It’s not about the glass ceiling

As a feminist policy analyst I would be the first one to point at a glass ceiling were I to see one, and there are several of those around even in the US. Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump has the media belting out editorials and opinion pieces such as The New York Times’ ‘Girls Can be Anything, Just Not President’ and Times’ ‘Hillary Clinton Collides Again with Highest Glass Ceiling’. To blame Clinton’s loss to a glass ceiling is to whittle her defeat down to her gender. To paint her as a victim of gender discrimination is to paper over all of the problems with her campaign and attitude towards the American people.

This election was about much more than putting a woman on arguably the most powerful seat in the world. To many Americans the election was lost when Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race for the White House and they chose to abstain because they felt neither Trump nor Clinton represented their interests. Sanders understood and genuinely empathised with the deep frustration of the average American who saw the American dream disappear as unbridled financialisation and globalisation wiped out the equity from their homes, made a college education no longer guarantee a job but ensure a long battle with indebtedness, turned once thriving towns into deep stretches of waste, and engaged the country into seemingly endless and irrelevant wars. As a political insider, friend of large corporations and one who voted for America to go to war with the Middle East, Clinton represented the very political machinery that brought on the mess average Americans badly wanted to get out of.

How desperately they wanted change, and what a sizeable majority they turned out to be though is something that has taken everyone by surprise. Just a few weeks ago when Trump’s gross misdemeanours with women, to put it politely, made headlines I texted a friend in Wyoming: ‘this election is over, there is only one candidate left standing’. But it seems that Trump, with all of his crudeness and corruption was preferable to voters than the classy, politically correct Mrs Clinton. If it was her gender that mattered, most American women would have voted for her, for as Obama put it, as the first female president she would make an excellent role model ‘for our daughters’. As it turned out, of the women that did vote, 53 per cent voted for the overtly chauvinistic Mr Trump.

Those that chose to abstain certainly didn’t want a bigoted, xenophobic, sexist in the White House and Trump’s win will be hard to swallow for all of them. Nevertheless, they could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary either. To the average American, Clinton represents the white, liberal elite who readily and patronisingly sympathises with minorities such as Muslims, Latinos and African Americans but who cannot bridge the divide within her own race, that is, the white majority itself. Years ago I worked with small, family farmers in rural Arkansas, a very red state near Texas. This was immediately after 9/11 but the rice and vegetable farmers I worked with to petition the government of Arkansas for a state department of agriculture were genuinely kind and treated me with the same respect they accorded my white or black colleagues, even though they knew I was from Pakistan, one of the most hated places in the US at the time. I have lost touch with most of them now but I am pretty sure they voted for Trump not Hillary in this election. This despite the fact that Arkansas was the Clintons’ home state. Mrs. Clinton was the first lady of Arkansas when Bill Clinton was its governor.Towns in Arkansas proudly display signs that make references to the Clintons, such as the city of Hope that has a large board placed at the town entrance along the highway, with ‘Birthplace of Bill Clinton’ painted in bright bold letters. These same Arkansans knew full well Mrs Clinton’s plans offered them no deliverance from the economic stagnation that is their lot.

When I moved to Boston, the bastion of liberal America, and people heard I had spent six years in Arkansas I saw them visibly shudder. “How did you survive around those people? What was it like over there?” My usual response was: “not as different from here as you would think”. This was nearly always met with incredulity and disbelief. In the same vein, as I prepared to move to Boston, the people I was leaving behind in Arkansas kept asking me, “Are you sure you want to go to them Yankees? They are a strange lot up there.” This election has made visible not just to America but to the entire world the deep fracturing within the white race. Sanders attempted to bridge the divide, Trump sought to capitalise on it and Clinton blithely ignored it.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th, 2016.

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