Gregory K. Moffatt, Ph.D.
I just finished reading
a wonderful book entitled Shattered. This book follows the
Hillary Clinton campaign from its inception through post-election.
The 2016 presidential
campaign is one that will get significant attention in history
books. It was the first time a woman had a legitimate shot at becoming
president and the first time a complete outsider, someone with no political
experience, won the presidency. It was also the first time a presidential
candidate used social media as his primary tool to defeat establishment
politicians.
Anyone who loves
politics, regardless of partisan feelings, would enjoy this insider’s look at a
political campaign. The two authors, embedded reporters during the
campaign, describe in detail the many strategies employed by Clinton’s campaign
to battle Bernie Sanders as a party opponent and then later to battle the
Republican nominee Donald Trump.
But as much as I enjoyed
the book, I saw a pattern. Strategists for Hillary carefully planned how
to attract voters from various blocs – Latinos, African-Americans, and women –
using carefully phrased campaign slogans and advertisements. Following
each primary, debate, and eventually the general election, in their summative
reviews these same strategists tried to explain Hillary’s losses.
Among their ideas were
that people couldn’t see the “real” Hillary – that they couldn’t see
past the introverted Hillary and recognize her heart for service to the
American people. These strategists supposed that various scandals –
emails among them – created a fog that drowned out her message.
A clearly millennial
perspective screamed at me. As much as I think the authors were generally
objective, oddly nowhere in the book do the authors even hint at the prospect
that voters may have heard Hillary’s message loud and clear. Maybe they
just didn’t like what they heard.
The campaign assumption
was that if the message was delivered properly, each demographic group they targeted
would vote for her. Yet I find it fascinating that not once in the book
do they consider that they did, in fact, present their message clearly.
Voters simply weren’t interested.
I’m not naïve and I’m
not suggesting that various issues during the campaign – the protracted primary
fight with Bernie Sanders, email server issues, James Comey, and Trump campaign
strategies – didn’t have any effect. I am suggesting, however, that the
thinking presented in this book is descriptive of a millennial generation.
It is egocentric and presumptive.
I encounter this
type of logic in my students. Over a three decade career as a
college professor, I’ve seen a transition in thinking. Years ago students
recognized that in order to make a certain grade, they had to do what I asked
of them. Today’s student thinks, “Why do I have to do this? Make
your case to me.”
In other words, the onus
is on me to prove that I know what I’m doing and that what I expect is
reasonable instead of the student believing I might – just maybe – know a
little more about the subject than he or she does.
“I don’t want a D,” one
student actually said to me, not even trying to defend his poor grades,
assignments he ignored, and lack of effort. In his mind, his desire for
something made his request reasonable. His assumption was that there was
something wrong with me – that he held no responsibility.
In Clinton’s
post-election comments, I saw some of the same. She said she lost because
of Comey, the media, or other external factors.
Qualified as she was, her egocentrism (and that of her campaign
managers) led to the assumption that her loss didn’t have anything to do with
her.
As I age – my short life
just a blip in history – I have seen many changes, but this egocentric trend
has never been more distinct. From the micro level in my university
classroom to the macro level on the world political stage, the phenomenon is
the same. The belief is that the world out there exists to serve us
rather than concluding that the world is a big place and we are
expected to find our place in it.
I’m not sure what this
cultural shift is bringing to us, but it worries me. The supposition that
everyone else is at fault for our failings is a dangerous trend. I
hope that this is a passing trend, but I’m not optimistic.