The Clinton Candidacy and the End of the Liberal-Democrat Alliance

Hillary Clinton as President will likely damage the Democrat brand for liberals for years.

Hillary Clinton as President will likely damage the Democrat brand for liberals for years.

Any hope the Democratic Party has of maintaining its favorability among liberal voters will be scuttled by a Hillary Clinton presidency. The Obama presidency has already taken its toll on the left- seven years of broken promises and the continuation of many of the worst abuses of the Bush Administration have soured many American liberals on the Democratic Party.

Still, the chance of electing the first female president on the Democratic ticket is too good to pass up as a legacy. But the realities of what a Clinton presidency will look like may end the liberal-Democrat alliance for at least a generation.

Domestic

Hillary Clinton was a board member for the corporation Walmart from 1986–1992, while her husband was the governor of Arkansas. Clinton’s campaign literature would have you believe she spent the majority of her time there pushing for progressive hiring practices and environmental responsibility, but few records exist of her work on the board.

Indeed, the four videos of board meetings that she attended show Clinton being silent on labor issues when they were brought up, and one of her compatriots on the board has said that in the twenty meetings they attended together, not once did Clinton bring up Walmart’s abusive worker policies.

She was not exactly the paragon of progressive activism- despite her attempts to retroactively seem so.

Clinton’s reversal on CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is worrying for the same reason. The revelation that it was concurrent with an influx of donation money from Pacific Rubiales, a company widely expected to benefit greatly from the deal, at the very least indicates her willingness to look the other way on workers’ rights violations for a sizable enough sum.

Clinton also supports the TPP and other free-trade agreements that spell doom for the poor and profits for the wealthy.

The massive influx of donation money she is already seeing from Wall Street should be a red flag. This is not a person who has the interests of the American working class in mind.

Foreign

Clinton was a staunch supporter of the War on Terror during her time in the Senate, voting in lockstep with the Bush Administration to approve and fund every act of violence and war the White House undertook.

In the run up to her loss to Barack Obama for the nomination in 2008, Clinton’s rhetoric took on an increasingly violent tone. Iran would be annihilated under a Clinton presidency if they attacked Israel, said Clinton, by America’s nuclear weapons. This kind of language shows a war with Iran will be an option on the table for the duration of a Clinton presidency.

Clinton’s relationships with world dictators are well known, stemming from her time as both First Lady and Secretary of State. She made it a point to make sure the world knew that she considered the Egyptian dictator Mubarak a great friend and fought Obama on the reneging of support for him in the waning days of the Tahrir Square Revolution.

There is no doubt that a Clinton presidency will continue the worst of human rights abuses abroad through war and covert operations, and the worst of civil rights violations domestically, that Bush and Obama have put into place. Her legislative support for the former and her work in the administration of the latter make this a foregone conclusion.

Accountability

Clinton is hardly unique in her belief that accountability is not something that should apply to her, but her refusal to acknowledge it is striking, even for a politician. Her term as Secretary of State provides two clear examples of this streak.

For an instructive example of her dismissal of any hint of accepting responsibility for her position, take this quote from Clinton’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the issue of the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012:

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

The Benghazi Hearings were bullshit, yes. But what matters here is her response.

A member of the oversight committee involved in working to discover the truth of the matter asked her a direct question. And instead of answering it, she told him that his question made no difference.

The Clinton email scandal, in which as Secretary of State Clinton used a private email server to conduct business and then deleted said server after turning over the emails she deemed appropriate to the government, is another example of Clinton’s refusal to answer for herself.

Only someone with a complete lack of respect for the accountability inherent in her position as Secretary of State would so flagrantly flaunt the responsibilities she had in her communications.

The Damage

A Clinton presidency would look like this, then: good treatment to those companies that have donated generously to her campaign at the expense of the working class; a bellicose foreign policy with war as the first resort, and a complete and utter lack of transparency and accountability in the administration.

That she will do this on the backs of the liberal American voter will only exacerbate the division between the Democrats and the left.

For many years, the Democratic Party has used the rhetoric of the left to push the policies of the right wing.

Bill Clinton felt our pain as he pushed through NAFTA and destroyed the remnants of the American manufacturing working class.

Barack Obama called for hope and change and made sure the worst authoritarian holdovers from the Bush Administration’s War on Terror remained in place.

Now, Hillary Clinton is borrowing the populist rhetoric of her “rival” Bernie Sanders to propel herself into the White House where she will work for the few at the expense of the many.

The Future of the liberal-Democrat Alliance

In the last three and a half decades, at least, the Democratic Party has not had the interests of the left in mind. Despite their statements to the contrary, the Democrats have worked at every turn to promote the interests of the rich and powerful. That they are slightly more accommodating of the working class is not enough.

The best that can ever be said for the Democrats is that at least they’re not the Republicans. This is something that is getting harder and harder to believe. At least the Republicans are honest about their beliefs, as toxic as those beliefs are.

The Democrats, who demonstrably share the Republican zeal for promoting war and the protection of the wealth of the richest among us, hide these beliefs in half-truths and doublespeak. Those on the left who still support the Democrats will find that support more and more difficult to rationalize in the face of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

As right wing as President Obama is, and he is very right wing, Clinton is even more so. When the American liberal sees his or her vote going to the endless perpetuation of the worst domestic and foreign policies in an administration with no accountability, maybe the cycle will finally be broken.