[From early 2025, still relevant today]
Clintonism fundamentally changed the Democratic Party. With its determined rejection of old liberal commitments, it established a new paradigm for the party’s politics and, with it, a new way of doing business that has persisted even as Clinton himself has faded into the background… It saturated the Obama years, seeping into both policy and electoral strategy through the coterie of Clintonites who shaped so much of his administration’s ethos; it underpinned Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid; and it reasserted itself in 2020 through the party insiders who were so fixated on resisting challenges from within their ranks that they abruptly shut down the Democratic primary field in order to guarantee that Joe Biden would be the nominee—thereby quashing a class-based insurgency in the party—and then propped up a cognitively challenged Biden long past any conceivable electoral viability. Most recently, the dead hand of Clintonism forged the foundations of Kamala Harris’s difference-trimming campaign pitch, which targeted the same elusive moderate suburban voters in swing states.