Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and the Mendacity of Equality

Is Hillary Clinton hiding something from us?  She’s clearly been painted with the stain of dishonesty.  Most of us can list her scandals, each with its own tag: Whitewater, Benghazi, The Emails.  Something, we think, has to be wrong here.  She cannot possibly have clean hands in every single one of these heavily investigated scandals, right?

The pervasive sense trailing Clinton is that she is not a transparent political figure.  Despite the length of her public career, she still seems opaque, unreachable.  What is she like as a person?  Who holds sway with her, and who does she influence?  Who are her closest friends and aides?  Why aren’t they more accessible to us?

The better questions: Why are we asking these questions of only one candidate in the race?  Is it a coincidence that it’s the female one?

History provides us with a valuable lesson here.  At the dawn of modern society came the intellectual Enlightenment, a movement of thinkers who rejected old forms of dogma and superstition in favor of rationality and rigorous investigation.  People like John Locke, Thomas Paine, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated for people to shake off the chains of oppressive religious and political systems.  In short, these philosophers believed that people were inherently good, and that they ought to govern themselves to create the best government—and life—for all involved.
Key to this new project of representative government was a sense of transparency.  No member of this new society could cagily guard his own private motivations, which might run counter to the greater good, thereby threatening the society as a whole.  Instead, people needed to be completely open and honest in public, display no guile, lest they harm the larger project of democracy.

There remained one group, however, for whom this transparency was inherently unattainable: women.  Where Enlightenment philosophers could shake off religious and political dogma, traditional beliefs about gender proved far more stubborn.  Rousseau argued that if women were allowed access to this new political project, they would inevitably cause its ruin.  Just look, he urged, at ancient Rome or Renaissance Italy: the moment women influenced the political sphere, those great civilizations fell.

In public, Rousseau stated, women turned deceitful, masking their true desires for all to see, and then manipulating those in power to achieve their ends.  You could never really know what a woman was thinking or what she wanted once she came into the public arena.  Transgressing the boundary between the home and the political sphere corrupted women’s natures, turning them from wholesome, maternal figures into conniving seductresses hell-bent on achieving their own selfish goals.

The sense of women’s inherent unfitness for public life has plagued our society since that time, making the scrutiny of women unequal and unfair when they do attempt to breach these artificial barriers.  Such women are deemed too masculine, or not pretty enough, or too strident, or not maternal enough, or, in the case of Hillary Clinton, all of the above.

If you want an example of the weight of three hundred years of male privilege, it is Donald Trump at a podium, or in a town hall forum, openly lying to our faces about his political beliefs.  Unquestioned.  Unassailed.  Unperturbed.  A picture of transparency.

In December 2012, just before she left office as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had an approval rating of 65%.  Today it has dropped to 49%, her lowest, according to Pew, since her 2008 presidential campaign.  So how far have we really come as a society?  If we claim grand progress, we’re just lying to ourselves.