Though Clinton had expected a coronation, the Sanders campaign pushed her to be more than she expected. The platform of the Democratic Party was shifted to the left in many important respects. Yet Clinton could not be champion of an anti-corporate populist movement. Yes, she correctly argued to tax the 1%. Yes, she articulated many progressive demands. But in the eyes of too many people, including many of her supporters, she was compromised by her relationship with Wall Street.
That said, what also needs to be considered is that Trump had so many negatives against him. Yes, he was an outsider, so to speak, and used that very skillfully to argue that he would bring another pair of eyes to the situation. Yet, this is the same person who is in the upper echelons of the economy; refused to share his tax returns; has numerous allegations against him for bad business with partners and workers; and engages in the same off-shoring of production as many of the companies he criticized! Yet, none of that haunted him in the way that various criticisms haunted Clinton. Fundamentally this was a matter of sexism, though it is certainly true that Clinton's being perceived as an insider did not help.
We don't know whether Bernie Sanders would have done any better but we do know that his message is the one that needs to be articulated:
It is impossible to accurately predict whether Sanders would have done better in the final election. He certainly would have been subjected to an immense amount of red-baiting and suggestions of foreign policy softness. Yet his message did resonate among millions, especially younger voters. And it was younger voters who did not turn out in force to back Clinton.
In entering the Trump era it is the movement that Sanders was part of coalescing that becomes key in building a resistance that has a positive vision. One of the weaknesses of the Sanders message was its failure to unify matters of class with race and gender. This is not an academic exercise. This is about telling the right story about what has been happening in the USA. It is also a matter of taping into significant social movements, e.g., Occupy; immigrant rights; LGBT; environmental justice; movement for Black Lives. These are movements that are focused on the future and a future that is progressive. This, in fact, is where the hope lies.
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I have argued for some time that right-wing populism -- with the Trump campaign exemplifying an aspect of this -- is a revolt against the future. It is a movement that is always focused on a mythical past to which a particular country must return. In the case of the USA, right-wing populism seeks a return to the era of the "white republic," and it is this that the Trump campaign was so successful in articulating. It did so through disparaging Mexicans, suggesting them as a source of crime, completely ignoring criminal syndicates that have historically arrived in the USA from Europe. It did so through demonizing Arabs and Muslims, suggesting them as sources of terror, completely ignoring that the greatest sources of political terror in the USA have been white supremacist formations.
Right-wing populism has grown as a result of both the ravages brought on by neo-liberal globalization as well as the demographic and political changes within the USA. It is the latter -- demographic and political changes -- that have unfolded over the decades as previously disenfranchised groups have asserted themselves and articulated, to paraphrase the poet Langston Hughes, we, too, sing America.
Yes, let us lick our wounds and reflect on the future. This election result was one that more of us should have anticipated as a real possibility. In either case, that the results were so close and that we did not have the ideal candidate to represent the new majority emerging in the USA remains for me a source of immense hope.
The struggle certainly continues.
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