Some wear T-shirts saying "Trump that Bitch", and there are those who describe Clinton as "the servant of Satan" or use hashtags such as Killary on social media. Trump is also the focus of contempt, and worse - he's been likened to Adolf Hitler and accused of having a personality disorder. Misogyny can be obvious, she says - as in the use of the word "bitch" - or it can be hidden.
Many of the barbs directed at Clinton revolve around her husband's well-publicised sexual transgressions in the s and 90s. Last year, Trump himself retweeted the comment, "If Clinton can't satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America? But some critics focus on her alleged role in the scandal, as a co-ordinator of attempts to keep the women involved quiet and to blacken their character. This attack and others like it show a determination to cast Clinton as a "co-perpetrator" in her husband's wrongdoings, says columnist and author Michelle Goldberg.
In the decades that the Clintons have been in the public eye, US politics has become increasingly polarised - a process partly fuelled by the proliferation of radical voices on talk radio and the internet. The election of Barack Obama - the first black president, and one of the most liberal for decades - also proved to be a red rag to some, including D'Souza. In one of a series of controversial books and films, the man described in the liberal media as "America's premiere conservative troll" argues that the president wants America to be "downsized" as punishment for the "sins of colonialism".
In his latest film - alluding to the Clintons' ability to turn political success to financial advantage - he goes so far as to accuse Clinton of being a gangster who plans to "steal America". But Donald Trump himself has also done much to put about conspiracy theories regarded by many commentators as devices to whip up hostility towards Obama and Clinton. He began his journey to the Republican nomination by reviving the long-debunked "birther" claim that Obama was not born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be president, only to disavow it last month.
Clinton to higher standards, treating her unfairly as the schoolmarmish, substitute teacher. Hillary Clinton is responsible for the email mess and other ethical tangles, too. Given the hostility, she should have avoided even appearances of impropriety. But, it seems the very scrutiny she wanted to avoid led her into this moral chasm with her private server.
Beyond this self-destructive paranoia, the Clintons have cut corners elsewhere, conveying a sense of entitlement, then lying about it. When caught, they have often justified their lapses with a characteristically Boomer self-righteousness, demanding absolution by invoking their idealism. Each scandal was not as terrible as opponents tried to make it but not as benign as the Clintons claimed.
Remember those moral missteps. At all. Butcher was raised to be a Democrat, and he voted for Bill Clinton in He always disliked Hillary, he says, and his distaste intensified when, as first lady, she was put in charge of health care reform. Aside from Al Gore, whoever Bill Clinton had put in charge of health care reform would have been unelected; presidents make lots of appointments that have legislative consequences.
No one elected Robert F. Kennedy to be John F. To me, at least, it sounded as if Butcher was angry that Hillary had stepped outside the role of a typical first lady, that she had transgressed certain gender constraints.
But like most Hillary haters, Butcher rejects the idea that gender has anything to do with his antipathy. Also like a lot of people who despise Clinton, Butcher finds her invocations of gender infuriating. Listening to Butcher brought me back to Rosner. Their politics are very different, but their assessments of Hillary Clinton are strikingly similar.
So am I. Like Butcher, Rosner felt that Clinton had overstepped as first lady. It could be that the reasons people give for disliking Clinton have changed simply because she herself has changed. She entered the White House as a brashly self-confident liberal. In other words, people hated Hillary Clinton for being one sort of person, and in response to that she became another sort of person, who people hated for different reasons.
No doubt, this quality is gendered; Americans tend not to like ambitious women with loud voices. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? According to one poll , even Democrats found Brown more personally appealing. This fits a broader pattern.
Because liberal democracy itself is in serious danger. Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.
All of these are now in serious danger. The primary source of this danger is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism.
Unimpeded by Trump's defeat in and unfazed by the January 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters actively work to exploit anxieties and prejudices, to promote reckless hostility to the truth and to Americans who disagree with them, and to discredit the very practice of free and fair elections in which winners and losers respect the peaceful transfer of power.
In an essay for Common Dreams , Isaac explains how this "friendly collaboration" between ideological foes came about:. Some of our signatories have long been aligned with the anti-war movement and with the Sanders wing of the Democratic party.
Some have been aligned with the more centrist Obama-Clinton-Biden wing. Bush and of Ronald Reagan before him. We have not checked our differences at the door. And yet we have come together precisely because we regard these differences as important, and we believe that if the forces of Know Nothingism, racism, and reaction associated with Trumpism prevail, we will all suffer. Our political differences are real.
And our joint commitment to democracy is grounded in those very differences. Many who will read this will be angry about what some of our signatories have said or done in the past. This is understandable. It simply requires us to acknowledge the ethical and political importance of coming together, across differences, to defend the things that we value in common.
Perhaps Benjamin Franklin said it best, at another moment when some very different people came together to oppose the tyranny of their time: "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. As the first drafts of history are being written about this dire historical period, one important theme will be about how many pro-democracy Americans worked together, often quietly or in secret, from the highest levels of government, including the military and the national security agencies, to the local and state levels and across civil society more broadly, in an effort to stop the Trump regime's plot to nullify the presidential election.
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