What If Hillary Had Won in 2016?

Can you imagine what this election would have been like if it was Hillary's midterm instead of Twitterman's? Slaughter of Democrats, right and left. More Senate seats lost. Governor's mansions? Fuggitaboutit! Because Republicans would have spent the last two years building their cudgels to smite the Devil, and they would have had some form of Trump leading them, aided by Fox News with funny memes about That Bitch in the White House designed for the same voters who wore MAGA hats in 2016 and longed for an American strongman. Instead of the strongman, they got that C-word they hate so much. 

You think Vladimir and his friends wouldn't have been co-producing the attack, heightening the hatred, hedging their investment in Trump with Internet manipulation? Wouldn't the Russkies want Trump active and vital for another presidential run? They'd keep his balloon inflated with constant flattery. Meanwhile, with Hillary taking a beating, nervous Democrats with no devotion to the Clintons would have stayed home on November 6th, and the wreckage would have surpassed 2010.

At least IMHO. I've thought about it a lot. I thought about the future of a Clinton presidency way back in the early Fall of 2016, when she was supposedly winning. Because I am a political animal and I want the progressive movement to thrive, I thought about the 2018 midterms with Hillary in DeeCee. The thought gave me the shudders.

(Full disclosure: I was a Bernie Sanders Democrat. I never felt any fire for Hillary. I despise triangulation.)

"It might actually be best for the Progressive movement if Clinton loses," I thought, "because with that man Trump in the White House, the Democratic Party would be forced into radical evolution and rebirth." I was and am a political animal, and I very much wanted to see the Democratic Party mean something and live, not die from self-inflicted wounds, or smothered in its sleep by Wall Street cash. Any political animal might foresee how Trump as president could help rebuild the grassroots of the Democratic Party, much withered from 2010 and stonecold brittle in some broad precincts. Trump stood to do exactly what he did: poke awake a sleeping opposition, a resistance that would find its voice and fight back against our mutual brush with strongman government, and bring many good people to their senses. 

I never uttered that thought to a soul. Uttering it now is probably folly, but it's a slow news Friday. 

With Trump, the Democratic Party, in all its chaotic and glorious variety, is back strong. The best candidates -- at all levels -- with the ability to raise small-dollar donations and compete as champions of community values, standing for simple justice, and fairness, and basic human decency. Those first-time candidates this year were riding the wave of a rising tide of activism especially among people who had never been involved before or had not been encouraged to poke their heads up. You can't create that kind of psychic energy out of boredom or complacency. The bravery and the personal commitment to sacrifice isn't birthed by 30-second TV spots. You can't purchase it with Soros money, chumps. That energy came from a mass reaction to human baseness.