are both “part of the establishment”? A vote for a third party is to look with indifference at all of those who Trump has already hurt, and the many more he will hurt once in the oval office.
This is not a call to stop organizing and raising political consciousness. This is not a call to abandon the issues that the two main parties ignore. Those efforts must continue. Admirers of Hillary say her greatest strength is her ability to listen to others and be receptive to their ideas. Her critics contend she will do whatever is politically expedient for herself. Either way, President Hillary Clinton is the progressive’s best bet because she would be the president we could influence. If she is politically malleable, let’s start molding her. Let’s stop talking about her as the lesser of two evils, and elect her expressing excitement about her proposals on wealth inequality, campaign finance, climate change, and criminal justice reform. Let’s flood the polls on November 8—bring your friends, being “not-political” is just a cop-out. The election is in our hands. We have power if we vote. Let’s make sure she knows why we are voting, and then let’s keep up the pressure when she’s in office. If we show our political might this year, and she wants to be reelected in four years, she will listen.
(View original post here: www.huffingtonpost.com/… )