On the Occasion of This Election, Let Me Talk to You About Bill Clinton

when a party has no principles but the superiority of compromise, what does it have at all?

On Tuesday I’ll vote at the local elementary school. On the presidential line I will be voting for Jill Stein, not out of any particular regard for Stein at all but as a protest against a system that gives me a choice between a far-right party that constantly pulls the country to the right and a center-right party that constantly allows the country to be pulled to the right. I am a leftist; the Democrats are a relentlessly anti-left party. They are allergic to attempting to reorient the country in a more leftward direction, and so constitutionally timid and self-loathing that they wouldn’t try even if they wanted to. In democracy you vote for the parties and candidates that represent your interests. The Democrats never have. No matter what the “blue no matter who” crowd says, it is always the job of candidates and parties to earn votes, to deserve them. That I’m expected to vote for politicians who don’t represent my values is a symptom of the fundamental brokenness of our country. Well, as I’m in a position where my vote makes no difference, at least I can vote in protest of a country with two right-wing parties and no other options.

I will be voting the Green Party line because there’s no better place to put my vote, and it makes no difference anyway. They don’t really bother to poll Connecticut because our electoral votes are about as safe, for the Democrats, as those of any state in the country. The only poll I can find shows Kamala Harris up 16 points, and honestly I would be surprised if it was ultimately that close. (Registered Democrats are currently doubling up registered Republicans here in early voting, I believe.) Were that not the case, were I voting in a swing state, I would hold my nose and vote for Harris and feel bad about doing so and never suppose that I was engaged in some heroic act of political maturity. Democrats always want you to do the opposite, to make compromise everything and feel proud of doing so, to act like compromising yourself and voting for clearly terrible candidates is the height of personal nobility. This is another core reason why Democrats always lose out of proportion with the fundamentals, because they would rather nobly hand victory to Republicans than to fight. No conservative Republican ever patted themselves on the back for compromising and voting for a politician who doesn’t reflect their values; the dedication to losing by winning is a purely Democratic fixation. Democrats sacrifice everything to appear to be the reasonable party while Republicans ruthlessly pursue their agenda. That’s why American domestic policy is to the right of where it was when I was born in 1981.

Consider, if you will, the “left” champion in the Democratic party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A congresswoman who has accomplished little even by the standards of the average member of the House, she’s spent the last weeks running up to the election by relentlessly attacking Stein, who functions as a proxy for people to the left of AOC and the Democrats. That is what this young liberal lion of the Democratic party is doing in the last days before we go to the voting booths, in an election where she calls the Republican candidate a fascist: enforcing the anti-left consensus within the Democratic party. That’s what she thinks is the most important thing to do, as we face down another Donald Trump victory. That’s how she thinks her time can best be spent. And, to be fair, it probably is the most effective use of her time in a self-interested sense. She clearly has designs on continuing to move up in the Democratic House pecking order, and in the Democratic party the only way to move up - the only way - is to move up by moving right. And she’s nothing if not ambitious.

I defy you to find a Republican politician who’s spending the last week leading up to the election by going after the Libertarian Party candidate. I defy you. Because Republicans don’t punch right.

Anyway. Bill Clinton.

Like I said, I’m a leftist. Here’s the book on Bill Clinton: Clinton is and has always been a conservative. He’s not like a conservative or conservative for a Democrat, but rather simply a conservative, not a conservative merely in contrast with Bernie Sanders or anybody else but just a conservative. He was a right-wing governor and a right-wing president and since leaving office he’s been a right-wing figure within the Democratic party. There is no equivalent in the GOP, none, nothing remotely like it. (The Republicans didn’t elect Lincoln Chafee president and then run him out there as a core spokesperson for the party for decades after.) Clinton presided over the most significant ideological change in one of the two major parties in modern history, and that change was to drag the Democrats (even further) to the right. He said that “the era of Big Government is over,” which was one signpost in his broad effort to make it okay for Democrats to abandon compassion as a policy goal, to leave behind the very groups they supposedly spoke for. He made cruelty and callousness political virtues within the party. By his 1996 presidential election campaign, Bob Dole had taken to calling him “Mr. Me Too” (lol) to express his frustration that Clinton had stolen his agenda. And that wasn’t hyperbole; Dole’s tax-cut gimmickry was necessary because there simply was no policy space between them for him to run on. Why bother to have two parties at all? Tongue-clucking Democrats love to scold people who equate the two parties, but by the end of Clinton’s administration there was nothing to distinguish the two. That’s why his ample personal flaws took center stage. What else would the GOP attack?

Clinton had, after all, dismantled the modern welfare system, leaving millions totally bereft of basic economic security and tripling extreme poverty among Black Americans. He had codified discrimination against gay servicemembers with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that had no reason to exist and which was entirely under his control as commander in chief. He would then go on to sign the Defense of Marriage Act, which criminalized gay marriage, an act that he called one of the proudest of his political life. He championed a Democratic “law & order” politics; the federal criminal justice bills he signed contributed significantly to mass incarceration and the drug war, but more to the point his stewardship of the party led to a raft of state-level bills that truly exploded our incarcerated population, particularly our population of incarcerated men of color. (Watch out for those superpredators, everybody.) He was the most important supporter of NAFTA, an international trade agreement that proved to be utterly disastrous for American industry, manufacturing, unions, and workers without college degrees; all of this was predicted by the agreement’s critics, but they were shouted down by Clinton and his team, who had lied about their own analysis of what the impact of NAFTA would be. He helped sharpen anti-immigrant rhetoric and pulled Democrats into the business of demonizing the undocumented. Clinton presided over the bombing of Iraq, which killed many, and intensified sanctions, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths through starvation. His supposed great foreign policy victory in Kosovo, which the media praises to this day, was in fact a horror show of reprisals against the powerless civilians who were unlucky enough to represent the “bad guys.” His economic advisors helped dismantle the regulatory systems that would have prevented the financial crisis, and his administration utterly failed to predict or prepare for 9/11. His ham-handed efforts at instituting neoliberal healthcare reform poisoned the well of Democrat-led reform so badly that a decade and a half later Barack Obama decided to ape a conservative Heritage Foundation-devised plan, so deeply constrained had Democratic ambitions become.

There’s also the fact that Bill Clinton is an accused serial sexual predator. The man’s list of sexual assault and misconduct allegations has its own Wikipedia page, which I find darkly comic. Going back to his days at Oxford, he’s been accused of sexual crimes ranging from harassment to exposure to groping to forcible rape. As President he met an unpaid 21-year old intern, a woman less than half his age in an utterly vulnerable position, and proceeded to engage in a sexual relationship with her. Anyone who knows anything about basic sexual power dynamics could tell you that a woman in her position could not freely and fairly consent and that it was, at the very least, highly improper for a man in his position to engage in such an affair, especially literally in the Oval Office. Clinton would lie about his interactions with Lewinsky, under oath, in the process of defending himself against a lawsuit concerning another act of sexual misconduct. In response to the fallout, the Democratic messaging machine branded Lewinsky a slut and a manipulator, which resulted in immense personal turmoil for her. In an effort to distract the public from the scandal, Clinton orchestrated the bombing and destruction of a Sudanese aspirin factory. Clinton has been extensively linked to Jeffrey Epstein, who was infamous for arranging for powerful men to engage in sexual acts with vulnerable and exploited underage women. Democrat media has long represented any such allegations as necessarily the work of partisan Republican conspiracy mongering, despite the fact that Clinton has collected sexual misconduct allegations his entire public life.

He’s not a good guy.

Here’s the punchline: were Bill Clinton on the ballot today, Democrats would insist that I had to vote for him, to fundraise for him, to withhold all criticism of him, and to do so with a smile on my face. They would say that, since the alternative is Donald Trump, I have to grin and support a man whose politics and policies are utterly contrary to my own and whose personal conduct has been repetitively repellant. That’s the one principle they believe in above all others, the absolute ethical superiority of moral compromise. It’s an entire political party built on an addiction to violating your own personal morals and ideals in the name of appearing to be A Grown Up, a party of Jon Chaits who see no greater ethical purpose than proving to everyone what a mature being you are by selling out your most basic values. The Democrats have no way to get out of this; they have elevated compromise to such an exalted place that the intelligentsia of the party essentially defines seriousness as a willingness to compromise. When the other party, in contrast, worships the refusal to compromise, what do you think is going to happen over time, as each party wins and loses? When a Clinton administration that’s defined by capitulation to conservatism is followed by a Bush administration defined by relentless and unapologetic dedication to conservatism, well, what do you expect? And yet if Bill Clinton was the candidate on Tuesday I would be expected to vote for him then, and if he was the candidate the next cycle I would be expected to vote for him them, and again and again, as long as the party felt like it. Against all of my values.

If you think that the policies the Democrats ostensibly stand for are the right policies, if you think they’re better and more compassionate, then ending the Clintonite grip on the Democratic party should be a core commitment of yours, even if your politics aren’t remotely as far left as mine. The addiction to compromise, the relentless pushes to the right, the timidity in the face of Republican boldness, the refusal to match the GOP’s extremity - all of these are impediments to even a moderate, center-left agenda. I’m sorry to constantly repeat this point, but politics is a game of tug-of-war, and the center is nothing but where the middle of the rope ends up. The extremes pull the middle. So if you’re someone with milquetoast liberal squish politics, you should hate Democratic triangulation and timidity as much as I do. Because Republicans relentlessly pulling the rope to the right, while Democrats refuse to pull the rope to the left, has gotten us to a place where conservative policy wins even as conservative candidates lose. It’s simply untenable. This policy of Democrats acting like they’re sorry for having an agenda at all, building a party identity of self-loathing, has been the dominant one during my lifetime, and it’s demonstrably a failure. The Republicans are a despicable party, but they are a political party. The Democrats are an anti-party.

Much has been made of the fact that the death of Roe v Wade has powered the Democratic party in the years since, getting out the vote, driving fundraising. And I’m glad for all of that because I’m a reproductive rights absolutist. But I do have to point out that the anti-abortion people did what they’re supposed to: they used political victory to get what they wanted substantively. It was the anti-abortion movement’s goal for decades, elect Republicans who would nominate Supreme Court Justices who would overturn Roe, which they did, with a big assist from Ruth Bader Ginsberg and her refusal to retire during Obama’s term. The anti-abortion people had a plan and unapologetically pursued it and, I’m sorry to say, succeeded in that goal. That’s what you’re supposed to do! That’s what all of this is supposed to be, the practice of politics to win electoral victories that give you the power to bring the country more in line with your moral values. You win political victories to make policy changes. You don’t win political victories to win more political victories. I mean, what’s the point?

Beyond all of that, the Democratic hatred for voters of conscience is a perversion of what politics is. I couldn’t vote for Bill Clinton because his political values and policy preferences are totally contrary to mine, and I couldn’t vote for him because he’s a person of terrible moral character who should not be treated as a person of influence. It’s astounding that the Democrats still trot him out as a voice of the party. Of course, I don’t have to vote for Bill Clinton. I do however have to confront a future in which the party that continues to treat Bill Clinton as some sort of grand old wiseman decides who I get to vote for. And I will have to continue to do what I’m always doing, which is to weigh the constraints of my conscience against the short-term political realities and make my best decision. But it is a decision, and sometimes I’m going to choose something other than what the Democrats want. So will millions of other people, no matter how many times Gail Collins throws a tantrum about it. Democrats have elevated hating Stein voters, like Nader voters before them, into a communal value that’s far more important than hating Republicans. (Dick Cheney, welcome to The Resistance.) They never, ever ask why exactly the Democrats and their candidates are so weak, so flagrantly unpopular, that their elections could maybe sorta kinda be derailed by Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

I guess all that I want is for the Democrats to ask themselves, do you really want to be the party that’s opposed in principle to Americans voting according to their moral values? And if the answer is yes, what exactly do you think you’re getting in the bargain? What is all the compromise for?