Trump is Hillary Clinton’s spirit animal The pair have more in common than you think

And now there is an interview, published in the New York Times ahead of its inclusion in The Fall of Roe, an upcoming book which describes how, “at a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history”. The authors are of course referring to the Dobbs decision that left abortion rights in the hands of the states, but they could just as easily be talking about Hillary, who continues to insist that she did not fail, but was failed, by the Democratic Party and its voters. They were the ones who refused to heed her warnings about the threat posed by Trump to abortion rights, to gay rights, to the future of democracy itself; she also fears they are still not listening.

“Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realise we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country,” she says. “This election is existential. I mean, if we don’t make the right decision in this election in our country, we may never have another actual election.” A cynic might point out that this is only the most existential election since the last one, which was the most existential since the last, and so on.

Twenty years ago, on the first Wednesday in November in 2004, I went to use the restroom at work and found a woman my age standing at the sinks, washing her hands and sobbing. I asked if she was okay. “He conceded!” she wailed — the “he” in question being Democratic candidate John Kerry, who had lost the previous day’s election quite unequivocally to the incumbent, George W. Bush.

I thought of this woman on election night in 2016; there seemed to be versions of her everywhere, their features twisted with something wilder and more desperate than mere disappointment. This wasn’t what they wanted, but more than that, it wasn’t what anyone wanted — at least, not anyone they or I knew. Where were these troglodytes pulling the lever for the man who every person in our peer group referred to, groaningly, as “the worst president ever”? Who were they? Did they even exist?

It is an animating sentiment of today’s political discourse that things have only got worse: that we are in an existential struggle for the future of the country against an unseen, unknown, unknowable evil. Republican voters mill about in flyover country, which might as well be another planet; our elections, rather than a banal exercise in choosing our political representatives, have become a proxy battle for our very lives against these roving hordes. And while nobody has quite come right out and said it, there is a distinct sense — evinced by both the Democratic Party leadership and a politically obsessed media class — that Americans face a binary choice come November. You can vote for Joe Biden for president, or you can vote to destroy democracy.

Meanwhile, the possibility that Trump might win legitimately — that indeed, a hazard of a healthy democracy is that the will of the people, sometimes, is to be governed by a buffoon — has been banished to the realm of the inconceivable, as illuminated by Hillary’s dire warning about what will happen if voters don’t make “the right decision”. Gone is the notion of an election as a question to which there are no wrong answers, only majority rule. Gone, too, is any sense that we ought to preserve equanimity in the event that the majority disagrees with us about which candidate is best for the job. In this paradigm, Republican voters are either wrong, as in error, or wrong, as in evil, but either way, they’ve made a terrible mistake.

It’s hard not to see the current state of the discourse as an obvious outgrowth of an earlier phenomenon that Vox writer Emmet Rensin termed the “smug style” in American liberalism, “predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them”.

It is also hard not to find Hillary’s armchair quarterbacking of the upcoming election a bit rich, considering the source, and particularly when her own smug style is at least partly to blame for getting us into this mess. We all have that highlight reel of cringeworthy moments that runs through our head when we’re awake and anxious at 3am: the verbal fumbles, the jokes that didn’t land, that time a waiter said, “Enjoy your linguini”, and you, an idiot, replied: “You, too!” If I were Hillary Clinton, I would be lying awake at night, wondering how different my life — all our lives — would be, had I never uttered the words, “basket of deplorables”.

But that’s me; the former candidate, on the other hand, seems disinclined toward accepting any culpability for the current state of affairs. Rather, she imagines herself as Cassandra, standing athwart the ignorant public and the ideologically blinkered members of her own party alike, a grandiose notion that appears to have only intensified in the wake of Trump’s conviction. About five minutes after the verdict came in, Hillary took to Instagram to announce the addition of a new product to her merch store: a mug emblazoned with her likeness and the words, “TURNS OUT SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”

Granted, in some ways — and particularly when it comes to the subject of the book — the told-you-sos aren’t entirely unearned. The “shout your abortion” brand of rhetoric that came to dominate the feminist discourse in the pre-Dobbs years now seems, in hindsight, to stem from a delusional level of confidence about the lasting strength of Roe, as well as a total incomprehension of the strategy of the pro-life movement. And if Hillary had won the presidency, who knows? In addition to sparing us the chaos of the Trump administration, not to mention a Supreme Court stacked with Trump’s conservative picks, perhaps she would have motivated her party to finally codify abortion protections into law, rather than letting them dangle forever by the thread of a single court challenge.

But she didn’t win. He did — and Hillary’s bitterness over this fact continues to get in the way of a realistic accounting as to why. The notion of the Republican candidate and Republican voters as something akin to an alien species reveals a bizarre insensibility as to how much Trump’s schtick is rooted not in conservative tradition, but in the aforementioned smug style that is so prevalent on the Left. When Trump takes to social media on Memorial Day and writes “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country”, he’s playing to the same contempt that had people chuckling alongside Hillary over the “basket of deplorables” line. When Trump stood in front of a crowd and declared the election had been stolen, he was traveling a path that had been thoroughly pre-greased by four years of open speculation that he was working for Russia, which had hacked the voting machines and tipped the election in his favour. Any sneer we can do, Trump can do better, louder and more shamelessly. The difference is not of kind, but degree.

Around the same time Trump first announced his presidential run, a rumour began to circulate that the bathrooms in his residence were outfitted with solid gold toilets. It wasn’t true, but it’s a remarkably vivid metaphor for his impact on American politics. Trump’s aesthetic is tasteless, ostentatious, vulgar; what’s running through the pipes, however, is just the same old shit. And despite the allegedly unprecedented importance of the forthcoming election, it’s hard to exaggerate how painfully familiar it all seems, like a TV show that has long since jumped the shark. We have the same characters, the same plotlines. We even have the same actual lines, as with Hillary’s interview. Alongside the allegedly unprecedented swipes at her fellow Democrats, she has also taken this opportunity to reprise her eternal grudge against James Comey, whom she believes singlehandedly cost her the election when he raised questions about her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, just two weeks before Election Day. “[Once] he did that to me,” she says, “the people, the voters who left me, were women. They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect.”

Every time Hillary raises this point — and she’s raised it a lot in the past eight years — I’m struck by how much it sounds like something Donald Trump would say, although he’d probably be more bombastic and throw in a few capitalised, trademark phrases for good measure (Very Unfair!). But the way Hillary talks about patriarchy and sexism is the same way Trump talks about elites and corruption. When she succeeds, it is in spite of these things; but when she loses, it’s because of them, a perfect rhetorical fortress within which her successes are always her doing, while her failures are never her fault.

I’m also struck by the people excluded from this narrative: the ones who were inspired not by her policy positions but by the history-making nature of her candidacy; the ones who checked the box next to her name for no other reason than First Woman President. In other words, the ones who voted for Hillary not in spite of her sex, but because of it.

Nobody likes to admit to being one of these people — I know, I was one of them — but Hillary’s campaign benefited enormously from the symbolic blow it allegedly dealt to the patriarchy, just as a certain number of Trump voters were motivated primarily by the thrill of dealing a slap in the face to smug elites. Indeed, the subtext of Hillary’s loss is not that she, as a woman, was forced to play by a different set of rules than Trump. It’s that he beat her at her own game.

What seems abundantly clear now, a flood of donations pours into Trump’s coffers in response to his conviction, is that this game has only ever been a sideshow, a distraction. That’s all well and good for the Republican candidate, who seems to view the presidency primarily as a vehicle for his own self-aggrandisement; this is his circus, these are his monkeys. But the actual business of policy change is happening elsewhere, and as the Dobbs decision shows, we ignore it at our peril.

All the performative resistance in the world won’t secure abortion rights for future generations of women; for that we need old-fashioned legislation and ballot initiatives, and with them, the cooperation and compromise that living in a divided country requires. The aesthetics of empowerment will never be a substitute for the unglamorous work of crafting policies and knocking on doors and persuading people to support your cause. And true, women have more power now than ever before in history — but the thing about women’s power is the thing about any kind of power. It’s not just about having it, or displaying, but using it.

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Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

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