Let Us Not Blame Hillary

This notion I’m hearing that Hillary should have taken on her Party and perhaps lead an independent movement—please, get a grip. It’s just not who she is. We need to see and respect that. We aren’t serving our long-term interests when we do what women too often do with women leaders: project an unrealistic image, feel personally betrayed when she doesn’t meet our standard—a standard we don’t impose on men—and tear her down.

I don’t think Hillary has ever seen herself as a movement leader. Not an MLK but more like LBJ, the insider who can get the nuts and bolts in place so that the outsiders’ dreams may become a reality. She has relied on her mastery of interdependent issues and coalition-building skills to gain respect—never trusting charisma or that she even had it. At the convention, she tried to get people to focus on the policies, not on her. It took Marcia Pappas to speak a truth I think Hillary never quite dared believe for herself: “I was in it for you, Hillary. It was about you.”

Besides, no one has ever been elected as an independent, not even Teddy Roosevelt who’d already done well in the top job. Like it or not, a woman candidate needs the backing and the infrastruc¬ture of one of those wings of the corporate party. If Hillary had ever entertained the notion that this grass-roots movement was going to carry her—well, more than a few peeled off and some say never again. Very precarious being Hillary. Very precarious being a woman in her position.

When die-hard supporters write about feeling betrayed by Hillary’s campaigning too hard for him, I think, oh, no, here we go again. The endless meetings we endured during the early 70s to deal with the “horizontal hostility” that we didn’t really understand or know how to handle—and still don’t. It’s so huge and so deeply ingrained. As women, we direct our aggression toward the safer target: other women. Even women who were abused often blame the mother who didn’t (or couldn’t) protect her, more than the father, stepfather, or boyfriend. That women dis-identify with the caste of women, are divided from each other, and direct our anger toward one other is the make-or-break territory for feminism—and arguably the biggest barrier to electing a woman president.

Yet none of these pragmatics captures my global response to these latest attacks on Hillary. The Right’s hatred and projections are predictable. The male-identified faux-feminists and the misogynist males of the Left who sank Hillary have shown their true colors this season. But when some of the faithful lose faith, it dredges up an ache in my soul. All that we have endured for five millennia merges with the specter of this new movement (to which Hillary’s candidacy has given birth) crashing once again on the rocks of women’s internalized oppression. Our Warrior Queen was checkmated. Will her child slip away as well?

Yes, I know how awful it was for each of us to see her campaigning so long and hard for him (as she always said she would), but how much more dreadful for her to go through this!! Knowing about the caucus fraud, knowing that the Party to which she was ever faithful never had her back, experiencing betrayal after betrayal from those whose careers she and Bill had made or had propped up—knowing all this and much more, she soldiered on with grace the likes of which I have rarely seen.

Her June speeches (and even her convention speech) gloriously buoyed us up while masterfully never conceding or endorsing him. I thought at the time, thank you, thank you for giving us this. You knew we couldn’t stand that right now. You kept faith with us. I wrote a piece that it was not Hillary’s job to unite the Party or win it for the loser, but I knew that if he lost, she would be toast. Scapegoating women is how men evade responsibility and justify their power.

How did she stomach what she felt she had to do—for her future, for our future, and in all probability, because of all kinds of threats? I think her choices were made for what she sees as the greater good of his country in these perilous times as well as for her own political viability. Do we really want to tear that down? Men (except those in ideological movements) don’t do that to each other. Shall we, who don’t have all the pieces, second-guess her?

Perhaps most galling of all, her post-primary choices mean that, although her campaign did lodge complaints about caucus fraud, she is not able to speak the truth about the primaries publicly. Nor, as I have written elsewhere (here and here), can she tackle the misogyny on her own because she needs a Greek Chorus to amplify, interpret, and spin with, for, and about her. Holding that silence is way beyond what most, and probably all, of us truth-tellers could handle.

Hillary doesn’t have the luxury that we do to be the principled outsiders naming the truth about the underside of her opponent’s campaign—the “real campaign.” It is vital that we all be the voice that she cannot speak. We must build a truth-based narrative about her, and replace the false dominant narrative about what happened during this campaign. A tall order, but essential to her future, the future of other women candidates, and our own.

Let us not turn our pain, disappointment, anger, despair, and heartache into attacking this extraordinary woman for the choices she made because they don’t fit our outsiders’ fantasy. Let us not participate in the scapegoating of female candidates—the behavior we have taken such exception to when done by others. Let us not do what women under patriarchy have done for their survival and crumbs for centuries—turn their anger horizontally rather than vertically—which keeps us divided and subordinated.

Let us train our fire where it belongs: the misogynist behavior of her abusive opponent, her Party, and the media, and the androcentric socio-political system which places women in impossible situations and pits them against each other. Patriarchy thrives on divisions it foments among women. Let us not fall prey to that. Let us catch ourselves when we fall into it, and do the hard work to stop it so that we don’t self-destruct as the Second and Third Waves did.