At Nancy Reagan’s funeral presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told MSNBC that the Reagans “started a national conversation about AIDS.” The response to that obviously false statement was swift and loud. Even Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign (which endorsed Clinton), tweeted “Nancy Reagan was, sadly, no hero in the fight against HIV/AIDS.” Clinton’s apology was posted to Medium the very next day. Picking a platform for a message goes a long way in picking the demographics of your message’s audience. The decision to use Medium for her apology was pitch perfect: older (and statistically more conservative) voters who watch cable news will see her praising the Reagans while younger voters who might turn to Medium to read the definitive take down of Clinton will find her own apology next to their favorite authors. More than just an apology though, the post goes on to give a small history of AIDS-related activism before going on to describe the present challenges facing those infected with HIV. More than an apology Clinton’s Medium post is an example of what I’m calling the “Explainer Candidate.”
We may still be mired in “post-truth politics” but there is an equal but opposite force of (mostly web-based) explainer publications that seek to augment, rebut, and frame a further reaching TV-based media cycle. Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and Slate (among others) have made an industry of starting sentences with “well, actually.” If you look at these publishers’ “advertise with us!” pages, you’ll see that their reader demographics skew towards the young-ish, well-off creative professional which also overwhelmingly votes for progressive candidates. There’s a danger here that is far worse than anything that comes from the right’s concerted effort to divorce facts from political positions: progressives have started mistaking the recitation of political facts for political positions.
To be fair to Clinton she does outline actual policy she would be in favor of, including expanded access to PrEP, getting Republican governors to expand Medicaid, and try to punish drug companies when they price gouge patients. But when you look at the proportions –out of a thirteen paragraph article there is one paragraph devoted to the apology and two for what she will do as president—the vast majority of it is a rehashing of the AIDS Wikipedia page. This is fact but not substance. Of course political leaders should be seen to at least know the facts of a given political controversy but when the announcement of truths outnumbers descriptions of what is to be done about those truths, we start losing sight of what this whole process is even meant to accomplish. Electing someone with good ideas about the future is much different than someone who can recount the past to you and being able to do the latter is only a necessary (not sufficient) condition for the former.
Bernie Sanders is guilty of this as well, in fact perhaps even more so. Every time he responds to a debate question with inequality statistics I cringe ever so slightly. The difference here though, and it is a crucial one, is that Sanders’ policy prescriptions are as radical as the facts that he cites. Clinton follows up a brief history of a radical direct action organization with incremental reform, thereby giving it a radical sheen.
Facts about radical organizations sitting next to hollow phrases like “hold companies accountable” does a disservice to those radical organizations, especially when you have a history of ignoring the role of social movements in securing progressive wins. Writing in The New Republic Jeet Heer chronicles how Clinton’s comments about the Reagans and HIV/AIDS is similar to her remarks eight years ago when “she appeared to give greater credit to President Lyndon Johnson for civil rights laws than the movement lead by Martin Luther King.” Jeet also points out that Clinton does not seem to understand the strategic role of contemporary social movements like #BlackLivesMatter. When she condemned the violence at Trump’s Chicago rally she exclusively attributed social progress to victims’ families “melt[ing] hearts” and not the sustained activism of Bree Newsome and others.
This is the important distinction: A candidate is an Explainer Candidate when the recitation of facts about the past or the abstract present replace policies or promised material support for present political struggles. An Explainer Candidate will give you a thorough history of a radical social movement in 800 words but claim all future progress must come from reasonable incremental change. The Explainer Candidate is looking to run out the clock on your own attention: to show that they are with it –that they are on your side– but also hope you don’t read to the end where they under-deliver on supporting the change agents that they acknowledge were necessary to secure those political wins.
Image Credit: Hermann Kasser