Let me stake out the unpopular position and defend Hillary Clinton.
In this new book we're talking about, Clinton concedes that she made many mistakes (like failing to visit certain states and of course retaining a private email server for convenience while in the White House), but also says that she ultimately still believes that circumstances outside her control determined the basic outcome of the election, and especially the infamous last-minute FBI letter. I think she's right about that! I mean the counter-argument I see to Clinton's claim that the FBI letter played a decisive role in the outcome is that "Well, it's still her fault because if she had been more responsible with her emails, she wouldn't have been in that situation in the first place." Well no, she wouldn't have, but saying that that makes the Republican-controlled FBI's partisan actions her fault is kind of like saying of a rape survivor that "Well she shouldn't have been drinking, so the rape is her fault." Lots of people think that way, but it's not actually true!
More compellingly, if voters were thinking about the candidates in a non-gendered way then there's no way that Hillary Clinton's email "scandal" compared to Donald Trump's corruption issues in magnitude. Even the FBI was forced to concede in public more than once that Clinton did nothing whatsoever illegal and that her email indiscretions had no victims at all. A victimless non-crime resulting from indiscretion is something that would rightly be called a mistake, not a scandal, and as such is hardly an issue of the same magnitude as Donald Trump running a fake university to bilk people out of their life savings or getting caught on video bragging about sexually assaulting women and then having a dozen of them come forward to confirm the validity of his recorded statements! But nevermind those minor indiscretions, Hillary Clinton broke protocol. PROTOCOL!!! You see how people (men in particular) held the two candidates to a different moral standard? The one can do whatever he wants and still win. The other had to be perfect and turned out to instead be human.
There is also the matter of experience that I relate to personally and consider a gendered matter. I'm hardly the only female on this Earth who has seen guys I train pass me up for promotions. That is something commonly known as the glass ceiling: where you are clearly better qualified, but you get passed by anyway because you have the wrong genitals. I REALLY think that that's the essence of what happened to Hillary Clinton both in the 2008 primaries and in this year's general election was made all the more pronounced and ridiculous. That a man with literally ZERO governing experience can win out over the candidate who has more experience and qualifications for the job than anyone who has ever run for the presidency I think definitely constitutes the glass ceiling. Or at least I think so anyway.
I really feel like this bullshit about it "being an anti-establishment year" is exactly that: bullshit! That's just the rhetorical excuse for the glass ceiling. It wouldn't have been an anti-establishment year if Joe Biden had entered and won the nomination, would it? He'd be president right now! Search your feelings: you know it to be true! 2016 was only "an anti-establishment year" because the Democratic nominee was a well-qualified woman and her opponent was a clearly unqualified man. It's the excuse for the man winning anyway just because he's a man.
That's all I'm saying.
