Hillary Agonistes

NOTE: The title is a tribute to Nixon Agonistes, which is to historian Garry Wills what The Naked and the Dead is to Norman Mailer.

Let’s start this post with a thought experiment:

I’m a feminist. I have always been a feminist. I believe the feminist agenda can save this country. Until we get a strong feminist in the White House our freedom is in peril.

Now, wherever you see the word feminist above, substitute the word anti-communist. You’re now a Nixon Republican, and the year is 1967. Substitute the word populist and you’re ready to vote for FDR, and the year is 1931. Substitute the word progressive and you’re on a bicycle, looking ahead to 1896. Make it abolitionist and you’re a Republican, it’s 1859 and John Brown is your hero.

The point is that every new Thesis starts with a base vote, millions of people who feel they are not represented anywhere in Washington or in the dominant media. For Hillary Clinton these voters are feminists. (They’re not all women, but most are.) Your base will stick by you and make you powerful. Your base vote will ignore your flaws. All the work of your enemies to demonize you will only energize your base vote.

Let’s look at a brief history of the last 40 years through the eyes of one of these voters.

No one has fought the good fight of feminism like Hillary Clinton. She was there at the start, at Wellesley. She wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky. She was there at Watergate, presenting the impeachment papers. She was there in life, building a marriage of equals, in which she was the main breadwinner while her husband was Governor in the 1980s.

We know what was meant when he said "you get two for one" back in 1992. Al Gore wasn’t the real Vice President — he was number three. Hillary was the real Vice President. And she delivered, or tried to. Were it not for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy she would be President right now. And now we’re going to redress the balance.

You can take those paragraphs, change a few details, and you get Nixon’s life story. He was intimately involved in the history which came before his time. He was the angry man, the opponent, the AntiThesis, born of Joe McCarthy, seared by the Checkers scandal, cheated by the Kennedys. He even got exiled to New York after the disputed election  (only in Clinton’s case it was Bill who finally made the family flush).

I recently finished a book called Happy Days Are Here Again, by the late Steven Neal, which confirmed all this in another context. Franklin Roosevelt nearly failed to win his party’s nomination in 1932. He was saved by the party’s populist base in the South and West. Politics at that time was almost a mirror image of today’s, with conservative Republicanism dominant in the northeast, and the craziest of economic liberals in places like Oklahoma. FDR had to beat back a challenge that was based in his own region, in the big city machines of New York, Chicago, and Jersey City. And that challenge was based on FDR’s own long history in politics, which stretched back to the Theodore Roosevelt administration, throughout which he leaned against the dominant element of his party on behalf of something that looked a lot like his distant cousin’s brand of Republicanism.

The Clintons are well aware of this history. Bill Clinton walked to his 1992 convention to accept his nomination in imitation of FDR’s own plane ride from Albany to Chicago in 1932 — both events were stunts meant to set a new precedent, start a new era. The Clintons know their history.

And they know you need a base to win. Hillary has one. No matter the current polls, she will be tough to beat as a result.