2Artistic
Dispatches From
the Front Lines
RI5HVLVWDQFH
A new
Nation seriesTheNation.com/OppArt
PETER KUPERThoughts on What Happened
I quite enjoyed Katha Pollitt’s
column “Hillary Clinton Tells All”
[Oct. 9]. It seems fitting that a year
after the election, Pollitt addresses
CNN Hillary-hater extraordinaire
Dylan Byers’s recent tweet that
“The Hillary Clinton ‘I-take-full-
responsibility-but-here-are-all-the-
other-reasons-I-lost’ tour continues
to be intrinsically problematic.”
Few “journalists” are more to
blame for Donald Trump’s rise and
Hillary’s loss—no, our loss—than
Byers. He wrote in Politico on May 7,
2015: “Never has the national media
been more primed to take down Hill-
ary Clinton (and by the same token
elevate a Republican candidate).”
That’s right, he didn’t write
“expose her falsehoods” or “detail
her hypocrisy.” He wrote that the
media was “primed to take [her]
down.” And the rest is history.
When will journalists learn?
Bernie Evans
savannah, ga.
In Katha Pollitt’s column, she misses
a point that Bernie Sanders didn’t
miss: that Clinton never found a
war she couldn’t support. Didn’t she
learn anything from Vietnam? All
the comparisons Pollitt puts into her
column pale in comparison with this
one. No wonder it was left out
of Clinton’s book and left out of
the policies she presented in the
campaign. Glenn Umont
alamo, calif.I want to praise Katha Pollitt for her
supportive column. In spite of what
the media maintains, Hillary Clinton
was not a bad candidate, nor did she
run a poor campaign.
Hillary won the popular vote by
3 million ballots, which is more than
Kennedy over Nixon in 1960, Nixon
over Humphrey in 1968, Carter over
Ford in 1976, and Bush over Gore in2000, and the same margin as Bush
over Kerry in 2004. Trump was ap-
pointed by the Electoral College. He
was not elected president. In a true de-
mocracy, which this country is not, the
candidate who wins the popular vote
is elected. The presidency was stolen
from Clinton by James Comey, Vladi-
mir Putin, Julian Assange, and Matt
Lauer, who used what was supposed to
be a forum on the Veterans Adminis-
tration to attack Hillary on her e-mails.
Hillary Clinton, not Donald
Trump, was the people’s choice.
Trump’s ascension to the presidency
is the biggest tragedy in US history.
With Hillary, we would have had an
experienced, capable, well-informed
president. Instead, we are stuck with
a mentally deranged criminal degen-
erate. Reba Shimansky
new york cityDown With Epistocracy
A simple answer to Jason Brennan’s
obviously pessimistic message, as
described in Jan-Werner Müller’s
review of his book Against Democracy
[“Blaming the People,” Oct. 9], is
to admit that most people are not
going to learn a lot about the issues.
For example, they don’t know basic
macroeconomics, such as that job
growth is promoted by demand com-
ing from everyone, rather than by tax
cuts for the rich; the rich have a re-
cord of financializing and disinvesting
more than investing, especially now,
following the MBA- ization of America.
Since people do not know the
issues, the only way to gain their
support is to do stuff. People came
to support Franklin Roosevelt’s pro-
grams in the 1930s, as well as Medi-
care and the Affordable Care Act.
More things to do: Many of our
technologies and industries began(continued on page 42)Comments drawn from our website
[email protected]