As Hillary Clinton conducts her "losers tour" replete with interviews with sympathetic journalists and speeches before sympathetic audiences, the Democratic Party narrative regarding the November election, building in pieces till now, is fully fleshed out and settles into place.
The central theme of that narrative is that the election was "stolen" by Donald Trump. Hillary was denied that to which she was entitled by (now former) FBI Director James Comey, Russian interference via Wikileaks, and the broader racism, sexism and misogyny of the American electorate (effectively tapped by a racist, sexist, and misogynist Trump).
Since Clinton lost despite getting 3 million more votes than her despicable opponent, we can throw the institutional anachronism known as the electoral college into the blame mix as well.
Such a narrative performs a crucial psychological function for Democrats by explaining defeat in the least cathartic fashion, thereby requiring the least amount of soul-searching and painful reform of party positions and appeals; far easier to just assume that the other side stole something than to accept any blame for losing it.
Even more important is the manner in which the narrative conveniently prepares the ground for Hillary to run again in 2020 by absolving her of any responsibility for what happened.
Many thought that this was the last we would see of the Clintons, that losing the Democratic nomination to an obscure, upstart first-term senator in 2008 and then the presidency itself to a reality TV buffoon in 2016 was more than enough.
But it wasn't, and likely never will be, because apparently a life without political ambition would be a life not worth living for Bill and Hillary (and Chelsea?). Project Clinton has therefore regrouped and found a new pathway toward its perpetual goal of putting a second Clinton in the White House.
The "stolen election" theme becomes crucial to this effort because it transforms Hillary from culprit for humiliating defeat into victim and even martyr. Instead of blowing an election that everyone thought was in the bag, she had it stolen away from her at the last moment by skulduggery.
So Hillary is now back, even to the point of opportunistically inserting herself as leader of the resistance to an illegitimate Trump presidency through creation of her new PAC "Onward Together." As New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin noted, the chances that she took this step to help elect Cory Booker, Andrew Cuomo or any Democrat other than herself are "zero and none."
Of course, one is left to wonder exactly how enthusiastic Democrats will be with Hillary back in the picture--the last time a party (the Democrats) re-nominated last time's loser was in 1956, and Adlai Stevenson (another Democratic martyr) proceeded to lose to Dwight Eisenhower by an even bigger margin than before. And if Hillary seemed a bit stale in terms of personality and message in 2016, it is difficult to see how things will have improved on that score with the passage of four more years.
When the Soviet Union was experiencing "the era of stagnation" under a feeble Leonid Brezhnev, the average age of the Soviet Politburo exceeded 70 years; nearly a decade more than the average life expectancy of Soviet males.
How fascinating, then, to realize that the mean age of the most visible contemporary Democrats--Bill and Hillary, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders, and Nancy Pelosi--is almost 73.
By means of contrast, and were Trump to decide not to seek a second term (as he has discovered, being president is "hard"), the likely list of Republican nomination contenders could include Marco Rubio (45), Paul Ryan (47), Ted Cruz (46), Nikki Haley (45), and Ben Sasse (45). The old coot, by GOP standards, is John Kasich (64).
Democratic strategists disastrously mistook Barack Obama's cult of personality for an emerging Democratic majority (the "coalition of the ascendant") that would guarantee the party electoral dominance for decades to come. Based on such assumptions, they thought they could safely demonize white working- and middle-class couples with kids who go to church on Sundays as the source of all that racism and sexism.
They were wrong, and now find themselves in worse shape than at any time in the past century. Bereft of any farm league, the party leadership will experience continuing ossification.
Within such a context, the return of Hillary cannot help but create ambivalence. To have the official narrative provide convenient villains in the service of restoring the party's sagging spirits is one thing; to have it used as a vehicle in the service of continued Clinton appropriation of the party at its likely electoral expense is quite another.
And then there is that broader problem of how Democrats see the nation they wish to lead.
In a review of a new book on leftist activism in the New Republic, Sam Adler-Bell claims Democrats lost "not because we did something wrong, but because we did something right in a world that's wrong. We fought the forces of misogyny, xenophobia, and white supremacy, but they were too strong; they overwhelmed us. And how could they not? This is America after all."
Yes, this is America. Or at least the sordid America that liberals see.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/15/2017