Clinton’s 2016 campaign offered continuity just as voters demanded change

Evidence

One of the images that has most haunted me since the election is that of Clinton and her close allies doing their version of the “mannequin challenge” on the campaign plane. It wasn’t only the smugness of this scene which irked (but just check out the sheer amount of self-satisfaction packed into Hillary’s grin); it was the sense that this simulation of stasis — reminiscent of the eerie scenes in Westworld in which the android-hosts are temporarily put into sleep-mode — actually revealed what the Clinton campaign was composed of: decommissioned political robots playing out an exhausted programme one last time before being permanently taken offline. The uncomfortable irony is that this final-day promotional video’s injunction — don’t stand still, vote today — is, unfortunately, exactly what too many of Clinton’s potential supporters did. But it was also what Clinton’s whole campaign had done: stayed still. While Trump’s campaign was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement, Clinton’s offered only more of the same. Or the same, but less. Its message was not only that nothing much will change, but also that nothing much needs to change. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2023

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Clinton lost by failing to mobilize supporters, not by a rightward surge — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2024