On Monday, a woman who was never elected to the presidency, Hillary Clinton, spoke to a crowd in India. There, she laid out the reason she lost: those stupid, stupid poor people.
Yes, Hillary was a blue collar candidate, all right.
Here’s what she said:
There’s all that red in the middle, where Trump won. Now, I win the coasts, I win Illinois, Minnesota, places like that. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. “You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are, whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.”
Clearly, this is the way that Democrats will win back the middle of the country: by calling them racist rubes who despise immigrants and still have outhouses.
It never occurred to Clinton that perhaps she lost because she scorned those people; it never occurred to Clinton that perhaps those people scorned her not because her agenda was sophisticated, but because her hatred of them was so basic to her nature. Mitt Romney was hurt in 2012 because he suggested that 47 percent of the public didn’t pay taxes, and so couldn’t hear his call for tax decreases; Hillary lost because she thinks people who live outside big cities are idiots and deplorables.
It’s also worth thinking about Hillary’s take on wealth here. Is she advocating for an income-based voting system? If so, that gives the lie to the idea that Democrats are the party of the poor – and if Democrats actively alienate those who earn less, they’ll be alienating a core constituency, by the numbers. Those of low income already show up less often to the polls. They’re certainly not going to show up to vote for Hillary Clinton or anyone like her.
Hilariously, Democrats seem more interested in doubling down on intersectional politics than in appealing to the rural voters they’ve lost. That opens the door to Trump’s re-election. But with each passing day, Hillary shows why she never became president – and why she never should have.