Hillary Clinton has an odd habit that infuriates the press and millions of Americans of all ideologies. She tells the truth. Her delivery is often unforgiving, and her timing impolitic, but the message is, typically, what few people in the madness of contemporary discourse seem to value—correct.
The latest example of the former senator’s capacity to “offend” occurred when she told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that the students protesting Israel and America’s support of the Jewish state “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East.” She explained that most “young people” don’t know the history of “many areas of the world, including in our own country.”
Media outlets, from The New York Times to Fox News, reported on the comments as if they were shocking, while officials and pundits on Clinton’s left and right ridiculed her. Senator Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat, called Clinton’s assertion “dismissive.” Elizabeth Spiers, writing for the Times, projected the 76-year-old as a symbol of “boomer” arrogance, and Juan Cole, an academic popular with the hard left who consistently defends the brutality of Iran and flirts with antisemitism, argued that Macklemore, the protest-rapper who once appeared on stage with a hook nose and in Hasidic garb while performing the song, Thrift Shop, “has a historical understanding that runs rings around Mrs. Clinton.”
Van Hollen claimed that his conversations with student protestors indicated comprehension of Middle East history but offered no evidence. The rest of Clinton’s critics read lines from a familiar script: They scolded the former Secretary of State for her poor manners but did not even attempt to argue that she was wrong.
The documentation of Americans’ historical illiteracy is overwhelming. A 2018 survey from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation showed that only one in every three Americans could pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Similarly alarming, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reported in 2017 that only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of the federal government. In the same year, a C-SPAN survey found that most Americans—57 percent—could not name a Supreme Court Justice.
A 2020 study found two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 did not know that six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Only 44 percent could explain the meaning of the term “Auschwitz.”
In the face of widespread ignorance, universities have thrown up their hands and announced their retreat. Most universities no longer require that students pass a history course, and fewer than one-third require a course in U.S. history as part of the curricula for history majors.
We haven’t even gotten to the Middle East—a subject on which proficiency surveys of young Americans are difficult to find. Exercising just a little bit of logic vindicates Clinton’s analysis. If Americans cannot even name the branches of their own government or identify a single Supreme Court Justice, should anyone expect them to know anything about the Oslo Accords? What about the Camp David Accords? Or the Six-Day War? You don’t have to look far on YouTube to see protestors unable to identify which river and which sea should mark the boundaries of a “free Palestine.”
One need not agree with Clinton’s anti-Netanyahu/anti-campus protest take on the Gaza war to acknowledge the obvious truth that the protest’s ranks were filled with ill-informed.
But taking “offense” is a well-practiced art in American life. One would think that many Americans would feel grateful for Clinton always giving them opportunities to show their sensitivity by objecting to her factual arguments. There is no such generosity.
When she ran for president in 2016, Clinton predicted that “we’re going to put a lot of coal mines out of business.” Her opponent, Donald Trump, promised to “bring back” the coal mines “better than ever before.” The coal industry has been in decline since the 1960s, but many people preferred Trump’s environmentally ill-advised and economically incoherent fantasies to Clinton’s acknowledgment of reality. Republicans and mainstream media jumped Clinton for “insulting” coal miners.
Since 2012, 63 coal companies have filed for bankruptcy.
While discussing her 2016 primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton said, “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him. He got nothing done.”
Judging whether anyone in Congress “likes” Sanders is problematic, but his Senate record as of 2016 is easy to check.
Sanders is responsible for many amendments but, in the words of Politico at the time, has “rarely forged actual legislation or left a significant imprint on it.”
Clinton’s most significant offense—an utterance that lives in the annals of the greatest crimes against humanity—was her “deplorables” jibe during her 2016 campaign.
I’m issuing a trigger warning, in case you feel faint. Here it is: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Clinton described the other half as “people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.”
It is undeniable that Clinton’s tirade was imprudent and costly. A candidate for national office should not insult voters. But in the clamor to denounce the former Senator, examine her “insensitivity,” and defend the Trump voter, mainstream pundits, Republicans, and frightened Democrats never wrestled with her central claim.
Had they bothered to do the job of journalism, they would have learned that polling data, academic studies, and other metrics overwhelmingly confirm that racism, hostility to immigrants, and Christian Nationalism, which collects a variety of patriarchal and homophobic ideas under one theocratic umbrella, are central to Trump’s support. Nearly half of Republicans accept as valid political science the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, which posits that wealthy, global elites (most of whom they identify as Jewish) have conspired to harm white Americans with mass migrations of Latinos, Asians, and Africans. These same voters are likely to tell pollsters that immigration “dilutes” American strength and identity.
Political scientists at Pennsylvania State University have uncovered that Trump supporters are much likelier than other Americans to express support for political violence and that such support is “mediated through racist and xenophobic attitudes.”
Eight years after the national conniption over the “basket of deplorables,” the country is still suffering from Trump’s hate movement. Perhaps, taking Clinton’s warnings more seriously, whether they came during her campaign address on the danger of the “alt-right” or her speech on the high stakes of Supreme Court nominations, would have proven more beneficial than acting as if her gaffes were traumatic to the electorate. But the press, at the time, nursed one trope above all—the Trump supporter in the Ohio diner who watched the steel plant close. Clinton gave the economic dislocation argument its due but allowed for an uglier truth—a truth we now know all too well.
There are indeed baskets she omitted—lifelong Republicans who will always vote for lower taxes, sincere opponents of legal abortion—that complicate her taxonomy. But she clearly stated that she was being “grossly generalistic.” The beef at the time was with her denouncing the ugly motives behind many Trump voters. As usual, she was right. Michael Kinsley famously said, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” Such was the case with deplorables.
The late George Carlin half-joked that Americans “show their ignorance” when saying they want “politicians to be more honest.”
“If honesty were suddenly introduced in American life,” the comedic legend said, “the whole system would collapse.”
The histrionics that Clinton’s honest assessments provoke validate Carlin’s cynicism. Feminists, media theorists, and political analysts can debate the reasons. Still, one undeniable thing is that Hillary Clinton, in the next day, week, or year, will say something true, and everyone will hate her for it.
