For
a great many women around the world, Donald J. Trump’s defeat of
Hillary Clinton feels like a painful setback not just for democracy, but
for our gender.
Voters
chose a loose cannon of a man with zero government experience over a
calm, collected and supremely qualified woman. The root cause of this
injustice, many have suggested, can only be sexism — proof that the
glass ceiling protecting the highest reaches of power cannot yet be
shattered.
The reaction is understandable. It’s also wrong and unnecessarily demoralizing.
Of
course no female or nonwhite candidate with Mr. Trump’s lack of
experience, angry outbursts, boasts of sexual assault or trail of broken
marriages could have gotten elected. That Mr. Trump did, while spouting
such ugliness about women and minorities, speaks to deep and persistent
strains of misogyny and white supremacy in American society.
But
we can recognize all this yet still reject the idea that all women who
reach as high as Mrs. Clinton will meet the same fate. Yes, she had a
gold-plated résumé that more than qualified her to be president. But
that overlooks an important fact: Virtually everything about Mrs.
Clinton’s biography made her uniquely unsuited to draw blood where Mr.
Trump was most vulnerable.
This
election needed a Democrat who could call out, again and again, the
myriad hypocrisies and absurdities of Mr. Trump’s claim to be a hero for
the downtrodden working class. In the debates, Mrs. Clinton landed
points when she exposed Mr. Trump’s history of outsourcing and tax
dodging. But by then Mr. Trump had already spent the summer mocking his
opponent for her private parties with oligarchs, painting her own
lifestyle as profoundly out of touch with ordinary Americans (which it
is).
In short, she landed on many of the right messages, but she was the wrong messenger.
Similarly,
there was much to be made of the scandals at Mr. Trump’s foundation and
at Trump University. But the Clinton Foundation — and its various
entangled relationships between private corporations, foreign
governments and public officials — made Mrs. Clinton’s attacks far too
easy to turn back at her.
We’ll
never know what it would have looked like for a woman who is outside
the Davos class to have run against Mr. Trump, because voters were not
given that option.
And
then there is Mr. Trump’s record with women: the open talk of sexual
grabbing without consent, the career made rating women’s bodies as if
they were slabs of meat, the infidelity and serial marriages. Once
again, these were all weaknesses that Mrs. Clinton was poorly suited to
fully exploit. Not because she is a woman but because, as Mr. Trump
pointed out in the most public and humiliating of
ways, Bill Clinton has repeatedly been accused of sexual assault — and
Mrs. Clinton has an on-camera record of working with her husband to
discredit his accusers.
Mrs.
Clinton’s behavior during these personal crises may be understandable,
and she is certainly not responsible for her husband’s actions. But the
fact remains that no matter which major party won, a grabby man was
about to move into the White House residence. Would the election results
have been different if Mr. Trump had faced a female adversary who could
credibly have pledged that, under her watch, we would be free of this
kind of seedy drama?
Here
is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining
explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed
policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for
endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no
matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence
to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s
coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade
deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers.
In
this version, it’s all about sexism. And that is the surest way to
ensure that the Democratic Party’s disastrous 2016 mistakes will be
repeated — only next time, with a man at the top of the ticket.
Letting
this early draft of history go unchallenged also means accepting a
powerful constraint on the full potential of American women of all
backgrounds and ideologies. Right now, all women are being bombarded
with the message that they will be perennially kept down by that highest
of glass ceilings — never mind that this barrier could well prove
significantly more fragile than it seems.
That
Mrs. Clinton could be defeated by the likes of Mr. Trump remains
disgraceful. But Mrs. Clinton was too flawed a candidate for this
disgrace to go down in history as a defeat for her gender.
Come
January, Donald Trump and the Republican Party will have a great deal
of power. Let’s not hand them power they have not actually earned — the
power to crush the possibility that the right woman may one day become
president.
source: TheNewYorkTime
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