Failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton painted American voters as gullible during a recent interview on MSNBC, saying that they failed to appreciate the alleged “extraordinary accomplishments” of President Joe Biden’s administration.
Clinton told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that figures in the Republican Party “truly just want power, power to impose their views, power to exploit financial advantage, power to implement a religious point of view.”
“You know, a lot of people got, oh, I think kind of frustrated looking at the messy process of legislation, and they — they didn’t really appreciate that within a year, the Biden administration has passed two major pieces of legislation through both the House and the Senate. They passed another major piece through the House that will soon be in the Senate,” Clinton said. “By any measure, those are extraordinary accomplishments, and they really will help many millions of Americans with health care and prescription drug prices as well as climate change and so much else.”
“But because of the way we are getting our information today and because of the lack of gatekeepers and people who have a historic perspective, who can help us understand what we are seeing, there is a real vulnerability in the electorate to the kind of demagoguery and disinformation that, unfortunately, the other side is really good at exploiting,” she claimed.
WATCH:
TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED VIA MSNBC:
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: You know, less than a week after the January 6th attack, in the second week of January, you wrote a piece in “The Washington Post” that I reread today. Among a lot of other observations you said this.
You said: It is sobering that many people were unsurprised by what occurred last week — meaning January 6th — particularly people of color for whom a violent mob waving Confederate flags and hanging nooses is a familiar sight in American history.
I have been thinking a lot about that recently, because — I mean, on one hand we have what feels like an emergency going on. We have a disturbingly large part of the right promoting and excusing political violence while at the same time, they’re trying to discredit our political system and our electoral processes. That combined message from the right that politics doesn’t work and violence is okay, that is — that’s a recipe for disaster. That is a recipe for the end of democracy.
But on the other hand, we keep talk about that as an unprecedented threat, and it — to me, it doesn’t feel unprecedented. I mean through the lens of how people have color have lived in this democracy, the rejection of political mechanisms, you know, choosing violence instead of fair political contests, that’s the history of how people of color have been treated in this country over and over and over again. I feel like you’ve been trying to make that point aggressively.
Does understanding that, does understanding that the not-unprecedented nature of where we are help us figure out a way out of this particular mess?
HILLARY CLINTON, FAILED PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, I think it points us in the direction that we go when our better angels are leading us, and that is understanding, human nature being what it is, we do need boundaries. We need guardrails. We need to have an understanding amongst this great pluralistic country of ours that if we’re all going to get ahead we all had better be much more sensitive to, understanding and empathetic toward each other, and that particularly applies to people of color, minority groups of all kinds, because we truly rise or fall together.
And we’ve had leaders who have risen to those occasions, who have certainly done their best, both to inspire us and create the right environment for us to, you know, look past our differences and find our common humanity, our common ground, and we’ve had laws passed that try to create those structures, those guardrails, those prohibitions against mistreatment of each other.
But what we’ve seen sadly in the last several years is not new in our history because it is rooted in the struggles that we’ve had going back to before our beginning, but it is, unfortunately, turbo-charged by the combination of demagogues, social media that is more interested, frankly, in profitability than the rule of law or unity, that feeds disinformation in a way that strips people to the core of their insecurities and their fears.
So, it’s not new in any way, but the way it’s being implemented is new. And it’s really hard to escape. So, the problem that we face is an old problem, but with a new twist because of technology.
And I think we’re really on the precipice, Rachel, of seeing people, particularly in the Republican Party, but not only there, who truly just want power, power to impose their views, power to exploit financial advantage, power to implement a religious point of view. We see all of that converging.
And, as you said in the very beginning of your question, this is not an American phenomenon, you know. Anne Applebaum, whom I respect greatly, has been covering this from her perch in Europe, particularly in Poland, because we see the signs of it everywhere.
You know, democracy is messy. You know, a lot of people got, oh, I think kind of frustrated looking at the messy process of legislation, and they — they didn’t really appreciate that within a year, the Biden administration has passed two major pieces of legislation through both the House and the Senate. They passed another major piece through the House that will soon be in the Senate.
By any measure, those are extraordinary accomplishments, and they really will help many millions of Americans with health care and prescription drug prices as well as climate change and so much else.
But because of the way we are getting our information today and because of the lack of gatekeepers and people who have a historic perspective, who can help us understand what we are seeing, there is a real vulnerability in the electorate to the kind of demagoguery and disinformation that, unfortunately, the other side is really good at exploiting.