The Bernie Bros vs. the Hillarybots

Bubbling intra-left conflict over Hillary Clinton has washed over the internet, with the most recent fracas concerning

the cover art for a new anti-Hillary book by left-wing writer Doug Henwood. The book, which will be published in January, is an expansion of Henwood’s anti-Hillary broadside for Harper's in 2014. Its cover is a noirish painting of Hillary, arm raised, gun pointed at readers, under the title My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency.

From one angle, the image is a hilariously kitschy take on an ambitious, tenacious politician long bedeviled by an American reluctance to admire tenacity and ambition in women. Painted by a Hillary superfan who describes her depictions of the candidate as “libidinal,” it works as an over-the-top riff on the way Hillary (and other powerful women) are seen as emasculating and dangerous. The painting recalls the “Texts from Hillary” meme that made Clinton briefly cool, as well as “Notorious RBG” iconography that resonates around fiercely brilliant bubbe Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In other words, it kind of makes Hillary look like a badass. 

But since the book is far from an ode to Clinton’s moxie, the image takes on a different cast, conveying the grotesque degree to which a competent professional woman, history-making presidential candidate, policy nerd, and grandmother can be so intimidating that her menace is best portrayed as violent threat. It’s imagery that mirrors right-wing conspiracy theories about Hillary as a murderous Lady Macbeth. But remember, this book comes not from the right but from the left. Henwood goes after Clinton as a hawkish corporatist, beholden to Wall Street; he includes Clinton’s feminist shortcomings in his critique. 

This is the fractured, maddening dynamic in play in a far corner of the American left, as Hillary Clinton continues to square off against her progressive challenger, Bernie Sanders. Her critics, some of the loudest of them progressive men, are struggling to communicate the intensity of their distaste for her and for her supporters. But in their efforts, a few are reaching for the communicative weapons usually wielded by their ideological foes — those who diminish, demean, and infantalize women. These lefty guys are reminding their feminist peers that misogyny and bitter gender resentments are not — as they have never been — the sole province of the American right. As Michelle Goldberg points out in her piece about these tensions, "as long as feminism has existed, left-wing men have dismissed it as a bourgeois triviality. Now we know how little things have changed."

The skirmish over Henwood’s cover is but one in a series of recent progressive kerfuffles. Past weeks have also involved disagreement over whether Sanders’s reference to Clinton shouting during their first debate could reasonably be heard as reflecting gender bias and aggravation over Sanders’s advisers’ suggestion that Clinton would make a great vice-president. Then there is the criticism that Hillary can hardly be hailed as a feminist hero when, among other things, she so vocally supported her husband’s welfare reform initiative, legislation that caused disproportionate harm to poor women and their families.  

And while Democratic enmity is much milder this season than in 2008 (when it was set to “Historically Over-Determined Agony”), the fact that the two candidates on offer are again figures without presidential precedent — a white Democratic woman and a Jewish Democratic socialist man — means that the fights we’re having with each other are again clouded by complicated impulses and hang-ups related to identity, power, and representation. 

Officially, the debate about whether to support Clinton or Sanders is not so different from debates Democrats have during many presidential cycles. It hinges on the relative merits of taking a big risk on a more radical candidate in the hope of revitalizing the left, or taking a safer path in hopes of protecting (and perhaps modestly expanding) what meager progressive infrastructure we have in place. This is a serious debate; none of us really knows which path is smarter or will benefit or harm more Americans, but many of us have strong opinions about it, and have participated in versions of it before, when we’ve tussled over other candidates. 

But when Clinton is in play, so is her gender, working both for and against her. To some portion of her progressive supporters, Clinton’s femaleness is regarded as a positive in their overall political calculus. It seems reasonable to argue that it would be good for the country to elect its first female president (especially since the woman in question is not a Thatcher-esque reactionary, but a strong Democrat), just as it was good for it to elect its first black one. But to admit to a consideration of her gender, even when it is so clearly not the only consideration, means your opinion risks being laughed off as infantile, simplistic, girlish. Some left-wing Clinton critics accuse her defenders of “voting based on that alone,” or with an eye only to “vulgar identity politics,” as Henwood puts it in My Turn. With a few simple turns of phrase, legitimate arguments over presidential candidates and representational inequities get reduced to insinuations that women have no head for politics and are just concerned with seeing their own image shining back at them from the Oval Office.

I recently published a lengthy piece about my own conflicted feelings about Clinton, in which I acknowledged an investment in electing a qualified Democratic woman as one of my (serious) considerations. Despite the fact that the piece also detailed my qualms about her, it was derided by some lefty men (and Clinton critics) whose work I respect. That’s fair enough; we disagree. But I was struck by the way in which they voiced their objections, portraying the piece, which was published in Elle, and the feminist argument it put forth, as fundamentally unserious, self-interested, vain, and illegitimate. “600,000 Iraqis died because of the war Hillary enthusiastically supported but you’re a ‘hot mess’ so that settles it,” quipped blogger Freddie deBoer, making reference to the hyperfeminized phrase “Hot Mess” that appeared in the headline of the story, though not in the text. Matt Bruenig, a writer with whom I agree about many things, summarized his view of the essay: “a highly educated rich white woman says she really wants a highly educated rich white woman to be president”; his later blog post about it was called “The Presidential Mirror.” Progressive writer Zaid Jilani refused to even acknowledge any specifically feminist argument for more equal representation, explaining instead that “Ppl voting for Hillary for this reason are like southern GOP neighbors wanting GOP for culturally affirming reasons.” As if the concerns of people who have never had representation in the White House were equivalent to people wanting to vote for candidates they’d like to have beers with.  

In several places, including Henwood’s book, Hillary critics perform a neat but dishonest elision, placing arguments set forth by some feminist Hillary defenders (including me) next to those made by a British writer named Daisy Benson, who wrote a column earlier this year bearing a headline about how the Labour Party should support a female leader “regardless of her policies.” But no one I know or respect who is writing about American politics has made any such suggestion; many feminist journalists have been more than explicit about their opposition to female candidates whose policy ideas they deplore. The acknowledgment that Clinton’s platform isn’t perfectly aligned with a progressive and feminist agenda doesn’t distinguish her from previous presidential candidates or even from Bernie Sanders, whose positions on guns and foreign policy are far from progressively perfect. But somehow the admission of gender as a factor in support for her creates an opportunity to dismiss not only enthusiasm for Clinton as feminized and thus silly, but also a whole body of feminist argument that concerns itself with the underrepresentation of women in politics. It allows a young man like Ben Norton, a staff writer at Salon, who regularly refers to journalists who have written anything positive about Clinton as “Hillarybots,” to authoritatively explain to “bourgeois feminists” that their lack of commitment to dismantling systems of oppression invalidates their feminism. “Clinging to your identity group,” writes Norton, “‘regardless of its policies’ is not politics; it is high-school clique drama.”