Donald Trump is president and Hillary Clinton is partly to blame

The first stage of grief is denial.

They’ll blame the FBI. They’ll blame Russia and Wiki-Leaks. They’ll blame Bernie Bro’s and third party candidates. They’ll blame the corporate media and social media. But if Democrats are really interested in knowing why they lost they don’t need to look that far.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow but the truth is that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party bear a huge part of the responsibility for this cosmic clusterfuck.

Make no mistake, this was Hillary Clinton’s election to lose and she lost it in quite spectacular fashion to a man so abhorrent that it renders all hyperbolic descriptions of him meaningless at this point.

All this begs the question: why did she even run for President? Of course she was immensely qualified for the role, but she was also a deeply flawed candidate in this type of election.

She ran because she recognised that America isn’t really a democracy, it’s a dynastic oligarchy and she had decided it was her turn. It didn’t seem to bother her that her candidacy was toxic from the very start or that she was despised and mistrusted by large swathes of the American electorate. She saw the presidency as hers by right.

For their part, Democrats nominated her despite knowing that she was a deeply vulnerable, scandal-ridden candidate marred by her fondness for starting wars and cozying up to Wall Street bankers. They chose her because they thought she was the only ‘electable’ option, and because she represented the kind of managerial centrist liberalism that had seen Democrats get elected in the past. They went for her despite the wealth of empirical evidence which showed that other candidates – like Bernie Sanders – polled much better against Donald Trump. And so the Democratic Party leaders quickly fell in line, calculating that a Clinton victory would advance their own careers. The DNC bowed to the might of Clinton’s political machine making it almost impossible for anyone to stand against her.

But in the political climate of 2016, it was a Clinton candidacy that proved to be the reckless gamble. This was an election that was never going to be won by someone who embodied everything people loved to hate about the political class. Clinton was viewed (quite rightly) as the guardian of the status quo by a country that wanted to see the entire system burn.

It didn’t help that she ran an utterly uninspiring campaign, that she offered no grand vision of change for America, or that her hollow robotic attempts to connect with voters failed miserably.

Ultimately Hillary Clinton had nothing to offer working class Americans that have been suffering for decades under the yoke of crippling neoliberal economic policies which she and her husband supported. Trump is no warrior for the poor; he’s a sociopathic megalomaniac concerned with his own personal advancement and nothing else. But he managed to channel the fear and anger of those who felt they’d left behind by a rigged system which favours establishment elites like Clinton. Trump won by energising large numbers of white working-class voters in a way that an establishment candidate like Clinton could never have done. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald put it “Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.”

Of course, there are a myriad of factors that caused this catastrophe and some of them have nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. Trump’s campaign unleashed an unprecedented wave of racism, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia and this was reflected in the voter demographics. Not only did Trump win a majority of white college-educated males, he also won the support of 53% of white women. This suggests two things; firstly that support for Trump was not just about economic anxiety and secondly, that even if the majority of white people in America aren’t overtly racist, they clearly don’t think racism is a big deal.

That being said, although it may be more convenient to pin the blame on bigoted Trump supporters fired up by prejudice and hate, the truth is much more complex than that. After all, a lot of those same people that voted for Trump also voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and in 2012. As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn put it: “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story.”

We may never really know why this happened, but it is now incumbent upon Democrats in the US, and those on the left more generally, to undertake some serious soul-searching so that next time around America can be made great again.