Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Sexism
Here’s an article showing the talking point from
Newsweek:
This often vitriolic campaign was a national referendum on women and power.
(The subtext here is usually that if you don’t join the consensus cluster, you’re a sexist yourself, and possibly a sexist Trump supporter). And if you only look at the averages this claim
might seem true:
On Election Day, women responded accordingly, as Clinton beat Trump among women 54 percent to 42 percent. They were voting not so much for her as against him and what he brought to the surface during his campaign: quotidian misogyny.
There are two reasons this talking point is not true. First,
averages conceal, and what they conceal is class. As you read further into the article, you can see it fall apart:
In fact, Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent, with white women without college degrees going for [Trump] two to one.
So, taking lack of a college degree as a proxy for being working class, for Newsweek’s claim to be true, you have to believe that working class women don’t get a vote in their referendum, and for the talking point to be true, you have to believe that working class women are sexist. Which leads me to ask: Who died and left the bourgeois feminists in Clinton’s base in charge of the definition of sexism, or feminism? Class traitor
Tina Brown is worth repeating:
Here’s my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played in Hillary’s demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate, when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump’s gross comments with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump’s unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he’d be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill’s.
Missing this pragmatic response by so many women was another mistake of Robbie Mook’s campaign data nerds. They computed that America’s women would all be as outraged as the ones they came home to at night. But pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. It is everywhere in the interviews. “My dad lost his business”, “My husband hasn’t been the same since his job at the factory went away”.
Three Myths About Clinton's Defeat in Election 2016 Debunked | naked capitalism