People are surprised when I express support for Hillary Clinton. My economic politics are hard to the left and, unlike hers, explicitly socialist. But it’s entirely because my analysis of inequality is economic that I endorse Clinton – not as a least-worst option, not even due to the nature of her opponent, but on her own terms as a leader pledged to the material improvement of women’s economic and social reality.
This is a structurally radical framework for broad-based American change. Yet over the course of many a bleating bro-beating on the internet, the dread realisation has landed with me that among too many men who identify themselves as on the left, notions of what constitutes social progress and radical redress of inequality are gendered concepts – with the result that Clinton’s activist leadership is wilfully dismissed.
Time magazine may have called Clinton a “cultural revolutionary”, but the Bernie Bros are having none of it. If you’re a woman who’s supported Clinton online at any point you’ll know which bros I mean.
They’re the self-proclaimed progressive gentlemen who insist that Bernie Sanders was robbed of the Democratic nomination, despite his loss by more than 2.5m votes in the primaries. Whether “brogressives”, “brocialists” or “manarchists”, they denounce Clinton’s claim on American left leadership despite her popular nomination, policy, activist record, her spoken statements or her trouncing of Donald Trump in three debates.
There must be scrutiny of any candidate for office but it comes with an obsessional viciousness towards Clinton in these mannish parts of the left. The Australian writer Jane Caro described an experience of praising Clinton and being “abused, sneered at, patronised (oh my God, how you will be patronised) and sent endless propaganda purporting to prove she’s corrupt, a criminal, a murderer, a warmonger etc”.
I’ve received this propaganda too. Clinton’s critics cite unstructured blog posts about petrodollars, blame her for the US mire in the Middle East, and post links to rough-edit YouTube videos proclaiming her ownership by the banks.
The alpha-bro outfit WikiLeaks has fuelled some old-school conspiracy theories by tweeting sly suggestions that she’s a puppet of the Rothschilds. There are those who – unbelievably – insist she’s “just as bad” as Trump.
Such ardent behaviour is global, and unrestricted to those US citizens who can determine the election. It’s been described by female writers across the world as they simultaneously explain the phenomenon of “silent Hillary supporters”. Since the primaries exposed this behaviour, vast communities have formed of women organising secret Facebook groups so they can praise, analyse and debate concerns about the Clinton candidacy without abuse. I’m in two of them – an Australian and American one – there are thousands more, and various groups run into memberships of thousands.
It’s not just leftwing women, either. An article in Marie Claire observed the phenomenon of evangelical women in conservative communities secretly organising for Clinton as well.
Why there’s open hostility by certain men towards Clinton as well as how her female voting base is locked down in their support for her is simplistically explained as an act of and response to sexism. But there are more complex and nuanced elements here that apply to a broader western conversation about policy priorities.
Problems of pay inequality, parental leave and access to affordable childcare exist across the western world because of the scarcity within political leadership of those who fight for women’s causes beyond lip service and make actual legislative change.
Fighting inequality in the US – and global – context has defined Clinton’s political engagement for her entire career. Her campaign is unashamed in its commitment to women’s policy. As an Australian, I look upon the opportunity Americans have to exercise a vote for her with envy.
The hatred of Clinton from the testosterone left is a dangerous, self-defeating omission from those who insist theirs is a project of fairness. Clinton has progressed from community activist to presidential candidate with relentless dedication to equality causes.
Entirely because of her own redefinition of the first lady role, it’s hard to imagine now how groundbreaking it was when she told the UN “that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights” in Beijing in 1995; or when she published It Takes a Village, arguing that childcare is a collective social responsibility, in 1996; or that she is credited with the creation of an office on violence against women at the Department of Justice.
In her busy senatorial career, she championed access to contraception as a women’s rights issue, fought for the Paycheck Fairness Act and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter bill for fair pay, as well as campaigning for paid parental leave for US public servants.
Her tenure as secretary of state was characterised by her unprecedented centralisation of gender equality strategies to foreign policy, creating a structure for participation of women in peace processes and recognition of rape as a weapon of war, which was subsequently adopted by the UN.
Her nuanced understanding and dogged defence of women’s autonomy and the right to choose has been hailed as “glorious” given the dangerous polarisation of the abortion issue in the US. She’s never abandoned her dedication to improving access to childcare – it is a central feature of her present campaign – and her candidacy for president has been marked by her advocacy for fairness for women and children, equal pay, reproductive rights, health equality and family and carer’s leave.
While women fight these ongoing battles for recognition and redress of our structural disadvantage, it exposes the privilege of cabinet ministers, WikiLeaks wannabes and Bernie Bros alike that they can trivialise, minimise or ignore them.
There is more at stake in the US election than one candidate’s victory and another’s defeat, far more than who should gain the levers of an economy – far more even than who deserves access to the US armoury.
Clinton is not just the most qualified candidate for election. Not only does she have a singular, expert history of activism, leadership and service that recommends her on her own terms. She’s a candidate whose policy, practice, life and very person are inextricable from the political cause of equality.
In a democratic choice reduced to two options, to reject her for her opponent amounts to a rejection of equality as a political project. For those of us who lack the privileges conferred on others at their birth, should Clinton lose it’s not only the result that will be devastating, but the consequences, too.
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