An American Ally of Necessity

The restoration of this deeply unfair, anti-meritocratic hiring philosophy is just the latest hasty pander from Hillary Clinton. Amid a challenging interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who appeared to have a difficult time accepting the fact that the former secretary of state’s lead in the delegate race was genuine, Clinton sought to defuse the situation by appealing to her interlocutor’s chromosomal makeup.

These hiring quotas won’t be applied to the general workforce, however, where they are proven to have a deleterious effect on workplace comity and productivity. No, they will be implemented somewhere far less threatening to the general welfare: The White House.

In the interview, Maddow reminded Clinton that the Obama administration approached the process of securing Cabinet-level talent (including herself) by applying a gender-based litmus test to prospective candidates. When asked if the former first lady would also pledge to ensure that at least half of her Cabinet would be made up of women, Clinton confirmed that she would emulate the Obama administration in that regard.

“Well, I am going to have a Cabinet that looks like America,” Clinton insisted. “And 50 percent of America is women, right?”

Maddow approvingly noted that not only had Barack Obama pursued this course, but that liberal heartthrob and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also made the pledge to surround himself with a genetically, if not intellectually, diverse group of advisors. Why? “Because it’s 2015,” the prime minister insisted.

“Back in the pre-identity Dark Ages, leaders of representative democracies felt obliged to cite principles or aims in explaining policy to citizens,” our own Abe Greenwald observed at the time. “Today they cite trends.” And trends are malleable, unfixed, and often lead observers into logical cul-de-sacs by inviting them to make fallacious straight-line projections. Principles, meanwhile, are far less mutable.

Take, for example, the latest in an endless parade of Malthusian disappointments: the disarming of the Population Bomb. This was a popular doomsday prediction (a thing that might in a healthy society be a contradiction in terms) from the late 1960s. The theory held that the world’s population growth would continue to expand exponentially until it eventually outstripped the planet’s ability to cope.

The theory’s author, Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich, defended his hypothesis as recently as 2009. He said that, if anything, their projections were too optimistic about mankind’s environmental impacts. In the interim, Europe and Japan’s birthrate fell below population replacement levels, China gave up on its one-child policy as its birthrates collapsed, and American fertility rates reached an all-time low.

“For the first time since 1950, their combined working-age population will decline, according to United Nations projections, and by 2050 it will shrink 5 percent,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The ranks of workers will also fall in key emerging markets, such as China and Russia. At the same time, the share of these countries’ population over 65 will skyrocket.” This is no bomb but an implosion. Any minute, we are due for a round of apocalyptic hand-wringing over the shrinking population that will surely doom mankind.

Trends are only misleading if you chose to pay attention to them. For example, the percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats has declined steadily from 2008 and is now roughly at parity with those who identify as Republicans – a demographic group that has remained generally stable in that same period. Meanwhile, the number of Americans who identify as political independents in that same period spiked dramatically. According to the most recent Gallup survey, only 25 percent of Americans identified as Republican and 31 percent as Democratic while 44 percent self-identified as independents. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Hillary Clinton to appoint a Cabinet that “looks like America” in this infinitely more meaningful regard.

This is, admittedly, a digression, albeit a forgivable one. It was arrived at only when we inadvisably took Hillary Clinton at her word when her only intention was to pander sloppily to women voters. Hiring competent women is well and good, but having women in a Cabinet-level role is not breaking any new societal or cultural ground. That is abundantly clear from the dearth of enthusiasm even among Democratic voters for the prospect of the first woman president. As I theorized in a recent COMMENTARY podcast, Democrats have done the historic president thing by virtue of identity alone and they have found it an unsatisfying experience. This is the message of Bernie Sanders’ appeal, particularly among younger voters: Identity is not enough.

The idea of a first woman in the White House just isn’t setting the nation’s hair on fire, as some anticipated it would. It might be this realization that is forcing Clinton to make her references to her gender markedly less subtle. That’s the impression one got from a pro-Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA accusing Marco Rubio of “mansplaining” to his wife because a scripted joke he repeatedly told on the stump included the word “explaining.” “I would note, just for a historic aside, somebody told me earlier today we’ve had like 200 presidential primary debates, and this is the first time there have been a majority of women on stage,” Clinton said during a February PBS debate hosted by Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill. “So, you know, we’ll take our progress wherever we can find it.” Dutifully, the audience applauded Clinton’s observation upon penalty of social ostracism.

For their part, it seemed as though the moderators agreed that this moment — their moment – was particularly historic. “Senator,” Ifill addressed Sanders, “do you worry at all that you will be the instrument of thwarting history, as Senator Clinton keeps claiming, that she might be the first woman president?” To this, the Vermont socialist said that no one with his particular set of views had been elected to the White House either. That, too, generated applause from the center-left audience – applause that felt as though they were not delivered at gunpoint.

Clinton’s pathway to the nomination was far rockier than she would have liked. The campaign has been a more ideological one than she anticipated, and Clinton has had a hard time adapting. Though it is dog-eared to the point that you can see it coming from a half-mile away, the Clinton campaign continues to play the gender card in almost every difficult hand. The former first lady’s clumsy appeals to gender solidarity have had only mixed success in the Democratic race, but they will find a captive audience in a general election in which her opponent is viewed unfavorably by seven out of every ten women. If Clinton is not so lucky to draw her preferred Republican opponent, however, the Democrats may decide that slavish devotion to the tenets of identity politics isn’t such a winning strategy after all.