“What
scares me the most is Hillary’s smug certainty of her own virtue as she has
become greedy and how typical that is of so many chic liberals who seem unaware
of their own greed. They don’t really face the complicity of what’s happened to
the world, how selfish we’ve become and the horrible damage of screwing the
workers and causing this resentment that the Republicans found a way of tapping
into.”—Former Washington Monthly
editor Charles Peters quoted in Maureen Dowd, “Curtains for the Clintons,” The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2018
Charles Peters,
let it be said right away, is no Trump supporter. But he’s in as good a
position as anyone to understand why Hillary Clinton lost the support of the
working class that had been a bulwark of the Democrats going back at least to
the New Deal.
Now
in his 90s, Peters was a county campaign chairman in his native West Virginia for
John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election. Since 2000, he has watched
in dismay and horror every four years as this once reliably Democratic state has given its
wholehearted allegiance to the GOP.
Years
from now, historians will be utterly perplexed over why Hillary Clinton, so obviously better qualified for the Presidency
than her opponent—and part of an administration with a favorable record on the
economic and national-security issues that matter to voters—could have lost to
Donald Trump. Perplexed, that is, unless they understand the smugness that
Peters correctly identifies as infuriating to the working class.
How
could anyone question her good faith, Ms. Clinton wonders, even as she and her
husband took in $240 million over a 15-year period speaking to all manner of
industry groups and foreign countries who sensed—correctly—that she would be
gearing up for a third Clinton term in the Oval Office. Her tone-deafness in making three
speeches to Goldman Sachs totaling $675,000—and then refusing to divulge the
transcripts of the addresses (which ended up out there anyway, courtesy of
WikiLeaks)—is remarkable.
But
then, it is hardly less remarkable than a Democratic Party that helped pass
NAFTA under Clinton’s husband—an agreement that, it is plain to see now, did nowhere
near enough to protect American workers from production jobs being moved to
Mexico, not to mention lowering wages and benefits here at home, according to an analysis five years ago by the Economic Policy Institute.
In
the 1936 election, even amid the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt
fulminated against the “economic royalists” of Wall Street, and won in a
landslide. In 2016, a more brazen “economic royalist” than FDR could ever have
dreamed of won the Presidency, in no small part because of the very real faults
that so many in the working class detected in Ms. Clinton.
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