Tuesday, September 19, 2017

The wrath of Hillary?

Sophia McClennen of Pennsylvania State University has a thoughtful piece about The great Hillary Clinton paradox Salon 09/16/2017. McClennen sees the paradox as, on the one hand, Hillary claims that her prominent position as a woman in politics is a great strength and a reason to vote for her. And, on the other, she and her followers often seem to be trying to minimize or divert criticism by treating it as just a manifestation of sexism:

Unlike her run for the nomination in 2008, in 2016 the Clinton campaign specifically emphasized her role as a female candidate. She also had to contend with the aggressively hostile ways that Donald Trump and his supporters hurled sexist and misogynist epithets her way. From chants of “lock her up” to “nasty woman” to the various other ways that Trump displayed his disdain for women, the “woman card” was constantly in play.

But at times Clinton cast her role as a female candidate as a way to displace legitimate concerns that she was a Washington insider. Recall that in the first debate she responded to the question of being an insider by saying, “Well, I can’t think of anything more of an outsider than electing the first woman president, but I’m not just running because I would be the first woman president.”

And therein lies one key feature of the paradox: she both was and wasn’t running as a woman. That feature of the paradox was indisputable. Whether she highlighted her gender or not, it was certainly true that she had to contend with gender as a framing issue of her candidacy.
Rebecca Traister argues the case that Hillary suffered from a widespread prejudice against angry women in Hillary Clinton Is Finally Expressing Some Righteous Anger. Why Does That Make Everyone Else So Mad? The Cut 09/15/2017:

The question of whether Clinton could or should have found her own mad voice during the campaign hangs over What Happened. Should she have turned on Donald Trump as he paced behind her at the second debate, she wonders. Could she have found a way to communicate the anger many Americans were feeling? “I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous ... Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired,” she writes, describing the mental diagnostics she was performing as she listened to Trump’s wrathful inauguration, wondering if “maybe that’s why Trump was now delivering the inaugural address.”

But if her failure to win the Electoral College hinged on Clinton’s inability to traffic in rhetorical fury, then the question she raises goes beyond her own wiring. Because she never could have turned around and screamed at Trump, never could have slashed her finger through the air and called for revolution in the style of Bernie Sanders, at least not if she had any hope of winning the presidency. Hillary Clinton is a woman, and there is almost nothing that Americans view as more repellent in women than anger.

Recall that every time Clinton spoke too loudly into a microphone while debating her screamy opponents, Americans seemed to rear back; consider that the one deprecatory remark she threw out — calling those who responded enthusiastically to Trump’s open racism “deplorables” — is still regarded by many pundits as her fatal error. Never mind that she said it while running against a candidate who called Mexicans rapists. Censorious anger from women is a liability; from men, it is often, simply, speech. [my emphasis]
There's a long time piece of cynical wisdom that says that when a man shows anger, he's called forceful. But when a woman shows anger, she's called a bitch. This is often used in the context of how women have to avoid pitfalls in rising professionally in the hierarchy of corporations and other large organizations.

But this now standard piece of conventional wisdom was always flawed in that inappropriate or uncontrolled anger is usually seen as very much an undesirable trait in male corporate managers, as well. Flying off the handle is generally seen as risky, and the more risky the more responsibility and public exposure a manager has. CEO's may sometimes act like medieval tyrants in private. But showing a lack of control and focus in public - the way Donald Trump does - would make a corporate board worry whether their CEO was still up to the job.

It's true that a woman's competitors in an organization, maybe especially male competitors, are often willing to appeal to prejudice against women in unethical ways. It's also the case that women in work settings may try to portray annoyance coming from a male colleague as intimidating or bullying. And since there are many ways in which interactions between members of a corporate workforce interact with, compete with and cooperate with one another, it's exceptionally hard to claim that one factor stands out in a distinctive way.

Olga Kazan provides an important perspective on this in Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work? The Atlantic Sept 2017. She discusses findings that women in organization contexts often express an preference not to work for other women because of a perception that ambitious women will be especially likely to use aggressive tactics against them. This doesn't have to do with expressions of anger per se. But some of her examples show that successful women do express anger in office contexts and that it may benefit their careers.

In other words, it's important to avoid careless generalizations on this subject.

And I have to wonder what the basis is of Traister's claim, "Recall that every time Clinton spoke too loudly into a microphone while debating her screamy opponents, Americans seemed to rear back." Is there some basis for this other than Traister's own assertion?

It's also worth noting that Elizabeth Warren expresses various forms of outrage, annoyance and even anger in public. Maybe "Americans" also "rear back" whenever they hear that. And I'm sure that Republicans and corporate Democrats would like them to.

Hillary is a useful template for people to use to discuss issues of sexism and how men and women are often perceived. But when we're talking about whether any other one factor tipped the election, we are confronted with the same problem as with all the other factors. She won the popular vote by a clear margin. So only a minority of the voting population "reared back' from voting for her. And the Electoral College win was decided by less than 100,000 votes in three states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That's a tiny margin, and it's exceptionally hard to attribute that to any one factor. The chronic media prejudice against both Bill and Hillary is a more likely choice. So is James Comey's infamous pre-election statements on the emails, the latest in a long string of Clinton pseudoscandals irresponsibly hyped by the mainstream press.

Also, there were cases in which Hillary expressed anger publicly. Here is one of them, from Greenpeace USA, in which Hillary chides a Greenpeace activist pressing her on her energy industry donations, Hillary Clinton Loses Patience with Greenpeace Activist Over Fossil Fuel Donations 03/31/2016:



I remember seeing it during the primary campaign, in which my own perspective was that of a Sanders partisan, and I thought it came off as churlish. From the post-election perspective of a year and a half later, it still sounds churlish to me. But it also stands as a minor irritation in a primary campaign with much more substantial points of conflict. But did Democratic primary voters "rear back" form that incident? I would guess that Hillary voters were happy to hear it, Bernie voters took it a confirmation of what they thought anyway, and most everyone else never saw it.

In conclusion, I'd note that Trainer quotes Hillary herself in a statement that is telling not only for her personal style but her ideological perspective: “I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous ... Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired.”

I think it's fine for politicians to "stoke people’s rage and resentment" if there's a legitimate target on which to focus. Crooked bank CEO's come to mind, for example. But Hillary was running on a theme that embodied a certain kind of complacency, exemplified by her theme of "Stronger Together." Hillary didn't want to campaign on opposition and resentment against the power elite, the One Percent, the oligarchs, the super-rich - whatever term one prefers to describe the ruling stratum of the very wealthy in the United States. So we got lines from her like, "America is already great" in opposition to Trump's (pseudo-)populist theme of "Make America Great Again."

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