The Left’s Self-Defeating Hatred of Hillary Clinton

One sees on Facebook statements made and I have had friends say that if Bernie Sander is not the Democrat nominee, they will stay home on election day. What they expect this to accomplish other than putting a Republican in the White House and damaging the country for a generation, especially if the Supreme Court thrown to the far right for a generation or more.  Such anger and willingness to harm the country, not to mention, ultimately themselves, is irrational to me.  Indeed, it is more what one would expect from logic free Christofascists rather than progressives.  A piece in Salon looks at this irrational hatred and the damage it is doing to the cause these liberals claim to support.  Here are excerpts:

The media coverage of Hillary Clinton is a lesson in paradox: She’s the “most admired woman” in America, but no one is “excited” about her presidential campaign. She’s inevitable, but she can’t win an election. And even when she wins a debate, she still lost it.

This might seem like an indication of what we already know — that the former secretary of state is an extremely polarizing candidate, whose very name is treated as a curse word or a reason to break out the Holy Water during the Republican presidential debates. The New York Times’ Mark Leibovitch wrote earlier this year that “divisive” has become almost associated with her very name: “Clinton has worn the polarizing badge more than any other politician since the word came into its unfortunate vogue.” But as Leibovitch argued, Hillary’s status as a divider is less a product of her politics than our own.

Leibovitch compared the phenomenon to “Bush derangement syndrome,” a term coined by Charles Krauthammer to describe “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay —the very existence of George W. Bush. 

The biggest difference here is that before Krauthammer labeled Bush’s critics deranged, George W. already had three years of policies behind him. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, hasn’t been in the Oval Office a single day, and her presidency is already being treated by some as an unmitigated disaster. What’s more, even members of her own party are getting in on the action. In a recent column for Salon, self-avowed millennial progressive Walter Bragman suggests that Clinton isn’t just a bad candidate — she’s a threat to the future of the Democratic party itself — and compares her to the second coming of Reagan, a corrosive force that will destroy the foundation’s of American progressivism.

We’ve clearly moved past derangement. This is the time of full-on Hillary hysteria.
You’ve heard all of this before, of course. Hillary Clinton isn’t trustworthy. She isn’t “relatable” or “real.” (However we happen to be defining those words today.) Her so-called likability problem is ancient news by now — the same nebulous idea that has dogged her all the way back to her time as First Lady. But while these criticisms would be perfect for your anti-Hillary poker night (“B-23 — ballbusting!”), they’re also indicative of just how much the aversion to her candidacy — even among those on the left — is removed from the realm of policy. Even in Bragman’s takedown of Clinton, he begins with her image: “Hillary’s personality repels me (and many others).”

Clinton has continued to occupy that same space for the better part of three decades now, a one-woman culture war who plays the political game the same way the men around her do. But unlike those men, Clinton is chided for being “disingenuous” and a “political insider.” Everyone else just gets to do their job.

If America as a whole has a complicated relationship with the former First Lady, one segment of the population stands out. Research from the Wall Street Journal this November showed that Hillary hysteria is coming from one major sector of the population — white men. “Sixty-four percent of white men hold an unfavorable view of Mrs. Clinton, compared with just 26 percent who see her in a positive light,” the Journal’s Aaron Zitner noted. “That’s a gap of 38 points.”

And while Clinton critics could point to her deficit among white men as reason to worry about her electability in the general election, Zitner also notes that “Republicans are in such [dire] need of minority-voter support that they can lose in 2016 even if Mrs. Clinton under performs Mr. Obama among white voters.”

The response from many among Sanders’ white male voter base to Hillary Clinton’s continued success in the polls is to refuse to vote for her in the general election, as if the only thing worse than a Republican presidency is four years of another Clinton. But instead of folding our arms like a pack of third graders who have been told recess is cancelled, Sanders supporters should hold Hillary Clinton accountable to the right things, instead of quibbling about how much we just don’t like her, make her a better candidate.

Bernie Sanders’ supporters might accuse Clinton of sounding like a Republican, but we’re the ones who are doing the GOP’s dirty work for them.

Having been active in politics for over 25 years, the reality is that one rarely finds the "perfect candidate."  Instead, one has to choose the better choice from the field of candidates.  Childish foot stomping and screams that one is taking their toys and going home accomplishes nothing.  Indeed, all it shows is the immaturity and irrationality of those throwing the conniption fits.  

Is Homophobia a Form of Mental Illness?

Some of the far right conservatives that I have encountered have truly left me wondering if these folks weren't simply mentally ill.  Not in a raving lunatic sort of way, but rather a seriously unbalanced way.  Their fear of anyone or anything different or "other" was irrational.  As was their extreme need to (i) feel superior about themselves (e.g., a need to see others as unworthy sinners) and (ii) have an exact certainty that by checking off certain boxes on their list of "God's rules" they would go to Heaven.  Anyone different and/or any uncertainty is enough to send them into psychological overload.  An article in The Atlantic looks at homophobia and the mental/emotional attributes of homophobes and conservatives more generally.  The take away?  That these people DO have mental issues.  Here are excerpts:

[Homophobia] It’s a term that’s still too useful to abandon. Social psychologists have mounds of research on the role that emotions like fear and repugnance play in distorting our assessments of reality—that is, in creating bias. For starters, they’ve found that conscious reasoning is a much newer human capacity—evolutionarily—than gut feeling, and that the brain often deploys reasoned thought to rationalize feelings we already have. Rather than justifying a position—like, say, opposing gay marriage—based on how we actually feel, we often dream up non-existent dangers. Indeed, scientists have shown that our brains developed fight-or-flight mechanisms to help us avoid danger before our rational, deliberative machinery even perceives the threat.

Interestingly, researchers at Cornell and Yale (including Atlantic contributor Paul Bloom) have also shown that conservatives, on average, experience stronger levels of disgust than liberals do, and that an overall sensitivity to disgust correlates with anti-gay sentiment. “Our data show that disgust and politics are linked most strongly for issues of purity, such as towards homosexuality,” the authors explain.

Even more strikingly, researchers have found that people with negative views of gay people are prone to overstate the risks that gay rights pose. In one study, psychologists at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University measured subjects’ emotional dispositions and their risk preferences, giving them separate scores for each. When the two sets of variables were correlated, they found that “fearful people expressed pessimistic risk estimates and risk-averse choices.”

It’s no surprise that fearful people would be risk-averse. But this research showed not just that such people avoid risk but that they exaggerate it—in consistent and predictable ways. Researchers concluded that certain emotions, such as fear, activate “a predisposition to appraise future events in line with” whatever the person dreaded to begin with. In other words, fear makes people lose perspective on what the odds of danger really are. These visceral feelings often bypass consciousness, so we’re not even aware of what we’re feeling.

Haidt says people consult their feelings to help them decide what to believe. This sounds fair enough at first blush, but we’re not just talking about values here. Moral intuitions change the way people see the world around them. When your perceptions of reality are refracted through strong feelings, that’s a recipe for bias. It explains the “harms” arguments about gay rights, and why they persist even though there’s no factual information to back them up.

Using a process called Implicit Association Tests, Yale’s Paul Bloom and his colleagues documented a gap between how people say they feel about gays and how they actually feel. Researchers at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project dug deeper, exploring the role of rationalizations against same-sex parenting. Most opponents of gay parenting claimed their position was based on concern for the well-being of children raised by gay couples. But when given convincing evidence that kids with gay parents fare as well as others, very few changed their minds. Their brains sought to avoid the cognitive dissonance of holding beliefs that conflicted with their emotions.

In one of the few areas of life that allows for true, rational deliberation—the courtroom—this is exactly what’s being found. Recent rulings striking down gay marriage bans have found that those laws were rooted in prejudice, making them impermissible under the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court reached the same conclusion last June when it struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The law, said the Court, was “motived by an improper animus” and its purpose was to impose “a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages.”

[O]ften-cited fears—that it will trample religious freedom, cause distractions in the lockerroom, harm kids and families—have no empirical basis.

[U]nderstanding these rationalizations—both the predictions of harm, and the insistence that prejudice is not a factor—is different from accepting them at face value. In fact, as states like Arizona struggle to find logical explanations for anti-gay laws, it’s clearer than ever that bias, and not reason, is the motivating force behind them.