Dear Hillary,
During your concession speech, you apologized for losing. Although I was extremely emotional during the whole thing, this was the first of two cases that I started to full-on cry. You owe us, and no one, an apology. I am already seeing post-mortems about the things you and your campaign could have and should have done differently. And sure, careful analysis of this election and learning lessons from what has happened will be beyond important in helping us rebuild and take the country back in the elections to come. We live in a different nation than we thought we did, and we are going to have to understand that and make changes in order to succeed in the future. But as cliché as it is to say, hindsight is 20/20. To believe that you should have been able to divine the future and dramatically change course when all of the available evidence suggested that you were on a steady path to victory, and your opponent kept doing disastrous thing after disastrous thing, is ridiculous. And this cannot be said enough: more Americans voted for you than voted for Donald Trump, by a margin that continues to grow. It was true in the primaries, and it was true in the general election. When it came to convincing the most people possible that you were deserving to be president, you succeeded. Unfortunately our system didn’t translate that into the presidency itself.
In particular, I have no sympathy for arguments that suggest that if the Democratic party had nominated a different person, this all would have ended differently. There is no way to know that, because it is a counterfactual situation. Despite everything that everyone predicted about the outcome of this election, a silent majority (although not even a majority, because as mentioned above, you won the popular vote) actually did appear and upset the entire race. No one can tell me that the same thing wouldn’t have happened with Bernie Sanders or anyone else as the Democratic candidate. In my reckoning and attempt to understand and assess the facts of what happened, I suspect it would have been even worse – the masses of people who turned out to unexpectedly vote for Trump because of heartland economic frustrations were not, I think, more likely to have embraced a full-throated call for democratic socialism. In the months and years ahead, we can and we need to grapple with the facts of why so many people were willing to vote how the did, so that we can realign as necessary for the future. But we do not need to engage in impossible speculation of how it all might have been different if our (democratically chosen) candidate were not our candidate – we simply do not know, and we never will.
And any claim that it was your fault that you were not new and exciting enough, or that your proposals were not radical and thrilling enough, is absolutely abhorrent to me. I hear now, and have heard for months, critiques that you are too serious, too ambitious, and too much of a political insider. You were the first female presidential nominee of a major political party in history. How do they think a woman could possibly achieve the success you have and gotten to the level you have without being all of those things? Women do not have the option of sweeping in as a rogue outsider who may not be tested and proven, but is “exciting” enough to overcome any such concerns. Women do not have the benefit of a default assumption of strength and competence. They have to earn those things, and work for those things, and in the case of becoming the first female to ever run for President of the United States atop a major party ticket, it means working at them for decades. You did exactly what you had to do in order to rise through the ranks and make the biggest impact you could on your country (an impact which is giant, and cannot be understated). You weathered countless storms of (nonsense) controversy in the process, but you never stopped and you just kept working. I wish that I, as a man, had even a portion of the intense drive and dedication that you do. In the aforementioned post-mortems of your candidacy, people are talking and will continue to talk about how your well-informed, battle-tested, and extremely pragmatic positions were not intriguing enough, and that is why we lost. I maintain that until proven otherwise, relying on studied and tested best practices is the strongest hope we have to make real and sustainable progress. To have these qualities, and these decades of experience, and the hardest of hard work thrown back in your face as an insult is – in a word – bullshit.
And that brings me to the second time that I started to cry, with intensity, during your concession speech. It was the moment you started to speak to the young women and girls of the country, and assured them that while the first female president would not be you, she is out there somewhere. I suddenly felt the full weight of the sexism that has defined your career and your presidential aspirations crash down around me – and I had thought I had understood it before. As deeply sad and wounded as I am about the fact that you are not our next president for political reasons, this is when it became personal to me. You personified grace and eloquence and magnanimity with this statement, but I cannot imagine how hard this must actually hurt. You deserved to be our first female president. You have worked tirelessly for decades to contribute to our public welfare in every capacity you could think of. You worked so much harder and longer for it than any candidate before you, and that is deserving of a definitive place in our history. The fact that it has been denied to you, in the most devastating of fashions, and to this particular man, absolutely broke my heart.
So while I continue to mourn for your candidacy, and while I continue to worry about the direction of our country in the years to come, and while I endlessly and wistfully think about what might have been, please understand this: I also have so much compassion and empathy for you, as a fellow human being. And as it turns out, you are part of one of my very favorite categories of human being: a hard-working, inspiring, formidable, kind, and utterly badass woman. You did everything you could have done, and still society has denied you. This is not your fault, it is ours. This shouldn’t happen in 2016 America, and yet it did. I may never meet you in person, but oh how I hope I do. Giving you a hug would be an absolute highlight of my life. Or perhaps it is better to imagine getting a hug from you, because you are so much more formidable and experienced in doling out comfort. Unless you need it more that day, in which I am more than willing to be the hugger. Dammit, now I am all confused about the whole hug situation. So let’s just hug each other and be done with it (in this elaborate fantasy situation, built in my mind). Regardless of who hugs who, or even if we never do, I will continue to respect and admire you. And, something that I expect means even more to you, I will continue to be supremely grateful for, and never forget, all you have done and given so many of us throughout your years of public service.
And despite the election, here is one thing that has not changed, will not change, and cannot change. I can definitively say for myself, and confidently say for so many people, that you will always be one of the most formative and deeply admired political figures in my life. Probably the most significant political figure, actually, if I am speaking from my own experience. This was the third presidential election that I could vote in, and I voted for Obama in the first two. But I entered that fray after the dust of the primaries had already settled. You are the first candidate for whom I was all in, from even before you announced your candidacy. You never let me down once. You were never anything other than the picture of professionalism, class, preparedness, and determination. In short, I truly believe that you have been the most presidential figure in my lifetime, even if you may never be my actual president. I know that is probably extremely little consolation to you; it is certainly hardly any consolation to me. But I mean it, and I will hold onto it.
Last night, Kate McKinnon beautifully summed up the emotions of all of us nasty women and bad hombres out here, who are certainly not feeling this loss as deeply as personally as you are, but are feeling it deeply and personally nonetheless. Here’s a link in case you haven’t already seen and wept to it enough, like I have.
In summary, please know that no matter what happened on a Tuesday night in November 2016, I’m With Her, I’ve Been With Her, and I Will Always Be With Her. Thank you, thank you, and thank you again.
Doctor Dvorak's Delirium 