The Moment When Hillary Clinton Threw Away The Election

Was this it?

Why did Hillary Clinton lose a can’t-miss election to Donald Trump? You can make any number of arguments, including but not limited to: the difficulty of one party winning three straight elections in our modern era, an unwillingness by most observers to acknowledge that Americans could very easily elect a manifestly incompetent buffoon, deeply embedded structural factors which favor land over people, a widespread distrust of the elite classes who have benefited from the modern economy while many have seen their prospects stall or go backwards, the active interference of a hostile foreign power, the unprecedented intervention of a sanctimonious FBI director, the timidity of an incumbent president too feckless to alert the American people to an unprecedented attack on our system, the perfidious partisanship of the Senate Majority Leader in refusing to acknowledge those belligerent acts, the rise and acceptance as normal of a hostile media organization which has had two decades to serve as the propaganda wing of one party while keeping its elderly viewers in a state of fear and agitation wildly at odds with reality and the concomitant rightward shift of acceptable debate, the ostensibly objective “Paper of Record” choosing to overplay one candidate’s “scandals” while underplaying the other’s more obvious issues, recalcitrant purists whose privileged and immature refusal to acknowledge what was really at stake helped to drain enthusiasm and votes from the only left-leaning candidate with a shot at actually winning or the inarguable misogyny that is an inescapable fact of modern life.

Or you could say it was because of this, which happened one year ago today.

Historians will deliberate about the question for however many years we have left, but it’s hard not to see how it didn’t play a substantial role. Happy anniversary.