Clinton’s ‘Basement Dwelling’ Comment is a Distraction
Donald Trump has dominated the headlines over the past week as his campaign has made its best attempt at impersonating a burning plane crashing into the Earth, but for a brief moment Hillary Clinton was under fire for leaked audio from a fundraiser she held during the primaries. Hillary Clinton described supporters of Bernie Sanders as “children of the Great Recession” and more critically “living in their parents’ basement”. Taken in the broader, context this comment is not even that critical or meant in a denigrating manner. But there are several notable lines that have been overlooked.
False Equivalency and Condescension
“On the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”
This is a common refrain among many centrists and center left pundits. “On one side, there’s the far right that is filled with nationalism, xenophobia and racism. On the other, people want to join the rest of the industrialized world and have single payer healthcare and tuition free college.” To equate people that would like to ban Muslims from coming into the country as well as kicking out every single undocumented immigrant with providing better social services to the public is a false equivalence that is so insulting and absurd that I would think it’s parody. This is also the election where the supposed serious, electable candidate can hardly beat a guy who struggles to not retweet white supremacists, so this is pretty reasonable in comparison.
Clinton goes on to dismiss the policy desires of young people by bringing up one of the many Western European countries that has these policies and claims young people don’t really know what they’re talking about, they’re just too into their feelings. This has been part of a pattern this election of demeaning young people as knowing little about politics and policy. Clinton surrogates and writers in similar camps have made these comments over and over again regardless of how alienating it really is. Instead of trying to win our votes, there is a nonstop barrage of attempts to diminish and dismiss the concerns young voters display because they have shown themselves to be further to the left than Clinton or her allies.
Instead of simply admitting that there is an ideological difference between young voters and Clinton, there is an effort to classify young voters as naïve and ignorant, only unable to see the genius of Clinton and her pragmatism.
A Fundamental Difference
“So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.”
This is the most important part of the audio as it shows the fundamental difference between those that are part of the left and Hillary Clinton. While she correctly acknowledges that our generation has these politics because of the Great Recession, she doesn’t come to the same conclusion that U.S. institutions need radical change. She believes the Great Recession and the Iraq War were just mistakes and aberrations of our institutions and not a natural product. Young people have realized what the product of existing systems is which is why they got behind a candidate in an unprecedented manner to try and change them.
Throughout the primary, Clinton shifted between describing herself as a progressive, a word that is now so devoid of meaning and substance with how it’s being thrown around, and a moderate. Clinton knows there is a vibrant and growing left base that she can’t ignore. Clinton has tried to balance this with her appeal to the donor class by saying that she is a progressive who gets things done. She talked about not over promising and how she’s a pragmatist. The simple truth is that Clinton really just is between center left and center right.
Ezra Klein tries to spin it by calling this “the audacity of realism” a play on Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.” He argues Hillary Clinton is being bold by selling realistic policies and goals instead of widespread change like the 2008 Obama campaign or the Bernie Sanders campaign. Because voters, specifically young ones, don’t get inspired by long slogs for little reform, but calls for wide sweeping change. This is a totally backwards way of looking at politics, and an incredibly deceptive way of making an excuse for the fact that Hillary Clinton is a centrist out of choice and not necessity.
Ezra doesn’t mention that conveniently, the policies that come with being ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ just happen to coalesce with the donor class. Single payer just happens not to benefit insurance companies? Not breaking up the banks or taxing their transactions to fund tuition free college hurts Wall Street? Well that lines up so nicely! But with all the multitude of problems Obamacare has had trying to make a private health insurance market cover sick people while keeping insurance companies profitable, it is Bernie Sanders and his supporters who are considered too idealistic for wanting single payer health care. Despite Wall Street showing its nothing more than a ticking time bomb that will blow up the economy as it makes sure there’s little or no regulation, young people are the ones considered naïve.
Emmett Rensin correctly pointed out that pragmatism is just a means and not an end. The reason it is bold to propose radical change is because it goes against everyone that benefits from the current power structures. Wealthy interests like banks, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and other multinational corporations are perfectly okay with the status quo or small changes at the fringes. To take up a set of policy positions that work against the wealthiest people and corporations in the world is audacious. Hillary Clinton simply has a different ideology than the young voters who supported Bernie. She has never believed in radically changing our institutions or combating these powerful interests. She has repeatedly tried to establish relationships with them instead. For all her talks about specifics and being realistic, she simply believes that big goals are only meant to be dreamed of and not accomplished.
The Democratic establishment believes that real leftist policies are meant to be dangled as carrots, that we’ll get eventually but if you demand that we need these policies now prepare to be hit with the stick and scolded about not being ‘realistic’ enough. The philosophy of Hillary Clinton and the overall Democratic Party is to always keep true change in sight while never grasping it, just to keep young voters as a reliable voting bloc. But trying to present what little change she would bring about as a bigger deal than it truly is, is exactly why young people are not supporting her as much as they could this general election.
