Are you ready for this book by Pulitzer Prize Nominee Susan Bordo to drop and in the next couple of days and endlessly shit up your all your social media feeds?
>The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an answer to the question many have been asking: How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate—whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama's—come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician?
Her thesis? Not by being a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, or a talentless politician, but by Bernie Sanders calling her those things (which he is not allowed to because he is male) and by young people not only believing Sanders but also espousing a new (and wrong) kind of progressivism: one that views things like eliminating systemic corruption in politics as more important than continuing the already-won battles of the 1960s.
>Bernie Sanders splintered and ultimately sabotaged the Democratic party – not because he chose to run against Hillary Clinton, but because of how he ran against her.
>“I think, frankly,” he said in January, campaigning in New Hampshire, “it’s hard to be a real progressive and to take on the establishment in a way that I think [it] has to be taken on, when you come as dependent as she has through her super PAC and in other ways on Wall Street and drug-company money.”
>As I watched Sanders enchant the crowds, it was something of a deja vu experience to see a charismatic male politician on stage telling women which issues are and aren’t progressive.
>As one Sanders supporter wrote:
>"Yes, equal rights for women and minorities are critically important. To consider these ideals progressive, however, seems passé. At this point, it’s more fair to suggest they are traditional. Gender and civil rights and equality may remain under attack from the right, but these ideals are positively engrained in two generations of Americans. Progressive voters, at this stage in our young country’s political history, want to challenge corrupt systems. The prison-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, the financial-industrial complex, and the other lobbies that control our politicians and our government, for example."
>He was seen as authentic in his progressivism while she was pushed to the left by political expediency – as though a lifetime of fighting for equality and children’s rights meant nothing.