It turns out Hillary lost because she was a highly competent woman. Yes, that could have been the reason she won, but it is also the reason she lost.
You know what you read and heard again and again, that "I just don't like her" song - well, it turns out all that meant was "I don't like smart girls" or "I don't like accomplished women."
The stories we read even as children are all about boys but if girls get into them at all, she is the smart girl, begrudgingly acknowledged while mocked. Charles Schultz embodied her in Lucy and J.K. Rowling, in Hermione.
If you ever again hear a television pundit, news host or comic ask about whether people "like" someone in public life, remember it is just a grade school level of question - akin to when you were asked whether you wanted to sit next to Lucy:
"Heck no- my coolness requires I sit next to ...fill in the male name."
"I like" defines who I am...no broccoli for me when asked what I like to eat, and no smart girls when asked who I like.
Yes, it's also complicated why they hate smart girls.
Mark Twain, always wise, gave us a glimpse. You might remember Pap Finn - father of a boy named Huck - who was always happy to share his wisdom on race as well as other matters:
There was a free nigger there from Ohio — a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too….They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to?
Nice guy, right? Pap Finn fits right in with Trump's Deplorables.
Well, he had this to say too, when he learns Huck can read:
You've put on considerable many frills since I been away…You're educated, too, they say—can read and write. You think you're better'n your father, now, don't you, because he can't? I'll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut'n foolishness hey?—who told you you could?
Pap smacks Huck hard for reading.
There it all is - American Anti-intellectualism in one self-important and violent man. You have Pap Finn.
Wrap it in misogyny and sexism, and add sexual predatory behavior. You have Trump.
My wife's hairdresser, a fierce Hillary supporter, tells the story of one client, a woman, who was reluctantly voting for Hillary. She complained "Hillary just seems to know all the facts." He stared at her.
Matt Taibbi put it this way in his RollingStone article, President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong.
There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of the "low-information" voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates who spoke above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by academics and analysts that Trump's public addresses rated among the most simplistic political rhetoric ever recorded.
But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us silver-tongued media types ever thought about. The People didn't speak our language, true. But that also meant we didn't speak theirs.
Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge's Idiocracy, ostensibly a comedy but destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often cited this past year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia of idiot Americans physically unable to understand the tepid grammatical speech of a half-smart time traveler from the past. Many reporters, myself included, found themselves thinking about this film when we heard voters saying they were literally incapable of understanding the words coming out of Hillary Clinton's mouth.
"When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he's saying," a young Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago. "But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of bullshit."
Out of Trent Gower's mouth.
You now have why Hillary, the smart girl, the competent girl, the most qualified person ever, couldn't win in our America.
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November 14, 2016
