Hill's Far From Extreme, Even if She's a Woman
More from this column:
- Obama Part II: What Remains to Be Done
- Obama Part I: Those Who Made It Possible
- Address Apartheid in Israel-Palestine
- Forget Ayers, Let's Talk About Kissinger
- Spread Cost of War to All of Society
- For Real Change, Vote on the Real Issues
- Hill's Far From Extreme, Even if She's a Woman
- How College Can Change You if You're Open-Minded
- My America Is One of Action
- Pope Must Atone for the Sins of His Past
Now and then some weird alchemy of anthropological curiosity and masochism drive me to listen to right-wing talk radio, a pastime that has convinced me that Hillary Clinton is the single most hated person in the world by a large swath of the American public. To hear them tell it, Hillary is a cross between Shulamith Firestone, Malcolm X and Joseph Stalin. A quick Google search under “Hillary Clinton communist” yielded about 1.5 million hits.
A reasonably typical comment comes from Cliff Kincaid, who describes himself as a journalist and Clinton as “a radical feminist with a background in Marxist dogma and Communist connections.” He says that she is pushing “her international Socialist agenda, and the transformation of the United Nations and its agencies into a global state.” I assure you that such attributions are anything but idiosyncratic.
On the other hand, to hear the recent Clinton-for-president crowd tell it, she is a cross between Gandhi, Abe Lincoln and bell hooks. Clinton is described as a feminist icon, a progressive champion of the poor and oppressed, a defender of gay rights, an alternative to masculine politics. The Washington Post has run several op-eds in the last few months by Clinton supporters suggesting that the only reason anyone could fail to support her was sexism.
What is striking of course about the popularity of these positions is that both are absurd and not remotely backed up by Clinton’s record.
In reality, she is an utterly mainstream politician in terms of positions, style and political strategy. On Iraq, she supported the Bill Clinton administration’s sanctions regime that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. In the Senate, she supported the war, strongly and vocally, and continues to endorse a permanent U.S. military presence. She has never come out in favor of major arms reductions, against the insane military budget, nor endorsed a rollback of U.S. troop levels throughout the world.
She didn’t resist Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to block the use of generic AIDS drugs in Africa, a policy not unrelated to pharmaceutical support of the Democratic Party. She endorsed the Defense of Marriage Act. She has been one of the most vocal supporters of the ongoing Israeli destruction of Palestinian society. Her voting record on the environment is a bit more liberal than the middle of the Senate but in the most moderate third of Democrats.
On civil liberties, the Bill Clinton administration continued the Reagan push to imprison more people and undercut civil liberties protection. One little-discussed but deeply oppressive piece of legislation was the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Hillary Clinton did nothing to stand in the way of this trend. She also supported legislation written by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) that, for the first time, extended the death penalty to nonviolent offenses. She voted for the Patriot Act. In the U.S. Senate, she has a 75 percent lifetime and 67 percent 2007-08 rating from the American Civil Liberties Union.
She has been pretty solidly in the middle on immigration. She supported her husband’s dismantling of welfare. She supports moderate gun control. She has been a supporter of health care for all, but nothing like the fully socialized systems in Canada and Europe.
In sum, her record puts her pretty squarely in the mainstream of conservative parties in Europe and Canada. She is a bit right of the Tories on social issues (gun control, civil liberties, death penalty, health care); a bit left on economic issues; and a bit more militaristic in foreign policy.
In short: a mainstream Democrat. And one that is as closely tied to mainstream Democratic strategy and strategists as one can be. Early on she was the choice of the major Democratic power-brokers and closely tied to the Democratic Leadership Council, which has been pushing the party to the right for over a decade.
So what in the world leads both supporters and detractors to so utterly misrepresent a completely mainstream politician? In a word: sexism.
That this is the explanation for Republican Hillary hatred hardly requires argument. Denunciations of Hillary in the right-wing media amount to a caricature of misogyny. Though she has neither said nor done anything radical, the very idea of a forceful, well-spoken woman attacking any aspect of male supremacy from the White House sends a certain segment of the U.S. population into paroxysms of fear. So, when a male politician engages in self-interested political calculation, changes positions for political gain, etc., it is seen as what one has to do to get ahead. When Hillary does the same, she is a manipulating, evil b…
But if the image of Hillary in right-wing America is a reflection of deep-seated misogyny, her image as a fearless challenger of the downtrodden is that same reflection bounced around a funhouse mirror, for so much of the support for Clinton swallows hook, line and sinker the right-wing terms of debate. If they denounce a woman as a radical feminist, it must be a radically feminist statement to support her. If they say she’s a Commie Socialist, we must be supporting genuinely progressive ideals by voting for her.
The reality is that virtually no authentically feminist voices are allowed in either party, just as progressive views on civil liberties, war, gay rights, economics or foreign policy are systematically excluded. Dennis Kucinich tried to bring a few of these issues into the election, and he was declared a non-candidate before the race started.
There are genuinely feminist, anti-war voices at both conventions — Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, and many others — but they are outside, on the streets, protesting the politics-as-usual that cause so much death and destruction around the world, calling for health care, housing and education for all people, calling for an end to all wars and to offensive military spending, for a foreign policy based on justice and international law. It is, of course, detestable that the right-wing machine has done so much to demonize Hillary Clinton, but far sadder is that so many who claim to be progressive have taken the bait and allowed her to become the issue.
Mark Lance is a professor in the philosophy department and a professor and program director in the Program on Justice and Peace. He can be reached at lance@thehoya.com. COGNITIVE DISSIDENT appears every other Friday.
Sep 05 2008 at 4:44 p.m.
How then do you explain the right's love affair with Sarah Palin? She (in terms of gender) is much more womanly than HIllary?
Sep 05 2008 at 7:20 p.m.
Great question. I think this is the "clarence Thomas" effect. (There's a less nice name for it, drawn from a historical slang for a privileged member of the oppressed class, but we'll ignore that.) No group wants to admit they discriminate. Everyone thinks they are free from racism, sexism, etc. But what the truth comes out in the way they react to anyone in the discriminated group who expresses opinions that challenge them.
But there are always a few who, for whatever reason, are inclined to take on abslutely all the views of the dominant group. So you find people like Clarence Thomas who will denounce affirmative action, and support every policy of the white elite. You have leaders like Margaret Thatcher who are more masculinist than any man, attacking British social welfare, pushing wars, etc.
People like Sarah Palin are great for sexist AMerica. They denounce feminism -- and evolution -- and stand up for everything that right-wing masculinist America endorses. So she is no threat. A woman who has internalized every aspect of the ideology that oppresses her as a woman is fabulous.
Mark Lance
Sep 06 2008 at 4:46 p.m.
Extremism is almost always defined as where someone sits in comparison to who is defining them. So, from where Cliff Kincaid (whoever he is) sits, Hillary is a long way away and therfore on the extreme edge of left wing thought.
From where you sit she is a left of center politician. This probably says more about you (and Cliff Kincaid) than it does about Hillary.
Your argument that the reason that people both oppose and support Hillary is sexism is very thin. That some people from both camps would have those views partly or even largely because she is a woman is undoubtedly true, but I think it is highly unlikely that a Hillary supporter is going to vote for McCain because of Palin or that someone on the right is now going to vote for Obama because Hillary is not on the ticket. Maybe more importantly, it does not seem likely that McCain will lose many votes on the right because he named a woman.
If I were your professor, I might give you an A for effort- but you would fail on content.
Sep 06 2008 at 8:24 p.m.
Well Jim, let's leave to one side the condescending comment at the end.
If you will notice, I did not say she was left of center. Nor did I measure her by relation to my own views. I measured her by the standards of established representative democracies and argued that she is a bit left of the center of the right party in most countries. (I specifically mentioned the British and Canadian Tories, but the point would have been similar in France or Germany, and stronger in Scandinavia.) This is measuring her by a statistical norm across relevantly similar countries.
And Kincaid and the others do not say that she is left of the views they like. They say she is a communist, working for world government, etc. These claims are not subjective. They are objectively false, indeed absurd. Similarly the claims by many supporters that she is solidly behind a feminist agenda, a champion of the poor, and anti-militaristic. These are simply false claims, immediately refuted by a quick review of her record.
Sexism is not so simplistic as to manifest as "support all women" or "oppose all women". I agree that few Clinton supporters will be bought with the cynical Palin choice. But that is irrelevant to the argument that I'm making, that a forceful woman who challenges the status quo in even the smallest ways brings out massive vitriolic denunciation, while leading to a reactive support that also ignores the record, to the detriment of more effective feminist voices.
Mark Lance
Sep 07 2008 at 7:59 p.m.
Professor,
I am sorry if you felt I was being condescending, it was not my intent- but I'll accept that it could be interpreted in that light.
Now that we have established that you are capable of understanding condescension when it is directed at you, can we expect your articles and responses to stop condescending to your readers?
When people like Mr. Kincaid refer to people like Senator Clinton as communist that is their way of painting them as being of the far left, which, as you note she definitely is not.
What you then try to do is compare her to the political spectrum in other countries so that you can then put her into the center, or center right, or as you say, just left of that. Which seems to be your way of pushing her as far away from what certainly seem to be your views and back towards the likes of Mr. Kincaid. This is a poor argument as she is an American politician, running for office in America, and she has to be judged in that enviornment. In the US, Senator Clinton is definitely left of center and to many, left of that.
I don't think that your article makes a good case that any forceful woman who challenges the status quo in even the smallest way brings about vitriolic denunciation on one side and misguided support on the other. I also don't think it crowds out "more effective" feminist voices. If they were more effective, we would see results that spoke to their effectiveness.
The right didn't like Hillary because she was, back in the early 90's not particularly likeable,she condescended to them with the whole baking cookies blah blah thing and she was unelected and espousing things from inside the White House as if she was elected. She made herself a lightening rod.
The left doesn't seem to like any woman, particularly one who is still young (ish) like Sarah Palin who makes a play for power because it threatens their world view that they speak for all women, which they clearly don't and never have.
Both sides have proven that they are willing to vote for and elect women who share their views. You seem to be aggrieved that they won't elect these mysterious "more effective" feminist voices whose views they don't share. That people won't elect people that don't share their views is not a surprise to most people. That does not make them sexist, it means that they support women whose ideas fit with theirs and reject women whose views don't fit with theirs. They do the same thing with men (look at how the right painted Bill Clinton and the left paints W).
You seem to like to paint everything in black and white with nothing in between. It seems to leave you with a dark view of things. Cynics accuse others of being cynical because that is how they think. Republicans support Palin because she seems to have views that match theirs, Democrats support Clinton because their views match hers. The fact that they are women is, I think, a secondary consideration.
Sep 07 2008 at 9:08 p.m.
Jim:
Thanks for writing again.
It's hard to see how you could not interpret your last sentence in the first post as condescending, but I appreciate your saying it wasn't meant that way. As for me, you say that I am condescending, but offer not one remark as evidence, so I don't know what to make of that. As far as I can see I've made arguments for claims, and responded to objections. Challenging someone's views with arguments is actually the opposite of condescension for it presupposes that they are rationally capable of engaging with criticism.
As for the rest. I don't only compare Hillary to other countries, I compare her to politicians in the US. She is a bit left of center in the US, but nowhere near the extremes of our representatives. The most liberal reps in recent years, those who are way outside the mainstream consensus on a few issues, are probably Finegold, Kucinich, and McKinney. And none of them are remotely "communist," etc. No one in the US government, and certainly not Hillary, is anywhere near the way Hillary is portrayed by both the Kincaid types and the Hillary types. Again, that is something that is perfectly clear from her record. You keep objecting to my saying it, but not by responding to any of the arguments I gave based on her record. You just keep announcing that I have various intentions which make me wrong.
As for not making the case that this happens to any outspoken political woman, in a sense of course not. To really make that case would require going through lots and lots of examples from the history of many countries, and I have 900 words for a newspaper column. But I gave one case study and told you my diagnosis. I think it is quite a consistent pattern. (Britain had one female PM, for example, arguably the most rightwing PM in recent history.) If you look at the members of minority groups who make it to high levels in politics they are consistently people to take on the politics of the majority groups. Of course like any social-historical generalization there are a few exceptions. But not many.
The baking cookies comment came in this election cycle, so hardly serves to explain hatred from the 90s.
Your claim that "The left doesn't seem to like any woman, particularly one who is still young (ish) like Sarah Palin who makes a play for power" seems bizarre. Didn't they like Hillary? Didn't she "make a play for power?" Are you saying the left doesn't like young people? Or is it just that the left doesn't support women who have right-wing views? If that is the claim, then I hardly think we need postulate a desire to speak for all women. Not supporting people who have opposite views is what we expect. Utterly misrepresenting someone's views, or supporting someone fanatically when they don't share your views -- as I explained happen with Hillary -- is what calls for explanation.
re your next to last paragraph: The whole point is that the "left" as you put it are supporting someone way more strongly than her views merit, and the "right" hating her more than they do. And no, this doesn't happen for Bill Clinton and W. Some misrepresent each, but nowhere near as often and nowhere near as extremely.
Neither does Palin get the same characterization from "the left" as Hillary gets. The corresponding approach would be to say that she is a Nazi, that she is aiming to bring a racially pure white country, etc. Please show me one example from even the most extreme left blog that says something like this? By contrast, such absurdities were said about Clinton literally every day on the radio up until she lost the election.
As for painting everything black and white, and having a dark view, it is hard to find anything less true of me.
And I think I've responded to your final point several times now.
Mark Lance