I wanted to flag your attention to this piece we published today by Laura Kipnis on Hillary Clinton and the men who hate her. It might not be exactly what you’d expect from the title. It’s a fascinating piece and I highly recommend it. One point of interest of mine is this issue of hating more generally and how it applies to iconic figures in our political culture. I’ve twice come close to writing a book – got an agent engaged, started doing research and more – and then pulled back. The first time was in the late 90s and the subject was Clinton-hating.
That seems like sort of a distant idea now – even most of Bill’s enemies have either warmed to him or simply don’t care that much anymore. But in the 90s it was a thing and more. I wasn’t interested in writing a defense, though I had pretty strong ideas along those lines. I was interested in the nature of the obsession and particularly how different people had such wildly different reactions to the man. He was sort of like a human PH test that could tell you a lot about a person immediately just by the nature of their reaction to him. Indeed, he was – both as an actual person and in the penumbra of personalty and image that surrounded him – a fascinating tool to unravel the cultural history of the time in which he achieved greatest prominence and which he also helped define.
Bush certainly had some of the same polarizing, group-identifying nature to his political celebrity – plain spoken straight-shooter or unself-reflective dullard. And Sarah Palin did to a wild degree. Her star has obviously faded over recent years but you could understand a lot about the world of the early years of Obama’s presidency by looking at this woman and seeing what elements about her struck such deep resonance and identification with some and made others think she was a clown and a fool.
Hillary is no Bill. In good ways and bad ways. But she definitely has a lot of that PH test quality. It’s not just that people have strong opinions, love her or hate her. It’s that like these others, people love or hate her so often for the same reasons. So with that, our essay today on (Hillary) Clinton-hating.
