Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders, left, and former Vice President Joe Biden. Photo / AP
COMMENT:
In the future, when progressive parties try to pinpoint the exact moment they stopped doing what ordinary people were asking them to and started blaming ordinary people for not doing what they were told, they will only have to look at Hillary Clinton's campaign diary.
And hopefully when they try to pinpoint the moment they started listening again, they will only have to look at the last page of Elizabeth Warren's.
Clinton assumed she would be handed the Democratic nomination on a platter in 2008 only to be blindsided by a brilliant and charismatic speechmaker who honed his politics on the streets of Chicago.
Astonishingly, given the winner-takes-all, one-shot-in-the-locker, ultra-high-stakes nature of American politics, she was given another chance in 2016 – breathtaking proof of the privilege and power the Clintons are granted by the Democratic party machine.
Yet even with the full-throttle engine of the Democratic party machine behind her she was still almost toppled by a crotchety old socialist boomer who, by her own assessment, had never really accomplished anything much at all.
Fortunately for her, the fix was in and Clinton finally got her nomination.
… Only to completely cock up the election itself by failing to meet any of the people who needed to vote for her. She swanned around with celebrities and slagged off Republican voters and was so smugly assured of having her birthright bestowed upon her that she didn't even bother to campaign in the rust belt states of disillusioned working-class families who were once the backbone of the Democratic Party.
Most galling of all, she made the campaign all about her. That it was her time to be president, her right to take office.
This is the party whose most lionised hero JFK famously declared: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country."
And yet her whole campaign – some would argue, her whole life – was centred around asking the country to do something for her – right down to its actual slogan: "I'm with her."
If she had even the slightest sense of humility she would have known that the right slogan was "She's with you".
But she didn't and she wasn't.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, for all his innumerable faults, was at least saying what he was going to do for the country, namely make it great again. Even so, there is not a single person on the Trump campaign – including Trump himself – who did more to help get him to the White House than Hillary Clinton did.
In the end this almost delusional sense of entitlement was shameless, toxic and ultimately fatal. And yet we saw a carbon copy of it in Elizabeth Warren, who just a few months ago was considered by many so-called experts to be the great white hope of the Democratic Party – including the editorial board of the New York Times.
The Warren campaign is the epitome of everything that is wrong with so-called left-wing politics at the moment, and I say "so-called" because there is nothing left-wing about it.
Progressive politics these days is in fact defined by privileged people claiming oppression, which is why in the US it is led by a millionaire New England socialist and a Harvard law professor turned senator who claims she is a victim of the patriarchy.
Bernie is obviously just batsh**t crazy so let's turn the bullsh*t-o-meter on Betty for a little bit.
Even after she was exposed in her absurdist claim to Native American ancestry – an apparent effort to ratchet up more victimhood credits despite sitting at the very apex of American society – Warren couldn't help but try to make her failed campaign for the presidency about discrimination against her.
Bowing out after having failed to win a single state, nor even having run second in any – not even her home state of Massachusetts – this whiter-than-white woman of infinite privilege said from the lawn of her Cambridge home: "I say this with a deep sense of gratitude for every single person who got in this fight, every single person who tried out a new idea, every single person who just moved a little in their notion of what a President of the United States should look like."
Look like? Apparently those who didn't support her, namely the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters including almost 80 per cent in her home state, were trapped in some old-fashioned bigotry. This would no doubt come as a surprise to the majority who voted for Hillary Clinton just four years ago, let alone the tidal wave who supported Obama and carried him to two thumping election wins.
But no — according to Warren, it was not just for herself that she grieved, but the future women of America.
"One of the hardest parts of this is all those pinky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years. That's going to be hard."
One is reminded of The Simpsons' creepy geek millionaire Artie Ziff when he asks Marge not to tell anyone about his "busy hands": "Not so much for myself, but I am so respected, it would damage the town to hear it."
In fact, if the present women of America are any guide they'll probably cope with Warren's departure just fine, largely because they voted for it. The fact is that about 60 per cent of the voters in the Democratic primaries are women. And the fact is that in not one of the states that Warren contested did that overwhelming majority of women put her in first or even second place. Not one, even her own.
And so even as Warren is painting herself as a victimised feminist trailblazer she is blaming women for not voting for her based on what she looks like. Indeed, she is blaming them for not being shallow enough.
But surely she would not be so self-entitled and narcissistic to believe that the race for the presidency is all about her? Surely she would believe that the party, the cause, the defeat of Donald Trump is the most important thing?
Well, no. It is a long-held and vital tradition in primary races that anyone bowing out immediately pledges their support for another candidate and their energies towards the greater good. We saw the enormously impressive Pete Buttigieg do this early on to make sure Joe Biden knocked out Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday – and on the off chance Trump is beaten by Biden in November the DNC should build a 100-foot golden statue of Mayor Pete because he was the one who made it possible.
It is the only generous and decent thing a candidate can do in defeat but Warren wouldn't do it. Instead she pointedly refused to endorse Sanders or anyone else. Anyone who has ever worked in party politics knows this is a dog act.
In Australia such bitter vindictiveness is usually found only in former prime ministers.
But this attitude goes straight to the heart of identity politics. You define yourself as a victim – however privileged you may be – and then declare that anyone who doesn't support you is in some way backwards, bigoted or part of some invisible conspiracy of oppression.
It is the exact antithesis of what progressive politics is supposed to be. It jettisons the collective good in favour of personal grievance and sidelines the everyday struggles of poor and working-class people in favour of contrived appeals for individual sympathy. And yet it has spread through the left faster than the coronavirus.
Think of Hillary and Michigan. Detroit had been gutted by the global financial crisis, workers laid off, factories shut down. Clinton never even met them. Meanwhile her campaign was pumping out #ImWithHer all over Twitter.
Little wonder working class voters ran a mile in both directions to either the populist right or the socialist left. Thankfully most seem to have come back to the sensible centre, even if under Biden it seems more and more like the senile centre.
I am certainly not pretending that he is an inspirational candidate – at times he is barely even a lucid one – but at least he is likeable. Biden might sound like an overstretched tape of Lake Wobegon Days but Bernie just sounds like the angry uncle that would make you glass yourself if you had to sit next to him at Christmas.
And so Democrat voters have a choice between a genially demented candidate and a genuinely deranged one but the most embarrassing part is that both of them are more electable than painfully self-pitying senators crying sexism from their east coast estates.
Sanders won't beat Biden and I doubt Biden will beat Trump but he will at least save what's left of the Democratic Party's heartland.
What the next generation does with it remains to be seen.
Because the real scandal in this election campaign isn't anything the candidates will or won't do. It is that the Democrats have had four years under a wildly chaotic and unpopular president to cultivate an army of future leaders and the best they've managed to produce is a hokey old dinosaur, an angry old hippy and a whiny old professor.
It took a bright young thing of Nowheresville Indiana to show up just how much the party had failed to generate new talent, and yet even this great gay superstar with the charisma to win over Christian America was criticised by hipster Democrats for not being gay enough. It's hard not to suspect the party has a built-in death wish.
The truth is the Democrats had a Lost Generation and thus lost a generation. They are torn between old folks and new wokes with nobody in the middle. And it is in the middle that battles are won and lost.
And in the future, when progressive parties try to pinpoint the exact moment they stopped doing what ordinary people were asking them to and started blaming ordinary people for not doing what they were told, perhaps they will read this as well.
Joe Hildebrand is the editor-at-large of news.com.au and co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten | @Joe_Hildebrand