Ta-Nehisi Coates, commenting on Josh Green’s autopsy of the Clinton campaign, has a thoughtful post regarding the “false nobility of victimhood,” the rationalization of the Clintons that they were undone by forces outside their own control, rather than their own incompetence.
Obviously, I’m not a Clintonite, but a certain tribe of white men have always evinced a visceral hatred of her which I can’t fathom. There’s a sexism there, but something more than that, something about the men themselves and their own failings. For someone who’s never been a flaming lefty, Clinton draws an incredible amount of venom. I may not completely understand why, but I suspect somewhere out in our fair country there are millions of white women who know exactly what that sort of hatred is all about.
These men draw on the “false nobility of victimhood” more than any other. This is Rush Limbaugh’s America, a place peopled by monsters: women, rusty knives in hand, ready for castration, lazy and lascivious minorities who want to steal their jobs and force everyone to speak Spanish, to say nothing of the massive tyranny of Muslim workers negotiating with management to get Eid ul-Fitr of work. Appealing to this sense of white anxiety was a key component of Penn’s strategy, these “invisibles” who we learn every election season are “forgotten” even as Op-Ed after Op-Ed is cranked out about how they are the block no politician can afford to ignore. Certainly, they cannot. But I cannot figure out how such a group is described as “forgotten” when we spend so much time discussing how important they are. If there’s anything that appeals about Obama’s message, it’s that these white voters and the black ones Chris Matthews couldn’t bring himself to see as “normal” Americans have the same basic interests.
There’s simply something fundamentally American about presenting oneself as the unjust, the wronged, the aggrieved. And if a politician can get the vast majority of voters to agree with that sentiment, while seeing themselves reflected in the figure bearing the message, then they have a recipe for an electoral majority.