Hillary Clinton stops for a selfie. John Locher / AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.For Edward Snowden, politics is “the art of convincing decent people to forget the lesser of two evils is also evil.” And when it comes to the US election, it’s difficult to disagree. There is no reason to think that a Hillary Clinton administration would put a stop to the extra-judicial killings, mass surveillance programmes, and other anti-democratic practices, which have been enthusiastically pursued by the Obama administration over the last 8 years. However, with Donald Trump’s plans to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants en masse, to ‘build the wall’, and ban Muslims from entering the United States, attention has been focused almost entirely on the disaster that his presidency would be for civil liberties. We are left so horrified by Trumpism that we act out of fear of handing the GOP more ammunition. But make no mistake. Complacency, and a failure to put pressure on Clinton’s administration, will do more damage to the long-term progressive cause than a Trump presidency would.
Trumpism gains its support by peddling snake oil to America’s disaffected and displaced voters, taking advantage of the vacuum left behind by an American left that doesn't speak for them. The Democrats’ attention is focused elsewhere, and their current approach to capturing votes is based on something else entirely, encapsulated by Clinton’s simple – and now legendary – ‘rebuttal’ to Donald Trump: “Delete your account.”
Twitter/@HillaryClinton, 9 June 2016. Fair use.With over 480,000 retweets and 610,000 likes, this is easily Hillary Clinton’s most popular tweet. Searches for the phrase shot up, Wikipedia and Know Your Meme entries were swiftly created, and countless think-pieces were written – documenting the “Twitter beef” as if these were two celebrities fighting, rather than a childish spat between the two prospective ‘leaders of the free world’. Or, rather, another installment in the political sword fight between Clinton’s social media team and The Donald himself. This says something: the Clinton machine is slick, acutely targeted at its socially liberal audience for maximum yield, while Donald Trump’s off-the-cuff musings fuel his supporters’ view of him as an authentic anti-politician. Neither camp offers real political insight, while serving to entrench the political divide between their supporters.
