Clinton '16

Seriously. That woman had bloody well better run for President.

I just got back from hearing Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, former Senator from New York, former First Lady of Arkansas and then of the United States, and Yale Law School Class of 1973, give a talk on the occasion of her acceptance of the Law School's Award of Merit. It was awesome. There was a moment, a few minutes after the nominal starting time, when all of a sudden the audience just started applauding. I hadn't noticed anything that would occasion it, but it didn't take me long to figure out what was going on: her husband had just walked in the side door of Woolsey Hall. He kept a remarkably low profile, sitting in a front-row seat during the talk and then doing some hob-nobbing with the important types who were sitting on the front of the ground floor. Hillary entered a little while after Bill, to even louder applause if anything. Her speech was very good: I wouldn't call it great, mostly because it wasn't anything particularly novel. It was mostly reminiscence about her time at Yale and discussion of the importance of children's welfare, the former of which she delivered with great charisma and the latter of which is obviously a very compelling subject.

What I was really struck by was, as I said, how charismatic she was. That's not exactly in keeping with her reputation, both during the 1990s and during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Of course that reputation is doubtless very influenced by various forms of sexism, along with the fact that she kind of ran into a charisma buzz-saw in '08. But it did feel like there was a difference between her whole demeanor at this event and what I remember from the last campaign. And I have a theory, not surprisingly. I think she (quite in common with Al Gore) often suffers from a sense that she can't just be herself to be successful in politics, that she needs to dissemble about her true passions and motivations. With Al Gore that means toning down the wonky environmentalism, mostly. With Hillary it's about toning down the wonky feminism. And I mean that word broadly. She certainly is not a radical feminist, not by the standards of, say, the era when she attended the Yale Law School, but her overall agenda is undeniably the expanded feminist one. Women's rights, certainly, a movement she practically embodies at this point. But also stereotypically female "nurturing" issues, like health care and children's issues. And now, as for instance in the recent speech that Dean Robert Post quoted before her talk, gay rights, which like women's rights are just, she argues, human rights.

And her particular vantage point on these issues is, I think, an uncommonly community-focused one. She wrote, of course, a book called It Takes a Village, and I think she very deeply believes that attaining all these modern social liberal values and deconstructing the old oppressive power structures, which she is very much in favor of, shouldn't result in a thoroughly individualistic and isolating society. That idea, of a true community built not around the maintenance of power imbalances and the enforcement of certain behavioral norms but around simply caring about each others' well-being, is one that sits a little bit outside the ordinary terms of the social discourse. Liberals usually focus on the part where we tear down the oppressive power structures, following Marx in not really thinking too much about what the post-revolutionary world will look like. Hillary Clinton does think about precisely that, about what to do once those problematic social structures are defeated, and about what problems their defeat might actually create. That's a tremendously important complex of philosophical issues, and political issues as well.

And I think that when Hillary lets herself be, whole-heartedly and openly, the community-oriented feminist that she is, she's got a lot of energy, and it gets infectious. But too often, I think, she's had to shy away from that, out of fear that her perspective is just not a popular one. That too many unenlightened men whose votes she needs will find her "shrill," that too many people will find her "it takes a village" theme too feminine to take seriously from a politician. And there's certainly some truth to those fears; certainly there was twenty years ago. But I think those dangers have lessened a lot of late. Social liberalism is quite genuinely dominant right now, at least social liberalism on the terms of the past couple of generations. Gender equality, challenging gender norms, etc., all of that stuff is just plain winning. And I'd like to think that it's no longer the case that a woman talking about how we need to take care of each other won't be taken seriously.

So if Hillary Clinton runs for President in 2016, which I devoutly hope she will, here's my advice to her, other than sit back, relax, and waltz to the nomination. Well, actually, that's part of it. The advice is to be herself, to let her feminist flag fly, to talk about health care and child-raising, all the things that are her true political passions. And the part about how she's got a fifty-point lead in Democratic primary polls and substantial leads over all the Republicans serves to demonstrate that there are plenty of people in this country who like Hillary Clinton's self. Yes, there are still plenty who don't like her self. The Limbaugh types, and their less-vile-but-not-much-more-enlightened cousins. But there are fewer and fewer of those, and more and more people who just plain respect Hillary for having spent decades being a badass, hyper-competent barrier-shattering stateswoman who has long since deserved to be President. She doesn't need to change anything or hide anything about herself to become President. She just needs to take a page out of her husband's book, and be her own awesome self.