What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, by Peter Barnes,

a culture of grievance, victimhood, and scapegoating has taken root as traditional values of self-reliance and hard work have withered.

“Anybody who tries to make you mad and stop you from thinking is not your friend. There’s a lot to be said for thinking.”

“the Clinton Rules state that any relatively commonplace political occurrence or activity takes on mysterious dark energy when any Clinton is involved.”

“reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

“Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America,” she wrote.

Russia, China, and others believe they can operate in a so-called gray zone between peace and war, stealing our secrets, disrupting our elections, manipulating our politics, and harassing our citizens and businesses without facing serious repercussions. To change that calculus, I believe the United States should declare a new doctrine that states that a cyberattack on our vital national infrastructure will be treated as an act of war and met with a proportionate response.

And we all have the ability to break out of our echo chambers and engage with people who don’t agree with us politically. We can keep an open mind and be willing to change our minds from time to time. Even if our outreach is rebuffed, it’s worth it to keep trying. We’re all going to share our American future together—better to do so with open hearts and outstretched hands than closed minds and clenched fists.

The election, I would say, showed that “we will not be defined only by our differences. We will not be an ‘us versus them’ country. The American dream is big enough for everyone.”

Instead of making history and electing the first woman President, they now had to face a stinging rebuke and come to terms with the fact that the country had just elected someone who objectified women and bragged about sexual assault. A lot of women—and men—were waking up that morning asking whether America was still the country we had thought it was. Would there be a place for them in Trump’s America? Would they be safe? Would they be valued and respected?

You can see the same dynamic in a lot of personal relationships. I have friends who often get frustrated with their spouses who, instead of listening to them vent about a problem and commiserating, jump straight into trying to solve it. That was my problem with many voters: I skipped the venting and went straight to the solving.

Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,

In France, patriotism trumped partisanship.

it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them.

A Black Man in the White House.

“racial priming.” Their findings show that when white voters are encouraged to view the world through a racial lens and to be more conscious of their own racial identity, they act and vote more conservatively. That’s exactly what happened in 2016.

If we want to win in the future, Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.

“Change will come whether we want it or not, and what we have to do is to try and make change our friend, not our enemy,”

OnwardTogether.org.

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence,

As I’ve said, we need to be able to hold two ideas in our heads at the same time: Comey was wrong in how he handled the email investigation and Trump was wrong to fire him over Russia. Both statements are true.

A 2017 study by political scientists at the University of Massachusetts found that, contrary to the popular narrative, when it came to supporting Trump, voters’ sexist and racist beliefs mattered more than their economic dissatisfaction. In fact, these researchers concluded that sexism and racism explain most of Trump’s support among non-collegeeducated white Americans—the

All of this matters. It’s not just about what happened. It’s about what’s happening now and what will happen in the future. We have to understand 2016 because it’s up to us to make sure 2018 and 2020 represent the will of the American people, not billionaires in America or spymasters in the Kremlin. So no, it’s not time to “move on.” Everything that was done last time could easily be done again.

Fascism: A Warning.

He also doesn’t hide his intent one bit. Lesley Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, asked Trump during his campaign why he’s always attacking the press. He said, “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

One of the most pivotal moments in the birth of our new nation was when George Washington gave up his leadership of the army after the war and refused an offer to become king. The same spirit led him to step down as President after two terms, establishing one of the most important precedents in our history. Washington was hailed as an American Cincinnatus, after the Roman war hero who insisted on returning to his farm rather than wield power.

Political scientists and historians say that democracies depend on mutual toleration and self-restraint in the exercise of power. All parties have to agree to play by the rules and not try to destroy each other.

There is a tendency when talking about polarization and the breakdown of democratic norms to wring our hands about “both sides,” but the truth is this is not a symmetrical problem. We should be clear about this: The increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of the Republican Party, including decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump.

I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College. During the past five presidential elections, the person who won the popular vote lost the election twice. That’s flatly undemocratic. As I noted, the Electoral College gives disproportionate power to less populated states and makes a mockery of the principle of “one person, one vote.”