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Right-wing loathing of Hillary Clinton is mirrored on the left

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Zealots on the political right have enjoyed an unusually large megaphone throughout the years of Barack Obama’s presidency and that cacophony from one side of the political spectrum has drowned out equally strident voices on the left — at least until Bernie Sanders came along.

Sanders is not, himself, one of the shrill ones. Yes, he may be an impassioned and vehement leftist, but from the local politics of Burlington, Vt., to the national debate in Washington, he has worked within the system, compromised when necessary (on gun control, in particular) and now finds himself acceptable to most of the Democratic Party should he perform a miracle and win the party’s presidential nomination.

Bernie is a moderate compared to many of his ardent supporters — folks on the left who mirror the militants on the right in their dark assessment of the American political system. Besides sharing an absolutist attitude with right wingers, the lefties also share with them a deeply negative opinion of one particular political insider: Hillary Clinton.

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While the right is obsessed with Benghazi and emails, the left has a different set of indictments against Hillary. The two central charges: She is a shill for Wall Street, and she is a warmonger.

The first charge is based on the Clintons’ supposed coziness with bankers and financial leaders, evidenced by the Wall Street money that has poured into the campaigns of both Clintons, into the coffers of the Clinton Foundation and into Hillary’s bank account as payment for private speeches. Clinton defends herself by insisting that her record shows she has worked within the system to restrain the excesses of Wall Street, and there are facts to back her up (see this Washington Post article). Her leftist critics, though, believe the capitalist system is utterly corrupt and needs to be radically changed, if not overthrown, rather than merely nudged at the margins by accommodating politicians. (They are equally convinced that newspapers like the Washington Post — and the Los Angeles Times — are mouthpieces for corporate overlords, so anything they say in Clinton’s favor is suspect.)

The second damning charge is based on Hillary’s vote for the Iraq War when she was New York’s U.S. senator, and her perceived enthusiasm for intervention, regime change and the use of force when she was Obama’s secretary of State. The left blames Hillary for convincing her reluctant husband to bomb Kosovo in 1999. They blame her for pushing Obama into the intervention in Libya. And they credit her with creating the mess in Syria. One pseudonymous blogger has written that “while Bush and Cheney’s foreign policy was utterly despicable, Hillary Clinton has wreaked havoc on the world stage on a scale which is comparable … if not worse.”

There are serious arguments to be made against this broad indictment, but few would disagree that Clinton is far more in tune with America’s foreign policy establishment than is Donald Trump, who veers from isolationism to America-first bellicosity.

The point here is that all the attributes that make Hillary Clinton appealing to most Democrats — her social liberalism, her rationality, her experience, her empathy with oppressed women throughout the world, her acceptance of climate change as fact — do not come close to outweighing the perceived demerits that engender loathing on the left. Staunch folks on the left do not give a damn about the Democratic Party. In fact, the idea of a Trump presidency has some appeal to them because it could heighten social conflict and lead to revolutionary change.

When these people says it is Bernie or nobody, they mean it. They will never vote for Hillary. The question is whether there are enough of them in swing states like Florida, Ohio or Colorado to undermine Clinton the way votes for Ralph Nader in 2000 undercut Al Gore. Those left-leaning voters helped put George W. Bush in the White House. This year, they might deliver America’s fate into the hands of Trump.

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