Hillary Clinton has a thing for the mythical “center,” where disagreeing parties sit down and work our nations problems out like adults. It’s a nice idea — you could call it a warm purple space. Problem is, this center doesn’t exist in today’s politics. Yet Hillary regularly invokes it her public utterances, making her sound uninformed of our nation’s history and current day reality.
For example, last week Ta-Nehisi Coates called her out on an ahistorical statement on reconstruction she made at the 1/25/16 Candidates Forum. Regarding the loss to nation posed by Lincoln’s death, she said:
But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the re-instigation of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.
In other words, the myth is that people abandoned the center, and we didn’t solve our problems. But that was only a myth. As Coates points out, there was no center to be abandoned. Instead, there was a bloody conflict with former slave-holders who were “discouraged and defiant” because they wanted nothing to do with black citizenship.
[T]he fact that a presidential candidate would imply that Jim Crow and Reconstruction were equal, that the era of lynching and white supremacist violence would have been prevented had that same violence not killed Lincoln, and that the violence was simply the result of rancor, the absence of a forgiving spirit, and an understandably “discouraged” South is chilling.
Hillary dipped into Centrist myth again today with Chris Matthews:
We've got to get back to the middle. We've got to get back to the big center and solving problems. That's how we make progress in America.I'm proud to be in a line of Democratic presidents who just got in there and fought it out…I know how hard it is, and I totally appreciate how exciting it can be to be involved in a campaign that really just puts out these great big ideas. But I want folks to just stop and think, no matter what age you are, OK, we agree on getting the economy going. We agree on raising income. We agree on combatting climate change. We agree on universal health-care. Who has the track record? Who's got things done? Who can actually produce the results you want for you and your family, and for our country?
There is so much going on here. Let’s go piece by piece:
1. HRC: “We've got to get back to the big center and solving problems. That's how we make progress in America.”
Hillary got the verb tense wrong. That was how we made progress in the era of liberal consensus, the 1940s-1960s or so, when the federal government did big problem-solving things like World War II, the interstates, GI Bill, collection of adequate tax revenue, Medicare, EPA, etc. But that era is long gone. Like long, long gone. There is no consensus about government problem-solving. Since the late 1970s, the right has wanted to eliminate the government. And since 1995, Republican Congresses have reflexively blocked any and everything their Democratic brethren propose.
We are in a time of GOP-imposed gridlock— there is no center. Hillary’s prescription is forty years out of date.
So what to do? Well, the US has made progress in times of no center. We eliminated slavery. We recognized unions and gave working people respect & decent pay. The way forward toward these goals was not consensus but struggle. David Dayen offers advice applicable for today:
[T]he best theory of change, the one that’s most tangible to people, is to express your beliefs and preferences consistently until you find enough allies to make it happen. It may never happen – politics is a tough business – but there aren’t many alternatives.
Not surprisingly, Hillary doesn’t follow this plan.
2. HRC: “I'm proud to be in a line of Democratic presidents who just got in there and fought it out.”
Well, actually she’s not in a line of Democratic presidents. Not yet.
3. HRC: “OK, we agree on getting the economy going. We agree on raising income. We agree on combatting climate change. We agree on universal health-care.”
In truth we don’t agree on these things. The GOP rejects all of them. There is no “center” in American politics where these points of agreement are accepted. The only way to get needed government action in these vital areas is to out-organize and defeat the GOP. Hillary offers no advice or program on how to accomplish that.
Instead, she offers bromides on “getting back to the big center” that distract from the real work we must do if we are to save our country.
Hillary Clinton is a very smart and accomplished person. But she has consistently refused to accept difficult realities about the US, preferring a happy myth about the center and warm purple spaces to cold and confrontational reality. It’s almost childish. It’s certainly frustrating for those of us who know the urgency of change.
Hillary needs to rid herself of the center fetish if she wants to be an effective leader.
I’ll close with this line from the Coates piece:
It really isn’t too much to say, if you’re going to govern a country, you should know its history.