Disclaimer: I have deliberately waited a week to post this since the election because most of my friends and people I care about have spent the week grieving. If you are still grieving, if you are tender from the election results, if you are mostly feeling fear and outrage, then I recommend you not read this post. This post is intended for people who have enough emotional distance from what happened on November 8th to start looking at the 2016 race critically and analytically. That may not be you. That may never be you. That’s okay. I’m really not trying to poke bears or badgers or hornets’ nests, but I do think the perspectives in this post are important to building a leftist movement in the wake of Donald Trump’s impending presidency.

Disclaimer Two: This post will not be focusing on racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia as the roots of Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton. I am not hereby claiming that these hateful perspectives had nothing to do with Trump’s election. It is, however, my belief that they were ultimately a pretty minor factor in Trump defeating Clinton. Many people have posted in the last week that anyone who thinks these isms and phobias were not 100% of the cause has no business speaking and is wrong. If you are one of these people, you may choose to read my post to see a counter-argument. But if you do and wish to respond, please do not accuse me of completely ignoring the role that these played in Trump’s election. You may reasonably argue that I minimized their role and I welcome a logical debate about that. I think that the role these factors played in Trump’s election both exists and is something that we basically can’t, as leftists, do anything to change or fix in the future. The racists, sexists, xenophobes, and homophobes are not the part of the country that we are reasonably trying to persuade. If you actually believe that 47-52% of the country belongs in those categories, then we have nothing to talk about in planning for a future, other than waiting 40-60 years for those folks to die. I prefer a more optimistic look at the future, and one that I think is warranted as soon as we stop nominating Clintons for high elected office.

Disclaimer Three: This post is long. If you’re looking for a TL;DR, I would read the title of the post. In other words, the disastrous defeat of Hillary Clinton is, primarily, the fault of Hillary Clinton and, to a lesser extent, her supporters. If you’re too offended by that notion to see how I reach that conclusion, we’ll both be happier if you stop reading now.

Introduction: Unemployment Numbers and the Gaslighting of the American Workforce

In July 2012, I began periodically posting about the emerging gap between the traditionally reported figures of American unemployment and the seeming reality of said unemployment. As the labor force drained of people in the wake of the Great Recession, with millions of Americans giving up looking for work, retiring early, and (most importantly) never entering the labor force in the first place, reported unemployment started to decline much faster than it seemed it should. Labor force participation dropped precipitously to ultimately 35-year lows, while reported unemployment recovered from an alleged peak of 10% to under 5%. My analysis showed that unemployment actually stayed above 11% for years and, as recently as June 2016, was still as high as 10.96%.

When I started posting about this, it was before the 2012 election, and the words “labor force participation” had seemingly never graced a newscast about unemployment figures. The reported 8% unemployment was seen as too high, but at least stabilizing – my data had the figure close to 13%. In July, I coined the term Reporting Gap for this nearly five-point figure that had been steadily climbing and observed this: “Suddenly it’s a little more clear why the jobs haven’t been coming back and why no one you know feels like the economy is getting better. Suddenly we have a chart that reflects how the recession has actually felt.”

The insidious thing about this gap, I observed repeatedly over the ensuing four years, is that it makes people who aren’t succeeding in the current economy feel like they’re crazy. If unemployment is reported as being 4.9% but is actually 11%, those 6.1% of missing people feel like they are total losers – that everyone else is getting a job and doing fine but there’s something individually wrong with them that keeps them in this ever-shrinking group of folks who just can’t get work. And over time, they start to doubt the narrative they’re being told about the economy and the world. Can they really be this pathetic? Or is there some book-cooking going on that shades them out of the picture?

A funny thing happened on the way to 2016. By this fall, every newscast was talking about labor force participation cratering and sometimes the participation rate would even be discussed before the much vaunted unemployment figure. News would actually note that a decline in unemployment often wasn’t a good thing, because it just meant more people had given up. I, of course, had nothing to do with this – nowhere near enough people read my blog to make a difference. But I had picked up on a trend early that eventually became too big and obvious to ignore: the “recovery” was one that edited out people and jobs and found a way to squeeze the remaining workers into “greater productivity” (longer, more stressful hours) to maximize profits. At one point, I superimposed the stock market recovery over the increase in the reporting gap and it was a nearly perfect fit. Corporate America had found a way to sustain the loss of jobs in the country while rebuilding its own successful business model. The rich got richer and the poor got nothing.

Enter Donald Trump. He didn’t use the same analysis I did of actually examining BLS’ own numbers and applying a reasonable labor force participation rate to them. Instead, he used U-6 and exaggerated it a little, sometimes a lot. He said unemployment was still 18-20%, which I don’t think it had ever been. I wrote about this in August 2015. He was very wrong with the specifics, but he was fundamentally right to observe that American workers had been set adrift and told that everything was fine. And he was angry about it. In speech after speech, he tapped into the feeling of being invalidated, the feeling of being gaslighted, of being told that you are not experiencing the economic hardship that you are. And in so doing, he galvanized people who knew there was something wrong with the tale of the recovery being spun by a Democratic administration and the media that didn’t sit with their own experiences. Obviously many of his prescriptions for the situation were wrong, like building a wall, and the idea of an outsourcing businessman being the savior of the newly unemployed stretches any feasible credulity. But if the reality you feel, deep down, that no one is validating, suddenly gets validated, you feel an immense loyalty to the guy who validated it. I would argue this is where Trump’s traction and real appeal to the people who swung this election began.

Why Bernie Would Have Been a Better Opponent in this Context

The idea that Donald Trump, billionaire with rich father and icon of all that is 1980s about America, would be the hero of the working class is, on face, laughable. The fact that he somehow pulled off this stunt is a remarkable testament to the willingness of the American voter to appreciate the message even if the messenger is the embodiment of its opposite. That said, Hillary Clinton was in no position to criticize Trump’s status as the messenger here and, aside from a few observations of the hypocrisy of the tycoon critiquing offshoring after having offshored tons of jobs, she didn’t try. It is perhaps the most American part of this whole election that in 2016, the two major parties nominated two gold-plated billionaires in the year of working class populism. Reminiscent, perhaps, of 2004, when the major parties offered two staunch defenders of the Iraq War at a time when the war was becoming deeply unpopular. No better evidence of the irrelevance of the major parties to popular democratic interests could be given.

But of course, there was a third road, which was Bernie Sanders. Now I am not here to say Bernie would have definitely definitely won the general election against Trump, though it is my belief he would have. And I’m certainly not here to cite as my main piece of evidence that polls which also said Hillary would be mopping up the floor of the general election with Trump’s toupee said that Bernie would do so to an even greater extent. What I will say is that Bernie would have had no problem attacking Donald Trump for being a businessman, a tycoon, and a lifelong enemy of the working class he now claimed to espouse. And rather than this accusation coming from, say, the pot, it would have been coming from a man whose style could most generously be described as “rumpled,” who had no evident personal wealth, and who had spent pretty much his entire waking life talking about the plight of the poor and working class. Suffice it to say that this would have measured up considerably better to Trump’s claim that he knew how to dismantle the system because he’d been rigging it than a person who wouldn’t release the transcripts of secret speeches she gave to bankers for the six figures “they offered.” If you’re a working class voter and you look at Trump and Clinton, you see two people who are nothing like you and you take the one who sounds like they know what you’re going through. If you’re that same voter and you look at Trump and Sanders, you see a guy who is nothing like you and one who reminds you of you, and they both have the same general message about relating to you. But one of them has lived a life you can connect with and the other has been its boss. There’s really no comparison.

Yes, yes, red scare, red scare. The voters who we were supposed to worry would condemn Bernie Sanders for honeymooning in Moscow and cozying up to communist Russia just voted overwhelmingly to elect a man who repeatedly praised a former KGB agent as the strongest leader he knew. Trump was basically overtly accepting help from the Russians, placing Hillary Clinton in the interesting position of playing McCarthy to Trump’s pinko ways. She warmed to the argument robustly, willingly invoking how she might go to war with Russia in the third debate just to demonstrate how dangerous Trump’s Russian connection could be. And look where that got her. Turns out this voting bloc that tipped the 2016 election was a lot more afraid of local bureaucrats than former Soviet ones.

Of course, the primary argument that Team Hillary used against Bernie throughout the primaries, one that got extraordinarily loud and obnoxious as the general election approached, was that the Republicans would dig up all kinds of crazy dirt on Bernie and throw it at him for – gasp! – the first time, whereas Hillary had “survived” twenty years of such bashing. There is no more absurd, disingenuous, or damaging argument that anyone made or thought during the whole campaign. And yet this line was absolute gospel, a full-scale mantra, for Hillary supporters up until a week ago. No counter-argument would be heard, even when I suggested that this was question-begging at absolute best. By “survive,” it is technically true that Hillary Clinton had not actually dropped dead from the long-running Republican campaign to discredit her and embroil her in scandal. But the truth of this argument depended on an outcome that never came, namely the presumption that she would be a successful Presidential candidate. She had blown an enormous presumptive lead in 2008. The only thing she was ever elected to in her life was a US Senate seat from New York, a state which has elected exactly one Republican Senator since 1980. In those races, she beat Rick Lazio, a four-term Congressman who was brought in late to replace scandal-ridden Rudy Giuliani, and John Spencer, a former mayor of Yonkers. In the latter election, despite running against a former mayor who had absolutely no chance, she spent a 2006 Senate-race-high $36 million on the campaign.

To say that these electoral wins amount to “surviving” years of attacks is just shoddy logic. This is without evaluating the merit of any of the attacks or not. You can argue that Clinton is the most clean-nosed politician in history and all the attacks are (pun intended) trumped up nonsense. You can argue that she’s super-corrupt and hasn’t been caught for half of what she’s tried. Doesn’t matter. The point is that two decades of her being associated with corruption, scandal, dishonesty, and changing her position on major issues was never an asset. It was not proof that she could survive anything. It was proof that she was a ridiculously vulnerable candidate for whom millions and millions of people had decided they could never ever vote, no matter what.

Yes, Bernie Sanders is a socialist, an atheist, and culturally Jewish. His wife once did something a little shady with her university position. No doubt all of these things would have peeled some voters away from him. But marginally? I don’t think there are any people who would be peeled there who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election. His socialism? Right in line with the populism of 2016, and see the Russia analysis above. Atheism? Does anyone think Hillary Clinton believes in God or vote for her because of it? Judaism is a flashpoint for the racist Trumpers, sure, but did anyone who feels that way about Jews vote for Hillary? And a shady scandal involving a spouse… yeah. That’s going to be worse than the Clinton legacy.

So at best you get a push, and Bernie loses like Hillary did. Except, of course, that Bernie had momentous and excited enthusiasm behind him, was in tune with the year’s populist sentiment, could actually critique Trump’s elitism from a different vantage point, and had this little thing called humility. More on humility vs. entitlement in a bit. Suffice it to say that I think Bernie Sanders turns out a lot of folks who voted third party or stayed home this election, in addition to swinging those white working class Obama voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio who swung this electoral college toward The Donald.

And that’s to say nothing of not having to bully people into voting for him as “the lesser of two evils”. Which, as a concept, is why Trump won.

The Lesser of Two Evils Made the Most Evil

Hillary’s camp was quick last Tuesday night to start blaming third party voters for everything. Facebook feeds, news media, and all manner of angry Clintonites have been quick to jab the finger at me and my kindred people, third party voters. Apparently it’s all our fault that Hillary Clinton couldn’t beat Donald Trump.

The reality, of course, is the opposite. If no one believed in the concept of voting for “the lesser of two evils” and everyone had refused to vote for someone they didn’t like or support, Clinton would have won the election easily.

According to CNN exit polls from the general election, 18% of voters this year disliked both candidates. They broke 49-29-22 for Trump-Clinton-third party. Trump won this election, as I long predicted he would, by winning the race to the bottom. Tons of Americans hated both of these candidates. Most of them stayed home, disgusted. Those who turned out and chose Trump or Clinton anyway overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Had they all voted for third party candidates, Trump’s total would have taken a 9% hit and Clinton’s only 5%, yielding an electoral landslide for the latter.

For reference, only 2% said they liked both major candidates and there wasn’t enough data here to even see how they split. Surprisingly, “love trumps hate” and “when they go low, we go high” were just slogans and had no impact on this race to the bottom.

The fact that 78% of voters who disliked both major candidates still voted for one of them signals just how bullied the American voter is by the mythology of the two-party duopoly. But it also leads us to one of the most important realities of this campaign: that the lesser of two evils cuts both ways. And this makes the most frequent and loudest rallying cry against Trump voters totally nonsensical. This rallying cry states that all Trump voters are awful, horrible, no good, very bad people who have evil in their hearts. They’re all racists, all sexists, all want everyone you know and love to suffer. And that is why they voted as they did.

My response to this is as follows: had Hillary Clinton won and I spent the next week of my life on Facebook decrying how every Hillary voter wants foreign Muslims to die painfully, how they’re all imperialist militarists, I just don’t think that would have been taken seriously.

Indeed, I had a little preview of this in an interaction with Edward Fu on Facebook the day of the election, when I said that a vote for Hillary was a vote for mass murder. He responded by asking “So to be clear – if I vote for Hillary I’m either uninformed or pro-mass murder?”

I responded with “Hillary Clinton believes in war as an effective tool for foreign policy. It seems very likely that she will start a major war in her presidency. Even if she doesn’t, she is likely to kill many more people than the already very hawkish Obama. I don’t think this issue is a priority for most voters, because it doesn’t particularly affect Americans. Or many people see it as inevitable or even good that a lot of our time and money is spent killing foreigners. I am happy to make it a priority to disagree.”

The point is that most Americans did not associate a Clinton vote with what I see as the greatest likely impact of her Presidency that never happened, namely major war(s). And while I would have depressedly taken to Facebook to remind everyone that they had voluntarily enabled whatever war emerged in her first term, most people were not thinking about this. They were thinking about glass ceilings and a slate of policies cribbed from Bernie Sanders and not Trump not Trump not Trump. But this is really important. Because most people voting for Trump were thinking about change and Republican appointments and not Clinton not Clinton not Clinton. Or really just the last part. They aren’t horrible people. They just hated Hillary Clinton a tiny bit more than they hated Donald Trump. And if you were willing to support America’s war with Syria or Russia or Iran or whoever the next appointed Bogeyman would be in the Clinton administration in order to beat Trump, maybe you can be a little more sympathetic to someone who was willing to support the same person David Duke did to beat Clinton.

If you just don’t buy this argument at all, I’m guessing it’s because you’re yelling the following argument:

“But She Was So Qualified!”

This argument for electoral viability, honestly, is almost as ridiculous as “she spent twenty years getting everyone to hate her, so how could she lose?” Americans do not, as a rule, vote for President based on qualifications. They vote for the person they like and trust. Or, this year, dislike and distrust the least.

You know what the previous biggest mismatch of Qualified vs. Unqualified presidential candidates was? 2008. John McCain vs. Barack Obama. Hint: Obama was less qualified. Spoiler alert: he trounced.

Indeed, the Democrats have always been bringing the less qualified winner to the party since FDR. Bill Clinton? Way less qualified than GHW Bush. Jimmy Carter? A virtual unknown. JFK? The textbook example of a greenhorn. People freaking loved these guys. Well, not Carter till he was out of office. But you get the idea.

I think this is all that needs to be said to rebut the argument that Clinton’s resume was not enough to overcome her being a woman. A Black man had vastly less qualification for the Presidency and dominated. And if you think America likes Black men more than White women, several million inmates would like to register their personal dissent. I am not going to say sexism had nothing to do with Clinton’s loss. But the evidence is just not there that this is what was predominantly behind her losing, especially as the more qualified candidate. In fact, a pretty convincing argument would say that being more qualified was a hindrance in this race, especially when following two terms of her party’s Presidency. The fact is that Hillary Clinton is uninspiring, uncharismatic, and pretty bad at campaigning. Late in the general election, even when she was supposed to be en route to a rout, even pro-Hillary thinkpieces could admit this and tried embracing it as a strength instead of recognizing its obvious weakness.

You can say that she gets held to a different standard as a woman. Somewhat. But Barack Obama also gets held to a different standard as a Black man. And he overcame it, because he is actually good at the things that lead to Presidential victories. And there are women who are good at those things too, who aren’t carrying two decades of baggage around that makes people rule out voting for them ever. Elizabeth Warren might have gotten 400 electoral votes heads-up against Trump.

And this is part of what makes it so hard to talk about this election with the crushed Clinton supporters. Because they had started to buy the argument that Clinton was the last best hope of womankind, that she even somehow embodied womankind itself. She succeeded in convincing her supporters that she was an avatar of all womanhood, that no matter her past and her dubious dealings with her husband, no matter that she was a First Lady before holding elected office, no matter that she changed positions on things depending on who was in the room with her at the time, she was a stand-in for all women. And I can understand why people would feel that way about the first woman major party nominee for President, and doubly so when going against Trump and his boorish misogyny. But this was not an election where “Do you like women?” was on the ballot or “Do you trust women to run the country?” was a voting issue. Hillary Clinton lost White women 53-43. She lost people who were somewhat bothered by Trump’s treatment of women 75-19. Seventy-five to nineteen. Hell, she lost 11% of those who said this treatment bothered them a lot!

This association with Hillary Clinton and womankind was one-sided and self-selective. And it started before the primary with the insidious campaign slogan “Ready for Hillary”. Do you see what they did there? The implication was that the only reason you could possibly oppose Hillary Clinton for President is if you weren’t ready for a woman President. This, of course, was followed by the slightly less insidious “I’m With Her” with basically the same connotations. The race was couched as those who are sexist vs. those who are not.

And up until last Tuesday, heck, up until this minute for many in her camp, they never ever stopped believing the truth of that concept. Which of course leads to depressing conclusions if you think that this was the last best woman for the job. Of course, Barack Obama’s slogan was not “Ready for Barack” or “I’m Not Racist”. He did not try to bully people into voting for him to prove they were not something awful. Instead, he talked about hope, change, and yes we can. And whether he delivered on those promises or not, those were effective strategic choices, proved to be effective again this year as Trump presented himself as the candidate of change.

Of course, Hillary Clinton had no avenue for being an advocate of change. She was the ultimate establishment figure, framing this as experience and steadiness. She was following two terms of her party’s Presidency and felt she had to say that those terms had gone well, ignoring those who felt otherwise. And this is not necessarily a reason we should blame Hillary Clinton for anything other than wanting to run. She was the wrong candidate for this time in history, for this office. But there was one major thing she did that exacerbated her non-change-ness, her establishmentarianism, her extreme un-Obamaism…

A Sense of Entitlement

Nothing made people like Hillary Clinton less than her overriding sense that she just deserved to be President. In 2008, she expected a coronation and was stopped on the way to the church. In 2016, she’d lined up enough of the party elders and intimidated all the other Democrats out of running, then made sure they rigged the race anyway when the going got unexpectedly rough. Time and again, she acted like it was just obvious that she had a sort of deed on the Presidency, that this was not a race or a question, that she could not possibly lose, that there was nothing for a serious voter to even consider. And for all Donald Trump’s defensive responses to being baited (with a tweet or otherwise), Clinton’s inability to shed her sense of entitlement was the more serious blunder.

She was unable to ever really articulate why she wanted to be President, other than falling back on the “Stronger Together” catchphrase (which, let’s face it, was only ever about pulling in disgruntled Bernie voters and really rankled after evidence of her operatives shafting Bernie emerged). When there’s a void in why someone says they want something and they self-evidently want it really really badly, you start to get nervous about why exactly they want that thing so much. Trump, for his part, at least had the line about taking time out of his busy days to save the country. He didn’t need money or power or fame because he had so much of it. (In an interesting side-note, I had the displeasure of reading American Psycho this summer and discovering that Donald Trump is basically the #2 character in the book. Future historians will have a field day with this.) When Clinton didn’t give a square answer to the same question, it was just too easy to pencil in nefarious corruption and scheming.

But nothing was worse than when this all came to a head with the election-losing comment by HRC. In a mirror image of Mitt Romney’s election-losing assessment that 47% of Americans just wanted hand-outs and not to work, Hillary Clinton called a large chunk of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables”. Now, it was personal. Now, a sneering oligarch of the American power elite, someone who’d been helping run the country for decades, didn’t just ignore their suffering or claim that the country was doing better than they felt. She actually disdained them individually, as people. Condemning them not just as lazy, as Romney had done, but as morally evil. The self-reinforcing internal campaign monologue that only sexists could oppose the mighty Clinton Coronation had seeped out into the public with one fierce statement of bullying.

Would Clinton have won had she never said that? I don’t know. I’m inclined to think her other flaws were sufficient to sink her anyway. But the race was close enough (yes, yes, she won the popular vote, I know) that I believe a lot more of those 49% who disliked Trump and still voted for him might have stayed home without that comment. Or joined their Republican leaders in writing in Mitt or McCain or Ronald Reagan resurrected. And only someone so sure of victory, so truly honestly disdainful of others, is capable of saying something like that publicly. At the time, she was lauded by the media who’d all lined up to endorse her in fear of Trump for calling it like it was, for pointing out the horrible people propping up Trump. And look, many of those people are horrible and deplorable. But so are the war profiteers and bankers and, for God’s sake, George HW and W Bush, who all voted for Clinton. That doesn’t mean you come out and make a statement saying that you think the main reason people are voting for the other side is because they are personally bad humans.

(Incidentally, a lot of blame for this election loss should fall squarely on the person who made the social media meme that said all the former Presidents were voting for Clinton. Find me a person on this planet who respects both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, other than maybe Bill Clinton. That meme just alienated everyone a little and made Trump’s anti-establishment cred that much stronger. I’m kidding about the impact of this thing. A little. Maybe. It’s a weird viral world out there. Votes out for Harambe, who did not, in fact, get more votes than Jill Stein.)

“But, but, James Comey!”

I am much more open to the idea that James Comey contributed significantly to Hillary Clinton’s loss than third party voters. And not just because I’m not James Comey.

(But seriously, third party voters would have pretty much all stayed home if we had to vote for one of the two major party candidates. And you really think more Libertarian Gary Johnson voters would have broken for Clinton than Trump? Sadly, there are no exit polls on this, but trust me that the third party voters as a whole cost Trump more votes than Clinton. 52% of the electorate voted against the establishment this year.)

That said, I almost posted the day before the election that James Comey was in the pocket of the Clinton camp, because by raising and then silencing the investigation all before the election, he effectively was trying to demonstrate that there was no Clinton scandal to worry about. It’s hard to say if that hurt more than just not saying anything about the investigation at all in the last week, but if James Comey really were a Trump mole, why on God’s green Earth would he have said, literally, “there’s nothing to see here” the day before the election? It’s like LBJ giving a short speech promising that Goldwater would never use nukes the night before people went to the 1964 polls. Could you imagine? I mean, really?

Maybe Obama said he would fire him if he didn’t. That said, pretty empty threat, no? Is Obama really going to fire someone who raised questions about Clinton just before the election? Someday, Comey will write a tell-all book. And it probably will make something up about what happened, so we’ll never know.

In retrospect, it’s easy to say that Comey’s reopening and then quickly closing the investigation cost Clinton a lot of votes. But I just don’t know if there’s anything causal here, especially given that this argument is based on polls that proved to be faulty. And we don’t have polling data on the day before the election or the day of to indicate how many people switched back to Clinton when the investigation was suddenly slammed shut. Maybe Clinton was on pace to lose much bigger, but Comey helped almost save the day.

But here’s the thing: even if you can prove that Comey speaking cost Hillary Clinton the whole election, we’re back at “she’s survived twenty years of scandal!” If you’re right about Comey, then Hillary Clinton was literally entirely felled by the resurrection of a previously buried scandal that plagued her throughout the 2016 campaign season. And you all sneered and rolled your eyes and did your best G.D. Hillary Clinton impression to say that no scandal would ever beat this survivor. So if someone raising a question about one of this cornucopia of scandals really could undo what otherwise would have been a romp, was your candidate ever that strong to begin with?

Conclusion: “Storey, the Past is the Past – Why Re-Bury Hillary Clinton?”

A lot of pieces like this one have been criticized for beating a dead horse, stomping on a fallen hero, and unnecessarily carting out blame for someone who has already been wholly humiliated on the national stage. So what gives?

Firstly, and I wish I were joking about this, but I think it’s really important to start staving off the Hillary Clinton 2020 campaign NOW. I have talked to several people about this and they literally all believe that I am certifiable for even dreaming that Hillary would run again, but I am very very worried about this possibility and I want us all to think a lot about why it would be a very bad idea. As credibility for this prediction, I can only offer my election map prediction from July 2016 that I reposted the night before the election. Which showed a 312-220-6 win for Trump over Clinton, which proved to be 306-232 for Trump. You will not find many non-Republicans who saw what happened on November 8th coming.

(By the way, I haven’t yet called out Edward Fu for rudely and derisively arguing that this map demonstrated I had no ability to conduct political analysis. Scoreboard, sir.)

But beyond my fear of Clinton/Trump II: Apocalyptic Boogaloo in 2020, there is a battle underway for the soul of the Democratic Party, which, God help us, claims to still be the voice on the left. Howard Dean is running against Keith Ellison for DNC Chair. Bernie is being vocal about the change we need, but Chuck Schumer is leading the Senate Democrats. And how we view the results of 2016 has a lot to say about how we look to the future. If Clinton deserved to win but didn’t, if all womankind got rejected last Tuesday, if the basket of deplorables won the day and are all irretrievably evil, then there’s no hope or the hope we have will go to establishment Democrats just as corporate, corrupt, and militaristic as Clinton herself. If Clinton was a bad choice who made bad decisions, then we can start the conversation about a new direction. One that, arguably, is not all that new, because it looks like the very successful two campaigns of Barack Obama, but perhaps with more populism and more follow-through on the, y’know, change.

Because if there’s one thing Trump is unlikely to bring to Washington (and this should ironically reassure the most worried among you, though it worries me the most), it’s change. He’s already lining the Cabinet with the Old Guard Republicans. Newt Gingrich will be back. Nothing says change like 1994’s revolutionary in 2016. Mike Pence, or Baby Ted Cruz, is leading the transition team. Trump is trusting the same coalition that has been propping up Republicans for decades to “drain the swamp.” Plus his kids. His kids are new.

It would be a devastating mistake for the left to respond in kind, propping up its discredited elders for another run as well. We need new, fresh, exciting, energetic, charismatic, scandal-free leaders to take up the torch of left-wing ideals. Hopefully many of them will be women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals: exemplars of inclusivity without being seen as literal avatars of their particular intersectional group. And they should not bully people into voting for them because they are who they are. They should not complain about having to be accountable for past scandals, backroom deals, or changing their mind because they are who they are. And the country will love them for it.

Martin Luther King, Jr. asked that people be judged on the content of their character. He did not ask that they not be judged at all. The country judged Hillary Clinton on the content of her character. They judged Donald Trump on the content of his character, too. We can never again afford to support someone so plagued with character concerns, even against someone equally (or more) flawed. The ensuing race to the bottom is too close to be sure of, and way too close to feel entitled to.

In a long Facebook discussion during the election, one of the few I indulged in after Bernie had given up on the primaries, a former debater kept asking why I was evaluating Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as people, rather than a set of ideas they espoused. I never responded to the last part, mostly because I’d already said I had made my last post in the thread. But it’s the title of this post. All politics is personal.

And the reason for that is the structure of our representative democracy. Outside of perhaps California, we don’t live in a direct democracy. We don’t vote on every issue. We don’t choose to go to war or not, to build a school or not. We elect people to do it for us. And this is why we have to like and trust those people. Because they are not robots programmed to fulfill their promises, nor are they a mere abstract slate of ideas. They are people. Flawed, greedy people who want power and money and to be liked and to make the world in their image. You can criticize the “have a beer with” standard all you want, doubly so for giving us both W Bush and Donald Trump. But it’s a proxy for something reasonable. Who do you want in your corner? Who would you be friends with? Who do you trust when the chips are down to stand in for you?

If we ignore this question or shame people who take it seriously, we’re never going to build a successful leftist movement in this country. And I have my doubts that the Democratic Party can ever build or even wants that movement. But now seems like the best chance in a long time to try.