The Machine Bent on Destroying Hillary is the Same One that Made Her

Many of us feel a vague and surprising disappointment at slow-budding reality that the U.S. may soon have its first woman president.  The dawning of this reality has been anti-climactic because it has been tempered by the less-than-feminist stances the Clinton campaign has taken.  In an apparent effort to stop scaring the Right and appeal to the middle, her campaign has offered policies that are almost as war-mongering and unenthusiastic about change as, well, all the men.  We are left confused as to whether to be happy or sad at her emergence as Democratic front runner.  It is for feminists and those who love womankind deeper than the question of whether we would have preferred Warren, or of whether to vote for Sanders instead; it is a profound sadness that one of our potential victories has become simultaneously a potential step backward.

At the same time, it is impossible to not be outraged by the concerted effort from the Right to derail the Clinton campaign.  Sen. Kevin McCarthy’s admission that the Benghazi committee explicitly set out to destroy Clinton’s numbers was just one more brick in the wall of sexism built against Clinton and her possibilities.  No one was shocked at his shocking admission because we’ve seen for years how discussions of cankles, emails and grandmas have sought to distract from the substance of her campaign and kill the possibility of her as the first female U.S. woman president.

In The Art of War Sun Tzu reminded us that to win a battle you have to know your enemy.  Amidst noisy conversations about whether Clinton is a sell-out or the next milestone for feminist movements in the U.S., we have to recognize that Clinton is not our enemy, and neither are those who don’t support her.  Our enemy is the machine that is determined to destroy her campaign because it fears the change represented by a woman president, and it is the same machine that has made her into the less than progressive candidate that she is.

The U.S.’ two party system guarantees change will only happen if those who want it are very wily.  Many have noted that Clinton is engaging in just this type of political shape-changing. Some pieces of her platform seem to be designed to distract voters from the fact that she is a woman- don’t be alarmed at the levels of estrogen she’d bring to the white house- she still loves war as much as any testosterone-striken 13 year old video gamer. Whether Clinton is consciously choosing to espouse policies that make her seem more palatable to a country of implicit biases against women, or whether she has just been playing the political game for so long that her moral compass has been replaced by one measuring political expediency, her stance toward many of the issues of most import right now simply fall short of a feminist ideal.  In responding to the #BlackLivesMatter movement she has been un-energetic and unspecific, failing to call out systematic and state-sponsored violence against Black citizens and instead redirecting the conversation toward education.  She recently wrote an op-ed promising to maintain military support for Israel and shows no interest in denouncing the occupation.  Though she has made progressive and welcome platform choices (retracting support for the TPP and for Shell drilling in the Arctic), her stances foreshadow a presidency that maintains the U.S. as an imperialist force mistreating a giant swath of its citizens.

But is Clinton the ultimate source of some of the disappointing stances she has embraced on the campaign trail?  We saw similar concessions from the Obama administration as he battled to gain the support of those whom his ethnicity terrified.  His use of drones, continuation of draconian immigration detention, and support for the TPP seem to be designed to make him more palatable to the Right as they were wheezing and gasping over the fact that the U.S. had a Black president. It appears that in our two-party system, there are certain measures in place to keep things from moving too far in any direction.  To lead, you can’t be progressive and not-old-white-male; if your identity is something that would move the country to the left, your policies can’t be.  In his Harper’s piece about Clinton’s more-of-the-same stances, Doug Henwood noted that, ‘as wacky as it sometimes appears on the surface, American politics has an amazing stability and continuity about it.’  Though Clinton (as she has become fond of pointing out) would disrupt business as usual by being the first woman president, she seems to be striving for, and perfecting, the art of continuity.

What is this machine that keeps U.S. politics swinging back and forth in a very small radius of change? I can’t say that I know all the levers and buttons on it, but I know it has one gear funneling nauseating amounts of money into campaigns and one surreptitiously taking away voting rights.  It has another gear keeping the terms of one of the biggest trade deals in U.S. history a secret while jailing whistleblowers.  Clinton knows that she cannot win unless she panders to those who can afford to get her elected and promises that our war-addicted, fossil fuel-addicted and class stratification-addicted nation won’t suffer withdrawal on her watch.  This machine has galvanized a force that might actually put Donald Trump in office before it lets a woman in, and it has wooed Clinton into becoming a moderate Democrat who really might not help matters much.

Feminists need more than just a woman in the White House.  Identity politics are important, but concrete policies to make things better are more important.  If Clinton wins, it would be poor strategy to claim it as an unadulterated victory for women in the U.S.  We should, with sobriety, note it as a measured advance toward the world we want and keep working to dismantle the machine that both hates her and helped form her.