They have some fault, yes, but not more fault than the Republicans for selecting him, or the American people, or the electoral college or first past the post voting. At the end of the day, all the DNC did was bet on the wrong horse.
Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.
I don’t think that’s at all obvious. An ineffectual chaos monkey for 4 more years is arguably better than an effective leader implementing Very Bad policies that we will be stuck with for generations. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I can sympathize with that position.
I accept that people will disagree, especially on Hacker News, but I don't consider the willful sabotage of government "just in case" to be a valid form of political exercise. I'm not aware of anything in Hillary Clinton's platform that in hindsight would have made Trump look like the better alternative, or that would have potentially spelled multi-generational disaster.
Hillary was extremely in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was regarded as a very bad deal here on HN. She came out as skeptical of it during her campaign, but that was hard to believe given that she was responsible for it under the Obama administration.
She wanted to strengthen Obamacare, but was against a single-payer option. I'm sure people will quibble, but I'm confident health premiums would have gone up faster under Hillary.
Hillary Clinton was in bed with Wall St firms. A Clinton presidency would have risked undoing a lot of the regulatory protections that have been put in place after the dot-com and 2007 financial collapses.
Compared with Trump, Hillary Clinton is tremendously China-friendly. She would not have countered Xi's expansionist policies.
On more niche (but IMHO important) issues like space policy, Trump-Pence has actually been extremely good, better than any president in living memory. Hillary, on the other hand, considered expenditures on space to be a waste of money.
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There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight. Only through a deeply blue-tinted partisan lens could you say a Hillary term would have been objectively better on all accounts.
As I said way up thread, the DNC is as much at fault as anyone else for continuing to field deeply unpopular and uninspiring candidates, while simultaneously ignoring working class concerns.
>There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight.
Sure. But voting for a "chaos monkey" isn't reasonable. It's not as if Republicans would have been happy with another Democratic candidate, and they had an entire field of their own to choose from, and they chose to vote in Nero to watch Rome burn.
I don’t know if you noticed, but out democratic institutions have remained intact.
I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”
It is not game-theoretic optimal to give into extortion, because things will gradually trend in worse and worse directions. Sometimes a protest vote to the system itself is required to reduce the long term damage.
>I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”
As opposed to "vote for my candidate - Hillary is a literal blood drinking serial killing baby raping illuminati whore who will start World War 3!"
or "vote for my candidate - Joe Biden is a pedophile with extreme dementia, and we don't know exactly what his son is into but it's probably pretty awful?"
I mean, at least the people calling Trump racist can point to a large pile of circumstantial evidence to back it up. It's hard to believe that is "extortionate" and "holding the country hostage" but not Pizzagate, QAnon, and Stop the Steal vigilantes.
Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.