No, Hillary Clinton isn’t a Republican — but the resemblance is striking
Sunday, May 15, 2016 03:00 AM PST
No, Hillary Clinton isn’t a Republican — but the resemblance is striking
Clinton is a lot closer to Richard Nixon than Trump is, but she's really a Cold War liberal left behind by history
Andrew O'Hehir
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Part of the problem is definitional and historical, and maybe even epistemological. What do we mean by “Republican”? A Republican where, and when? In broad strokes of politics and policy, Clinton is a lot closer to the worldview of Richard Nixon — the president who funded Planned Parenthood and proposed a national single-payer healthcare plan — than Donald Trump is. (Less charitably, we could mention Clinton’s recent reference to her good friend Henry Kissinger, one of the moments of 2016 she definitely wishes she could take back.) But the Richard Nixon who got elected in 1968 would not be a remotely viable presidential candidate in today’s GOP, and quite likely would not be a Republican at all.
So no, those things don’t make Hillary Clinton a Republican. Let’s say this all together: She’s a Democrat — a Democrat of a specific vintage and a particular type. At least in her 2016 incarnation, Clinton is an old-school Cold War liberal out of the Scoop Jackson Way-Back Machine, a believer in global American hegemony and engineered American prosperity. (I realize that’s a completely obscure reference to anyone under 45 or so. We’ll get back to it.) Many such Democrats became Republicans after 1980 — in several prominent cases, the Cold War liberals of the 1970s became the George W. Bush neocons of the 2000s — but Clinton didn’t exactly do that, and that’s not my point.
Clinton’s problem, or let’s say the crux of her many problems, is that the machine dropped her into the wrong decade. She has no Cold War to wage against a monolithic ideological nemesis, only an endless, borderless and profoundly unsatisfying conflict against a nebulous, Whack-a-Mole enemy. She faces a public ground down and demoralized by 15 years of pointless warfare and empty paranoia. Clinton’s version of liberalism — she has earned that label, in all fairness — has been rebranded and reconfigured so many times no one could possibly keep track of its current contents. Her politics are like Doctor Who’s flying phone booth: Until you open the door, you have no idea what’s inside.
Clinton has assumed for decades that her understanding of American politics and the global order, shaped by the Cold War liberalism of her youth, is rooted in unshakable reality and represents a finely calibrated blend of idealism and pragmatism. Whether or not she’s right about that is a matter of interpretation, but here’s a fact: She now finds herself at a moment of unexpected political turmoil, when all her underlying assumptions about reality are under attack. It remains likelier than not that she will win this election — but how confident do you really feel about that? Clinton has clearly been taken off guard by the rise of Bernie Sanders on her left and Donald Trump on her right (if that’s where he is at the moment), and is struggling to catch up to a sudden shift in the political tide that threatens to leave her stranded.
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much, much more...
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/15/no_hillary_clinton_isnt_a_republican_but_the_resemblance_is_striking/
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