False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton

by Liza Featherstone (Editor)

Hillary Clinton presented her campaign for the presidency and her long career in public life as a triumph of feminism--but an all-star lineup of American feminists says, "It's not that simple." In a history of proposals and policies on welfare, Wall Street, crime and policing, immigration, international health, and war, Clinton has advanced ideas and laws that have actually hurt women--and restricted the powerful idea of feminism itself. From leading feminist figures like Laura Flanders, Moe Tkacik, and Medea Benjamin to a new generation of young female writers and thinkers, this book restores to feminism its revolutionary meaning and outlines how truly robust feminist policies could transform the United States and its relation to the world.

False Choices includes essays from prominent feminist writers Liza Featherstone, Laura Flanders, Moe Tkacik, Medea Benjamin, Frances Fox Piven and Fred Block, Donna Murch, Kathleen Geier, Yasmin Nair, Megan Erickson, Tressie McMillan Cotom, Catherine Liu, Amber A'Lee, Magpie Corvid, Belén Fernández, Zillah Eisenstein, and others.

Genres: Politics, Feminism, Nonfiction, Essays, History, Womens, Activism

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2016

About the author

Liza Featherstone is a journalist based in New York City and a contributing editor to The Nation, where she also writes the advice column “Asking for a Friend.” Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Ms., and Rolling Stone among many other outlets. She is the co-author of Students against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement (Verso, 2002) and author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic, 2004). She is the editor of False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton (Verso, 2016).

Reviews

[Jason Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great set of essays criticizing Hillary from the left. The book is quite accessible and paces very well. The essays on mass incarceration pulls no punches on Hillary -- who not only doesn't give a shit about black lives, but has strengthened and legitimated the state's 'moderate' brand of white supremacy. The book is quite sparse on Hillary's foreign policy record. To give an obvious example, there are 9 essays pertaining to her domestic record and 4 essays that talk about her foreign policy. For a dry, but comprehensive criticism of her foreign policy record, you can pick up Diana Johnston's Queen of Chaos. I highly recommend this book -- despite the fact that it will not change the minds of her fans who are imbued with far more discipline than Stalin's apologists.

[Ana Camastro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall, it's a very strong analysis and not all essays are equally strong, the book as a whole really works. The point to me was looking at Hillary Clinton's feminism through intersectional and internationalism lenses. If we're going to praise Clinton as a feminist champion, and her campaign as a feminist victory, we also need to be critical and hold it up to scrutiny. I definitely recommend reading, especially if you want a fair and well balanced analysis (as opposed the kind of work that is pure hate propaganda) about why so many people don't want Clinton to be President.
The last chapter sums up the whole book:
"Beyond Hillary: Toward Anti-racist, Anti-imperialist Feminism" by Zillah Eisenstein - Eisenstein begins the chapter: "As a feminist, I don't encourage or advocate misogyny toward Hillary Clinton. And course I'd love to see a woman become president. I also feel that if, ultimately, your vote for Clinton is needed to prevent a Republican from taking this country back to the nineteenth century, you should by all means go ahead and vote for her. But let us not, in our acknowledgment of these obvious feminist practicalities, lose sight of our opposition to the sort of feminism that Hillary Clinton represents and the harm it causes: equal opportunity warmongering. Because it is only out of such opposition that a better feminism can grow and thrive, one committed to peace, anti-racism, and the well-being of the 99 percent."
Near the end she writes: "Hillary Clinton's brand of feminism - power feminism, imperial feminism, white ruling-class feminism - is not the answer to this moment of crisis. And the answer must be about so much more than gender. Anti-imperial feminism must engage the multiple and complex identities of gender - racial, class, sexual, age, ability, trans and national."
In other words, get you a female candidate who can do both!

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

An invaluable resource during this disheartening period of presidential electioneering. With authors ranging from Frances Fox Piven to Medea Benjamin, Donna Murch and other truly feminist and discerning thinkers and doers, these essays serve as an essential examination of Hilary Clinton's "feminism" and the degradation of what feminism has come to mean in our sadly degraded politics. Essential reading for anyone who takes informed decision making seriously. I learned a lot.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirteen succinct and well presented (some even quite humorous) essays by different feminist writers. All have the ring of a collection of speeches by Cato the Elder, a Roman senator who ended any speech on any topic with the refrain “Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.” In this case, the brief version would be to say that no matter which way you look at Hillary Clinton’s exceptionally prolonged record as a senior figure in American politics, she is no feminist.

In the forthcoming presidential election, successive writers acknowledge that responsible, feminist voters will prefer to select Clinton to her Republican rival, and that is the nature of political choice in America as in so many countries. As they say on the back cover of their book “Aren’t You Helping the Republicans? Only if you think that even one person will read a book by a coven of leftwing feminists, find it convincing and conclude that she should vote for one of those misogynist reactionaries.” They also deny that this book is sexist when it attacks Clinton’s claim to the feminist vote. “We can start, not by insulting Hillary Clinton, but by creating resistance and revolutionary alliances of refusal—refusal to go along with the cruel forms of neoliberalism she has worked so hard to enact.” [p155]

The case against Clinton is not presented as a rant, but patiently spelled out by means of detailed attention to the facts of Clinton’s record. This opens by refuting the suggestion that Hillary Clinton is in any way an economic populist. Her record shows that she will make populist claims and even commitments when seeking election (I assume with the implications that she will do this again, perhaps assisted by more credible Democrats like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders) but she is in reality exclusively tied to the interests of the most wealthy. The account of her links with wealthy supporters is breathtaking. “If nominated, Hillary will become one of the wealthiest Democratic standard bearers in history; if elected, she will become one of the richest presidents of all time.” [p42]

Hillary’s attitude to poverty is clarified by examining the legacy of Bill Clinton’s presidency. With Hillary’s active support, President Clinton accepted Republican legislation that removed the universal right of Americans to state assistance when they were in poverty.
In August 1996, as President Clinton’s reelection campaign loomed, he took Hillary’s advice and signed the third bill. This version was called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and it created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to replace AFDC. Republicans and many Democrats argued for the new program by claiming that government checks to the poor created a condition called “dependency” that sapped recipients of the drive and self-reliance required for economic success. Hardly anyone probed deeply enough to recognize that dependency is part of the human condition.  But the plan was that newly trained welfare workers would combat dependency by tough love; they would persuade and, when necessary, coerce, welfare recipients to go out and take jobs. And with states setting strict time limits on a family’s welfare eligibility, those who resisted would ultimately be cut off the rolls p45

While the Clinton effort “to make work pay” had a short shelf life, the TANF legislation endured and it has worked just as its Republican architects intended. Welfare caseloads have plummeted, from about 14 million people in 1995 to 4.2 million today. Before welfare reform, 68 percent of families with children in poverty received cash assistance. By 2013 it had fallen to 36 percent, and the assistance these families received was only a fraction of the poverty line. States receive a TANF block grant from the federal government, but they are allowed to use that money for other purposes, so they have a strong incentive to deny aid to eligible families by requiring recipients to look for work first or by simply cutting them from the rolls for rule infractions. And without recourse to the courts, there is nothing that the poor or their advocates can do. It is no surprise then that with millions of people forced into the labor market, wages and working conditions at the bottom have deteriorated. The obstacles to aid are so extreme that during the great recession of 2007 when unemployment exceeded 10 percent—the worst downturn since the 1930s—sixteen states saw continued declines in their TANF rolls between 2007 and 2011 even though the number of unemployed had risen nationally by 71 percent. Since as few as 40 percent of the unemployed are eligible for unemployment insurance in any given month, this meant millions of families were eligible only for food stamps in the midst of a global economic crisis that resulted from the speculative excesses of Wall Street. Because of TANF, the US had effectively regressed to the early 1930s, when many of the unemployed had no recourse other than private charity. In a word, the Clintons gambled in 1996 that eliminating a legally protected right to assistance for the poor would not, in total, matter because of their policies to improve the compensation of low wage work. P47

Incidentally, an interesting and quite extended passage follows that discusses the limitations of any policy based on full employment and makes a strong case for the principle of a Universal Basic Income. Based on experiments in a number of Latin American countries, there is evidence that this is a viable and realistic policy option. "..the point is that social problems can be solved by throwing money at them, contrary to the trhetoric of dependency." p56 Of course, this would have to assume that our elite actually wished to solve them.

For every hundred families with children that are living in poverty, sixty-eight were able to access cash assistance before Bill Clinton’s welfare reform. By 2013, that number had fallen to twenty-six. p106

The Clinton legacy in education it is no less perverse and this was very much Hillary’s contribution. Infuriatingly, she took responsibility for introducing educational strategies without any reference to educational research or evidence whatever, entirely for political motives, and these have spread from Arkansas through the American system to other countries, not least England and Wales, where their influence is no less baleful. Central to these were standardized pupil tests and attacks on the competence of teachers and their strategic goals were also completely ill considered.

It is impossible to talk about the political strategy—or, to use today’s individualist parlance, the “vision” and “achievements”—of one Clinton without talking about the other. This is particularly true when it comes to matters they care deeply about—and education is unlucky enough to be one of those. P62

Reformers who emphasize standardized testing and teacher accountability over inputs/money often claim to do so because of concerns over young people’s presumed lack of preparation for high tech jobs.... But the truth is, these jobs don’t exist—the greatest area of growth in the job market for years to come was then, and still is projected to be, in the often low-paying service sector. The “skills gap” is a myth. P68

On racism, the book is scathing. The Clintons pull off the political stunt of attracting African American votes and support without addressing any of the structural foundations of racism; indeed, their policies are racist in their impact. In his critique of the inadequacy of anti-racism, Adolph Reed writes: as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance”. P74

While “meritocracy” was a satirical term used by British socialist Michael Young to describe postwar oligarchies, overseers of the neoliberal order like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair celebrated it. Like Obama, Hillary Clinton is one of the meritocracy’s golden children. 8 Under meritocratic rule, American exceptionalism tells us that we do not need systems of social welfare because we are a nation uniquely capable of leveling all playing fields and creating equality of opportunity for an astounding array of people of all races, sexualities, and, more recently, all gender identifications. American institutions are meant to reward intelligence and hard work and punish stupidity and idleness. That the Clintons are building dynastic forms of power and wealth linking private foundations, shadowy nonprofits, billionaires’ fortunes, and young bright ambitious people willing to take on the unvetted agendas of Eli Broad or Bill Gates does not, it would seem, discredit the myth of the meritocracy. P75

The couple’s close relationships with Vernon Jordan and other black insiders offered an illusion of access that superseded any real concern for how hard-line anti-crime, drug war, and welfare policies affected poor and working class African Americans. As the movement against state-sanctioned violence and for black lives grows, it is important to remember that proximity to power rarely equals real power. P96

The Clinton record on crime and punishment, and in particular the War on Drugs, is so disastrously bad that even Hillary has been cautious about defending its egregious errors.
It is only because the experiences of the incarcerated and the poor have been so profoundly erased that the Clintons can be thought of as liberals (racial or otherwise) in any respect. P97
The overall effect is a landscape of feminist carcerality which draws upon the force of the state acting in collusion with social service agencies, emboldened by an angry clamoring for “justice” in mostly privileged sites like college campuses. The end result is that some women, mostly middle to upper class, and mostly white, are able to demand punitive measures for their accused attackers, but vast numbers of other women, mostly poor, often women of color, are left to struggle under a combination of poverty and vulnerability created by the very system that claims to protect them. 3 At the same time that some women are granted the right to invoke state involvement and send more people to prison, millions of others—mostly poor white and black women—increasingly feel the brunt of a carceral regime. According to the Sentencing Project, from 1980 to 2010 the number of women in prison has increased at nearly 1.5 times the rate for men, a 646 percent rise which means that now nearly 205,000 women are incarcerated. Nearly 75 percent of women in prison have mental health problems, in contrast to 55 percent of men—and the significantly large numbers across the board say a lot about how the prison industrial complex is also now the dumping ground for a broken health care system. In all but thirteen states, incarcerated women delivering babies are shackled during the process of birth. P101

The US is home to only 5 percent of the world’s population but holds 25 percent of the world’s prison population. There are 2.4 million behind bars, but, overall, more than 7 million people are tethered to the penal system in some way (parole, house arrest, etc.). P102

Hillary Clinton remains wedded to free trade as an economic strategy. A major policy initiative of the Clinton Presidency was NAFTA and its impacts remain hugely damaging, not only in the US but also in Mexico and beyond.
In 1994, the Clintons oversaw the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As a result of US goods flooding local markets, Mexican merchants and farmers, whether selling textiles or corn, have been forced to shut down. Approximately 2 million farmers had to abandon their occupations, and today 25 million Mexicans live in “food poverty.” As Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy points out, “Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact.” Restrictive trade policies, disguised as “free trade,” mean the displacement of millions of people who had up to that point been able to survive and thrive in their native economies. NAFTA eventually caused massive waves of immigration as desperate Mexicans streamed across the border. P104

The Clintons were fully aware of the waves of economic migrants provoked by NAFTA and the book describes their repressive policy responses, dehumanising and criminalising the migrants whose plight was a direct and predictable outcome of Clinton’s policies.

On women’s issues. Hillary is utterly non feminist, yet works to secure feminist votes with her usual strategy of distraction.

The abortion lobby is arguably the only Democratic Party interest group the Clintons never fucked over, and the Democratic Party’s support for abortion rights in the face of the so-called Republican “War on Women” has become increasingly central to the party’s messaging. P111
...on other issues that disproportionately affect women, like health care, welfare, and wages, there is little policy consensus among Democrats. As a brand, abortion is pretty much all they’ve got. P111

It’s fair to say the makers and distributors of Mexican misoprostol pills have done infinitely more than Hillary Clinton’s political clique to ensure reality-based abortion rights... P112
It seems ill-conceived to have tethered feminism to such a narrow issue as abortion. Yet it makes sense from an insular Beltway fund-raising perspective to focus on an issue that makes no demands—the opposite, really—of the oligarch class; 120

abortion is a consummately foolish thing to attempt to build a political movement around. It happens once or twice in a woman’s lifetime. Kids, on the other hand, are with you forever. A more promising movement—one that goes against everything Hillary Clinton stands for—might take that to heart. P121

“The US is funding trafficking NGOs at 686 million a year and most of the money goes to ‘creating awareness on sex trafficking,’ and the rest [of the money funneled into those organizations] goes to pay their board members, many who make six-figure salaries,” says Robinson. 9 “When I called Polaris they said they don’t investigate anything, all they do is relay the tips to local police. I said, ‘Can’t people just dial 911 and we can save the 3 to 7 million a year you get in federal funding?’ They admitted they do not have any direct services, so all they do is refer victims to public shelters. A person can dial 211 and get a list of the same fake services.” 129
Tara Burns writes: Like we saw recently in the Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage, the courts are where minority peoples most often see our rights affirmed. The Supreme Court’s job is not to act as a moral arbitrator or to interpret the will of the people. It’s to interpret the law, beginning with the constitution. LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] people were being denied their constitutional right to equal protection under the law. 129

Hillary’s record as secretary of State under Obama has been hawkish and unproductive. Her contribution to the undemocratic coup that removed a progressive, elected President in Honduras in June 2009 is as shameful as any of the earlier imperialist ventures of the US. She simply is a neocon in foreign affairs and while I have no respect at all for Obama’s conduct of foreign policy, his record has certainly been utterly perverted by Clinton’s reckless behaviour.
“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, told the New York Times . “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he said, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.” p149

President Obama’s two signature foreign policy achievements—the Iran deal and the groundbreaking opening with Cuba—came after Clinton left. These historic wins serve to highlight Clinton’s miserable track record in the position. p148

The writers have no respect whatever for Hillary Clinton’s use of feminist sounding slogans in support of an imperialist and militarist foreign policy.
emphasis on women entering the labor force is an old strategy that intensifies the triple day of labor for women, but is not tied to their freedom, equality, or liberation… Clinton uses her “No Ceilings” initiative to advance women and girls around the world. She says that “giving women the tools to fully participate in their economies, societies and governments” is the unfinished business of the twenty-first century. I am more interested in a “No Basements” initiative: feminists need to work to empower from the bottom up where most women are found—hauling water, collecting wood, standing on assembly lines or at factory sewing machines, providing food, doing low-paid service jobs. p152

Clinton assumes the “exceptional” status of the US because of its supposed just and democratic practices, especially toward women. She long ago set her sights outside the US as in China in 1995 at the Beijing Women’s Conference, where she famously declared “women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” Interestingly, despite some campaign efforts to talk about paid family leave in the United States, she has usually located the problem of women’s oppression elsewhere, and not here. But what about safeguarding access to medical care, demanding a living wage and alleviations to poverty, improving day care, lessening incarceration rates, and increasing contraceptive coverage for women of color, right here in the US? P153

The cumulative effect of this book is a demolition of any claim that Hillary Clinton can be considered feminist, or for that matter even that she is progressive. Her candidacy and perhaps election as President of the USA will not represent any advance whatever for the issues to which feminism is committed.

[Rama Rao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Road to the White House

Feminism is largely used as a tool by the Democratic Party to promote its own interest. It is the focus group sculpted political package justifying their exploitation of people; racial minorities, women, middle class, abortion issue, immigration policies, and the whole enchiladas. No one is more qualified to exploit the system than Clintons. When Bill Clinton’s tenure as president ended, Hillary swapped roles seamlessly. They parlayed decades of public service into a fortune; for them politics is a “family business.” There is no distinction between business careers and political careers. Holding and serving in public office provides a platform from which they can monetize experience, connections and prominence. The 2014 family Income was $28 million; the estimated family net worth was $110 million; and Hillary’s personal wealth was valued at more than $30 million by Forbes Magazine. She pulled in a reported $14 million advance for her memoir of the Obama era, “Hard Choices.” In 2013, she gave 36 speeches for about $8.5 million, most at about $225,000 a pop, to customers like Goldman Sachs Group and Fidelity Investments.

How much does Hillary care about common people? For example, her State Department paid men $16,000+ more than women, even after accounting for education and job category. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, noted in the New York Times that women aged 25 and over constitute one-third of all minimum-wage workers, compared to teenagers of both sexes combined, who constitute about one-quarter. In addition the female minimum-wage workers are principal wage-earners in their homes where the husband/boyfriend is making enough to buy six-pack. The family is counting on money to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. As one can see that this a stark contrast to what the elite of the Democratic Party is cashing in.

This book argues that Hillary Clinton is not the feminist working women are looking for. The political and economic environments require a politician to understand the challenges of working women who are struggling to support their families and a build a future. The deprivation created by the extractive neoliberal governments benefit millionaires like Hillary Clinton. The discontent among young women is so strong that this became visible in 2016 democratic race, where majority of them supported Senator Bernie Sanders.

With regard to individual essays in this book; I found the articles by Maureen Tkacik on abortions and politics; Kathleen Geier on the policies of Hillary Clinton; and on ending poverty by Frances Fox Piven and Fred Block are interesting. Author Maureen Tkcik’s essay is profoundly educational as it illuminates the politics of abortion. According to the author, both the sides of the aisle are taking political advantage of this very painful process for women. It turns out that democrats are more wrong than republicans on this issue. As a man, I understood the emotional side of abortion and also believed in the woman’s reproductive rights. But there is another side very few men understand, it is the physical damage and pain caused by the anti-abortion drugs and surgical procedures. According to the author, less American abortions are performed at physician’s office compared to abortions in West European countries, Access to abortion pills and proper health care in the event of abortion-induced complications, the European model outshines the American model.

Zillah Eisenstein’s essay entitled, “Beyond Hillary: Toward Anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminisms,” and Mede Benjamin’s essay entitled, “Pink-slipping Hillary,” is little to do with feminism, and more to do with war in the Middle East. The problems in the Middle East started long before Hillary was even born; the royal families of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain are run by families of despots. They did not deliver the social justice to its population. The Islamic militants came on the horizon and quick to capitalize the popular discontent among its masses. Hillary Clinton did not create or exacerbate these problems. Belen Fernandez’s article entitled “Hillary does Honduras” is largely out of place in this book as it is completely devoted to June 2009 coup in Honduras, and how Hillary could not stop the injustice done to the Honduran people. Donna Murch’s essay and the essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom are about African Americans; it is very little to do with faux feminism.

The sad irony is that Hillary Clinton lost 2016 presidential race. We were be told by elitists like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other feminists that the glass-ceilings will be broken and we would be in a post-feminist era. The depressing part of this saga is that this is a victory for very few women who are too rich, too white, and too capitalistic. An average working woman has no place in this circle. With regards to this book, Editor Liza Featherstone has done an inadequate job.

[Abra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend (hi, Sara S.!) mentioned this collection of essays on Facebook, and I told my fifteen year old niece about it, who (like three generations of our family) was a strong Bernie supporter before he (inevitably) caved to endorse Hillary. We started reading it in tandem, and having finished a bit before her (she's gotten into Christian Parenti's Lockdown America, a very good book on the prison-industrial complex, if that's what it's still being called by the youngsters these days -- possibly it's more often what Yasmin Nair calls "the carceral state" which to me sounds like the cancerous state, close enough) I would say that a) this book as timely AF -- they did a great job pulling the essays together, possibly updating some of them so that they go right up to the end of the primaries; b) yes, the writing is uneven, but the points are all strong; and c) it was somehow liberating to read a strong, principled, and fucking civil critique of Hillary's non-existent feminism just as the disgusting, vicious debacle that is the Republican National Convention is underway in Cleveland.

The essays I thought were the strongest were Frances Fox Piven's very interesting one on welfare reform and her championing of a universal basic income (one of the Green Party's planks), Medea Benjamin's essay "Pink-Slipping Hillary" about Hillary-the-hawk as a condescending senator, Catherine Liu's well-written essay on "Neoliberal Fictions", Megan Erickson's "Waging War on Teachers" that traces the core of No Child Left Behind's punitive policies to Arkansas, Maureen Tkacik's "Abortion and the Politics of Failure" (also enjoyably crafted), and "Hillary does Honduras", by Belén Fernández.

This election year is going to be more (and seemingly worse) vilifying of leftists who refuse to vote for Clinton, Nader-bashing-redux, to say the least -- look at Dan Savage's rant from a call-in show in May to see the starting rhetoric (http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/...). False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton is a welcome addition to fact-not-emotion-based resources.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

In summary: "Hillary is effectively Reagan"

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

And with that I end my 2016 crusade against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Great read for my faux feminist friends. Good primer on feminism and economic justice and feminist politics critical of capitalist, warmongering, punitive policies. The 14 or so essays (some better than others) cover Clinton's disastrous domestic policy track record (neoliberal welfare and labour market reform, reproductive rights, carceral feminism etc) as well as well documented imperialist and very non-feminist foreign policy legacy.
If you can't grasp actual feminism and its link to capitalism, imperialism and racism on a theoretical level, this is a great intro as to why supporting HRC et al on feminist grounds is like the most ridiculous idea ever.

[Brandon Prince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of essays detailing Hillary Clinton's role in defining American neoliberal politics and modern U.S. military aggression. The authors take to task a feminism that would like to conveniently overlook (or relativize) this legacy: a history that amounts to a generation of domestic and international policies that have brought unspeakable misery and suffering to millions. At a time when criticism of Clinton from the left is being silenced and shamed; when people are being told to shut up and vote, "False Choices" is an important resource for those who refuse to lower their political horizons.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I woke up this morning to have my vacation spoiled by lots of social media chatter about what a terrible job the American media, and in particular Matt Lauer (who is, I suppose, technically a journalist), did of handling Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump last night. Lauer was selected, by virtue of his familiarity to audiences, to speak to both presidential candidates at something called the “Commander-in-Chief Forum”, the very name of which suggests the degree of seriousness with which it should be taken; it was held at Manhattan’s Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, a tourist attraction run by real estate moguls.

The most common thread in this criticism was that Lauer, a pleasant cartoon who sometimes has its word balloons filled with the text of news items, created a ‘false equivalency’ by treating Trump, a thought-free blowhard who fires people on television, as if he were on the same level as Clinton, who is more serious by virtue of the way she expresses her bad ideas. This is a fair criticism, on a certain level. While I have myriad problems with Clinton as a candidate, as this review and essentially everything I have ever written about her makes clear, she is superior to Trump on a number of levels: intellectually, politically, and personally, to be sure, she makes him seem like the crass joke he is. But on another level, the problem is a deeper one: whatever their virtues, or lack thereof, Clinton and Trump are the candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, and those parties are, by design, the only ones that are capable of winning elections at almost every level of American politics. If Trump is a buffoon, the fault rests less with Matt Lauer’s unwillingness to call him one than it does with the American public’s utter apathy towards electoral reform.

Ever since it became clear that Hillary Clinton would be the candidate of the Democratic Party in 2016 — that is, after no Barack Obama emerged to rob her of her destiny, and Bernie Sanders was banished for his stubborn insistence on making his political campaign reflective of his actual political beliefs — the idea that she is being treated unfairly (especially by the press) due to her gender has been inescapable. There is certainly some truth to this, as the double standard is alive and well particularly on the American right, and at any Trump rally or similar convocation of reactionary recidivists, misogynistic expressions of gendered hatred for Clinton are commonplace. But this has slowly transformed, particularly amongst a certain type of meritocratic liberal feminist, into the idea that any criticism of Clinton is an attack on not only her femininity, but on women as a whole.

Enter False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, a small but powerful collection of essays edited by Liza Featherstone. The credentials of its seventeen contributors are impeccable, ranging from academics to journalists to labor activists to sex workers; and, contrary to the insidious narrative that socialist/leftist critics of Clinton are overwhelmingly young white misogynists, all but one of them are women, many are people of color, and they range in age from their early 20s to their 80s. All are feminists; all are liberals are leftists (again, despite the idea that socialist attacks on Clinton derive from right-wing FOX News talking points, this is the farthest thing imaginable from a conservative argument); and all are united in their belief that Hillary Clinton’s history and politics should be a clear warning that her presidency will be no triumph for the cause of women.

One of the most interesting things about False Choices is the plurality of its viewpoints. Not only is it a book written by women of different ages, races, and backgrounds, but its attitudes towards Clinton as a candidate range from mild discomfort (of the “grit your teeth and vote against Donald Trump” variety) to utter revulsion. Absolutely none of them, however, engage in anything that could be reasonably categorized as misogynist; indeed, almost every argument against a Clinton presidency is predicated on the idea that it would be bad for women. Some of these arguments are drawn from her past as a legislator and public figure; some make inferences based on her support of her husband’s record as president, which was disastrous for poor and minority women in particular; and others attack the very idea of a feminism based on merit, on wealth, and on the idea that there is something inherently positive about a women in power, regardless of her ethics or ideology.

Similary, there are a wide range of issues on which the authors find Clinton’s candidacy disturbing. Some are relatively familiar, such as her support of Bill Clinton’s welfare ‘reform’ and free trade policies, or her time on the board of Wal-Mart, during which she had nothing to say about the company’s labor policies that left working women impoverished and tolerated workplace harassment and discrimination. Others are surprising: Megan Erickson’s chapter on how deeply the Clintons are involved in the for-profit educational industry was both revealing and disturbing, and Margaret Corvid’s piece on Hillary’s attitude towards sex workers while she was Secretary of State was something I knew nothing about. Belén Fernández’s piece on Clinton’s backing of the coup in Honduras leaves no doubt about how closely she follows the realpolitik of her diplomatic mentor Henry Kissinger, and the chapter by Frances Fox Piven and Fred Block is False Choices’ most intellectually accomplished, spelling out in rigorous academic detail the origins and impact of neo-liberal welfare reform and how it has been a disaster for the poor.

The book doesn’t succeed on every level. The introductory piece by Laura Flanders is weak and tedious, hiding its good points behind a poorly executed one-sided dialogue. Catherine Liu’s essay on neo-liberalism, the immigrant experience, and her father’s views on To Kill a Mockingbird adds a welcome personal perspective, but doesn’t do much to build a political case against Clinton. And the book would have been greater at twice the length. But it’s a very good and very necessary read, especially as it becomes more and more clear that a Hillary Clinton presidency is inevitable. Appearing on the unmissable CHAPO Trap House podcast, editor Featherstone admitted that what surprised her the most wasn’t that False Choices was met with hostility or ridicule, but rather with indifference: even the most resolute mainstream defenders of Clinton mostly ignored the book. It seems that to this flavor of feminism, there really is only one choice, and holding your candidate to a justifiable standard of behavior isn’t part of the program.

[Roos · Rating 4 out of 5]

HRC is a Republican!

[Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally I have a list of ways to hate Hillary without being my usual sexist self

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had counted the lack of constructive and nuanced debate of the discourses on Hillary Clinton in feminist circles (a not too small social media bubble of activists, GS graduates and political scientists) among a handful of 2016 unresolved personal and political grievances. Liza Featherstone, I applaud your efforts.

The essays are interesting and in many instances insightful. In the end, however, 'Hillary and feminism' would have deserved a bit more of a nuanced treatment. Authors often trail off into rants, and superficial, anecdotal criticisms of Hillary or, annoyingly, suggest that Hillary "should have done" this or that as Bill's *wife* under the Clinton administration. It. has. to. be. more. complicated. than. that. Come. on.

Having said all that, go read it anyway. What pisses you off will at least engage you, and there is a handful of carefully argued and actually very good essays in there too :)

[River · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short thoughts:
This book is an excellent example of the issues that are very common throughout leftists circles-racism, queerphobia, ableism, and ironically enough, classism too. Although the points made about hillary clinton are accurate, it was clear that this book was intended for white upper class cishet leftists to read, and pat themselves on the back for, and not actually intended for marginalized people.

Long thoughts:
So, as everyone in leftists circles knows, issues of racism, classism, queerphobia, ableism, islamphobia etc. are incredibly common in leftists communities. How these issues manifests is somewhat different than it is in other communities, but the issues are there nonetheless and this book was an ongoing reminder of that from beginning to end.

It is worth noting that this is a collection of essays, so expecting all of them to be perfect, or expecting to enjoy all of them would be unrealistic, however, I found the vast majority of them painful. There was one essay in argument for better treatment for people with addictions, which I entirely agree with, but that message was undercut when the writer decided to justify this need not with the fact that neurodivergent people are people and deserve to be treated as such, but because they're dangerous to society when not treated well. The sentiment that disabled people, and neurodivergent people need to be dealt with crept up in other essays too, making it clear that people like me weren't meant to read this. Similarly, this was how low income people were talked about as well. There was lots of mention about how low income people aren't well educated, so perpetuating the idea that bigotry and capitalism is the problem of the low income and those who were not formally educated in a college setting continues even in this book. Although the structural goals of what they were discussing (free healthcare, free education etc.) I strongly support, and these are the goals we should be working towards, the underlining reason they seemed to have these beliefs is because we're just harmful to society, when it should be because we're all human and should minimize all the suffering we possibly can. Not to mention the fact that many bigoted people are upper class, and hold college degrees-I don't feel I should need to say this to fellow leftists, but bigotry is not an issue limited to low income people, people without formal educations, and disabled people-it's a societal issue, and one that a bachelor's degree is not going to cure.

In a similar vein, there was discussions of "transgendereds" and our "medical needs" which still missed the mark. Race was discussed tactlessly as well, with multiple of the writers calling black people "blacks" and latinx people "hispanics." This said, it wasn't surprising that when I came across the chapter on reproductive rights the focus was on women's abilities to receive abortions-never mind the fact that trans men, and some nonbinary people are also able to get pregnant, and that not all women can. The essay was, rightfully, criticizing how little democrats have actually done for reproductive health, and how the focus on abortion hasn't led to increased accessibility to abortion, which is definitely an issue. However, the cissexist language was obviously annoying, as was a comment about "jihadist misogynists". It was odd, because many of the essays had cissexists language, but would then turn around and mention us "transgendereds" to the point that it felt like a show for other cis people to read, and say, "wow, so progressive."

When we decide we want to be active in political communities, and/or we want to help support people who face marginalization we don't it's most important that we center that group in the front. If you want to be an ally to trans people (or any other group you are not part of), you need to not be in the spotlight, and you need to work with that community and aid them in whatever way possible. When you refer to black people as "blacks" and trans people as "transgendereds" and disabled people as "addicts" and so on and so forth, we know that you're not working with us, but trying to be some sort of savior instead.

The best essay, in my opinion, was The Great Ambivalence by Tressie Mcmillan Cottom. I would highly recommend reading that essay. As far as the others go, if you can get through all the bigotry most do have good information in regards to the clintons, and democratic party in general, but there's certainly better work to be found.

[Kaleb Wulf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeez, hope she doesn't become president

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hillary Clinton is terrible. She's a warmonger with blood up to her elbows. She's bourgeois scum who hates the poor. Despite her rhetoric about women and children, she has been an integral party of many political decisions that hurt and killed countless women and children. She's truly a monster and I hope she burns in hell.

But I'm still probably going to vote for her because Trump is far worse and I believe that vote is a strategic choice not an endorsement.

False Choices is essential if you want to go into the second Clinton administration with the scales off your eyes. This collection of essays covers all the major issues with Hillary Clinton in an very readable manner. Being a collection of essays, not every part is of the same quality. Some essays dig into the specifics of Hillary Clinton's background and illuminate threads that you weren't aware of. Megan Erickson's essay tracing the threads from Clinton's radical views on children in the 1970s to her anti-teacher policies starting in the 1980s is absolutely riveting. Kathleen Grier on Clinton's false economic populism, Yasmin Nair on Clinton and carceral feminism, and Belén Fernández on Clinton's violence in Honduras are also essential.

Some essays, on the other hand, feel like previously existing op-eds that have a Clinton-related intro/outro appended. Frances Fox Piven is the most egregious example here. Catherine Liu's essay that tries to tie together Clinton and Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchmen also feels repurposed.

Still, for it's flaws, it's still essential. Clinton will mostly likely be our president. Naive optimism won't help us any more than it helped us with the disappointing Obama presidency.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

The premise of False Choices is simple: the policies and politics of Hillary Clinton fails women in a variety of ways, particularly when analyzed by feminist critics. And the book manages to verify this through 13 essays from feminist writers, each one with exhaustive sourced (!!!) research and anecdotes about the democratic frontrunner.
For the most part, this book is an excellent primer into why feminist-minded and leftist voters should be skeptical of Hillary's brand of "trickle-down feminism," but it doesn't verge into accelerationist pining for a Trump presidency. All of the writers refuse to mince words about policies of Clinton's that were detrimental to women, but it's all focused through the lens of informative researched writing, rather than persuasive rhetorical essays.
Additionally, the book is a quick read, as every essay takes 10-15 minutes to read despite being packed full of information. My only knock is that I wish it was even longer.

[Jayney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a bit too young to really take in the politics of "the Clintons"when Bill had the presidency. I knew Hilary wasn't a feminist. She doesn't stand for any feminism that I am aware of yet she has been branded as this uber feminist who might be the next president. This book confirms that she isn't a feminist and highlights shocking politics that Hilary has been involved in. I truly believe that she isn't the person to be the next president despite what sexual organs she has. I'd like the first female president to be a feminist. This book tells you who Hilary Clinton is. It is very valuable and very relevant.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good collection of essays, each one covering a way in which Hillary Clinton, the "feminist" presidential candidate, either alone or in close cooperation with her husband, has hurt the poor, the sick and the most vulnerable (yes, and women) during her long political career. And not only in the US.

Before this book, I had a vague feeling of uneasiness about her, but didn't know why. Now I do. If even half of the facts in this book are true, she's partly responsible for the coming of Trump, as well as for a lot of death and suffering.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'm politically quite close to a lot of the positions expressed in this book, but I can't help but feel like it's preaching to the choir. Reading through it made me feel like there's not a lot of effort expended in reaching out to mainstream Democrats who might not be familiar with the history of the School of the Americas, for example. However, the essays are fairly succinct and nice to share with like-minded friends.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably reading this a bit late as in a lot of the essays there was an expectation that HRC would become President. Either way it is an important book imo

[Nisreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides valuable insights into the views and politics of feminists on the far end of the left, and their perception of Clinton, the Democratic Party and white neoliberal feminism. I definitely don’t agree with a lot of the views and arguments mentioned in the book, especially the naive, not to say misleading, essays on the USA intervention politics which lacked nuance and vision. However, I do believe this book is an important read as it allow us, “liberals”, to challenge our own views and politics, in order to steer away from the “bad guys vs good guys” rhetoric in favour of a more nuanced and balanced approach.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays presents an in-depth analysis of the ways in which Hillary Clinton's brand of feminism is simply that, a brand. A feminist marketing scheme does not make feminist policies, and this collection does an astute job of navigating her imperialist, war-mongering drive as Secretary of State, and the ways in which her heavy involvement in her husband's administration deprived, and still deprives, minority women of their rights.

If I'm honest, this collection took a lot of work for me to really get into, because I feel like the first 100 pages or so were quite dry, and often the essays weren't written in a particularly compelling way. Also in parts I really did flinch at the insensitive writing (sometimes it was obvious the authors were not a part of the groups being spoken about, eg, the working class). Also this collection was written before the election, in fact, back when Bernie Sanders still had a sliver of a chance of becoming the democratic nominee, therefore there's a small undercurrent of devastating, dramatic irony every time one of the essayists evokes that pre-election disbelief that Trump could ever become President. Also, the play script prologue was overwhelmingly contrived and almost made me ditch the book straight away. However, as English woman who doesn't know a lot about the intricacies of US politics, the beginning essays were enlightening and gave me some more concrete arguments to back up my dislike of Hillary Clinton (lol), and I'm glad I stuck with it as towards the end of the book I really engaged with the essays, and that will be the meat of my review below. The collection is split into Part I: Hillary at Home which details her work as an influence in her husband's administration, and Part II: Hillary Abroad focussing on her work as Secretary of State under the Obama administration, and the ways in which she exacerbated US involvement in various wars.

The essay Ending Poverty as We Know It did a nice job breaking down the structures of full employment and the negative consequences this has when not supported by any steadfast policies such as paid leave, protection of resources, an end to wage slavery etc. In essence, an analysis of the US welfare state. I thought it was pretty interesting.

I had a couple of issues with Free the Children! by Amber A'Lee Frost. Not on the main topic of criticising Clinton's charity work, but on Frost's critique of third-wave feminism.

...despite the alleged eras of 'intersectional' feminism, civil rights, poverty, and the welfare of children have been effectively cleaved from feminism. Since the second wave, the mainstream feminist movement abandoned its most radical tendencies and certainly its materialist policy goals...there is no mass call beyond representation...

Well, sorry but I call bullshit. I think there's an element of a just critique there, in that a movement solely focussed on representation would be pretty useless, for example look at Wonder Woman and what that represents, just because we have a female lead doesn't change the pro-military genre, we just have more branded feminism akin to Hillary Clinton. But, I digress. Representation has its merits in informing the culture of our society, and considering how technology has made media much more readily available today I think representation is a far more relevant topic than it would have been at the time of the second wave. However, Frost is steadfastly ignoring the fact that intersectional third wave feminism advocates for minority groups beyond representation (and much of mainstream second wave feminism ignored minority groups). And as for the 'no mass call' comment, I wonder how different her argument would be if she wrote this after the #metoo and Time's Up movements, and the Women's Marches?

I was really looking forward to reading Catherine Liu's Neoliberal Fictions: Harper Lee, Hillary Clinton and my Dad but aside from my horror at the missing Oxford comma in the title my reaction at the end was pretty ambivalent. As someone who likes a good analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird, and as one of the disappointed readers of Go Set a Watchman that Liu mentions, I was ready for a really interesting relation of these novels to wider US society. And yes, Liu did deliver, analysing the narrative of southern white women and novels, the WASPy racism of Attics in GSaW, etc, and yes she did talk about the hypocrisy of the Clinton's 'playing golf with rich black Americans' whilst ignoring class and race structures and supporting the language of 'self-help' to divert attention from this racist society, but that's all pretty much stuff you can consider yourself or read elsewhere. The most original and interesting parts of this essay were the anecdotes about her dad and musings on immigrant identity, but I didn't feel they meshed well with an analysis of the Clintons.

Now if I could give a five star rating to the last seven essays in this collection, I would. I don't know why I felt this half of the collection was worlds beyond the first half. Perhaps the writing was consistently more compelling? Perhaps the writers don't use their platform to attack third wave feminism generally rather than targeting Hillary's specific capitalist-imperialist 'feminism'? Or perhaps I'm just far more interested in these topics rather than the more economically-focussed fare previously. Whatever the reason, I was able to stop forcing myself through the collection at this point and actually enjoy and engage more with the texts.

Page 89 is where it starts to get really good, with Donna Murch's The Clinton's War on Drugs: Why Black Lives Didn't Matter , followed by Yasmin Nair's Marry the State, Jail the People: Hillary Clinton and the Rise of Carceral Feminism which both gives very concrete analyses of racial structures in the United States, and the causes and effects of the prison-industrial complex, including the impact on minority groups, specifically racial minorities and victims of domestic violence. The latter essay provides a more focussed view on this and really interrogates the reliance on punitive measures and the lack of any good outcomes and progress as a result. If you read just one essay in this entire collection, make it Nair's Marry the State.

The good essays continue with Maureen Tkacik's Abortion and the Politics of Failure which I would argue does the best job in the whole collection of directly interrogating Hillary's marketing of herself as a feminist, by analysing how she uses abortion rights as a masthead, but fails to have any other policies behind it. She manages to make even the factual descriptions of contraceptive and abortion-pill ingredients interesting with her informal style of writing and hilarious anecdotes, making it the most compelling writing of the lot.

It seems ill-conceived to have tethered feminism to such a narrow issue as abortion. Yet it makes sense from an insular Beltway fund-raising perspective to focus on an issue that makes no demands - the opposite, really - of the oligarch class; this is probably a big reason why EMILY's List has never dabbled in backing universal pre-K or paid maternity leave....

By the end of the essay, after analysing the costs and other sacrifices in both choosing to abort and choosing to have a child, Tkacik implies that choosing to have the child is supported less in Hillary's world, which I found really interesting. Side note, the focus exclusively on cis women was a bit tiresome. Can't wait for the day that reproductive rights analyses will be fully inclusive of all genders.

Part II: Hillary Abroad

I agree with Margaret Corvid in Hillary Screws Sex Workers in that the decriminalisation of sex-work is a much more prominent topic in the UK than the US (although I could be saying that as a product of the friends I keep and the party I'm a member of which, as I do, supports full decrim), so it's probably much more impactful for a US citizen to read this argument. The bit that stood out to me was the analysis of how aid functions in relation to political divisions:

In a little-noticed codicil to its massive global anti-AIDS funding campaign, the US Agency for International Development denied funding to any organization that did not explicitly oppose prostitution'

This topic is broached again in Belén Fernández's Hillary Does Honduras , in which Fernández mentions that Obama did not label the coup ousting socialist Zelaya from power as a 'military coup', which would have 'triggered an immediate cutoff of US military and other aid to the country'. (The continued US intervention after this coup was in order for H. Clinton et al. to 'ensure that a reinstatement of Zelaya was avoided at all costs'.) Additionally, it is cited that 'since the coup, the US government has increased military aid to Honduras to its highest levels in history'.

Going back to Nair's Marry the State, Jail the People this question of aid comes up again in light of Uganda's anti-gay bill, in which Clinton was threatening 'to cut off aid to countries that did not hew to US-defined ideas of 'gay rights''. Now that might seem like an unfair criticism of Clinton, since gay people were literally being murdered. (Disclaimer, I'm not straight and LGBT-focussed rights are my largest personal area of engagement). However, Nair describes how 'African activists implored the West not to enact economic measures that would harm the most vulnerable in their countries, including lesbians, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and pointed out that laws criminalizing homosexuality were based on colonial legacies of homophobia'. Good point.

Ultimately, the reason I've quoted all of this is because it raises the questions, what is aid, does it actually help, and to what extent is it just a facet of imperialism? In relation to Uganda, and Africa as a continent, it's implied here that it's effective at helping the disenfranchised, however in Honduras military aid is a weapon to overthrow and manipulate governments. Ultimately, aid is given and retracted in accordance with how well figures like Hillary Clinton judge the American way of life, aka capitalist imperialist neo-liberal ideology, to be spreading. A pretty miserable thought.

Hillary Does Honduras was an incredibly interesting read for me as I know approximately nothing about Central (or South) America, and Medea Benjamin's Pink-Slipping Hillary is another, wider analysis of Hillary's involvement and exacerbation of war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen) and relations with the Koreas and Russia, which is definitely worth a read.

When Clinton announced her second campaign for the presidency, she declared she was entering the race to be the champion for "everyday Americans." As a lawmaker and diplomat, however, Clinton has long championed military campaigns that have killed scores of "everyday" people abroad'....

A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war - killing people around the world, plenty of them women and children.

I think this collection of essays has a pretty broad range in quality, and a general weakness is a lack of solutions, no matter how vague, to balance out the analyses. However, it's definitely worth a read, and while some of the essays tend to stray a bit from Clinton herself, many are insightful and astute, providing sharp analyses of Hillary Clinton's faux feminism and role as a figure of imperialism.

I'll end this absurdly long review/essay with a quote from the last essay, Zillah Eisenstein's Beyond Hillary: Toward Ant-racist, Anti-imperialist Feminisms:

Feminists of every sort need to mobilize and push for a multipronged agenda, during and long after the 2016 presidential election, stand in broad coalition with others against racist, patriarchal imperialist practices wherever they exist, and demand an end to human and ecological destruction'.

[Jordan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm halfway through the first essay and I just can't keep reading.

In the 40 or so pages this book has demonstrated to me nothing of intellect, only the same old vague points haphazardly strung together to explain why Clinton just isn't good enough. There aren't many fundamentally wrong things being said, but there is a lot of bad interpretation and things are written in a purposefully negative way. For instance, referencing the fact Clinton worked at the Children's Defense Fund (But only for one year!) - like okay, forget she remained best friends with the president of the company for the rest of her life, and forget mentioning the work she did that year which helped convince Congress to pass a bill ensuring educational opportunities for handicapped children (prior to which, there had been no legal requirement to meet disabled students needs - and by needs, I mean literally just having architecture in place that enables disabled students to access the building). Instead, we get reminded of the fact Hillary once said that to be a lawyer you have to represent the banks: which, in the world of a realist or pragmatist, that's just a true statement. Basically we're presented a false narrative: Clinton moves from public to private sector, so now we should all hate her and she just wants all the money in the world so she can bathe in diamonds and throw silver dollars at homeless kids. I'm loosely paraphrasing but you get the idea.

Each of the essays in this book are authored by different people, but of the three sections I've read so far none of them has impressed. The first essay is as discussed above. The introduction is as discussed in my update while reading the book. And the weird play thing at the start is just one of the worst things I have ever read. It's basically a couple at home watching a debate, one of the wives is particularly 'woke' and feels the need to show her 'wokeness' by deconstructing any reason anyone would have for supporting Hillary. The other wife is more tempered and supports Hillary. I know from the title of the book I should have been rooting for the super-progressive edgelord who knows absolutely nothing about politics despite the posturing and the buzzwords and 'Benghazi' etc etc. But the piece is written so badly that it's parodic of itself, and the only person I felt bad for was the pro-Hillary wife.

The back of the book also has an FAQ which probably amuses no-one but the absolutely most feminist and Left Wing: 'IS THIS BOOK SEXIST? No. The contributors are radical and feminist, and almost all are women. But sometimes even men write things about Hillary that are not sexist.' Yeah, somebody actually put that on a blurb and thought 'this is good!' Besides the obvious problem of the fact that the author seemingly believes women can't be sexist towards other women, it already communicates to you the whole point of this collection in its pure condescension and presumption of your ignorance.

This book seems only to be written to preach to the choir. If you don't like Hillary and want to bask in how smart you are for not liking her then you'll have a roaring good time with this. However if you have even vague notions of how Congress works, or how presidential campaigns work, or foreign policy, or kind of bow to any of the realities that politics requires then you probably won't enjoy this.

As a sidenote, it was interesting to see how some of the things mentioned in this book actually happened. Such as the BLM supporters that showed up at one of her town hall meetings. This book acts as though they were shunted off to the side and ignored because Clinton doesn't care about anyone but herself and her money blah blah blah. When, in the real world, Clinton met with the activists backstage because they had arrived too late to gain entrance, and she fostered an (initially) rocky relationship with them which resulted in her policies becoming more race-oriented #themoreyouknow.

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lewis' Law, "Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism", can be applied to this book - "Comments on Hillary Rodham Clinton justify feminism". Even from self-proclaimed left-wing radical feminists, the conflation of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton abounds. The only good essays in this book (there are two) are the ones that address Hillary's foreign track record. This actually makes sense given her old position as Secretary of State and that you can talk about the things she has said and done. The other essays desperately attempt to attribute Bill's track record to Hillary's with little success. Judge Hillary for her own actions and words, not her husband's. "Somebodies not somebody's", right? Right?

There are several errors in argumentation in the essays. For example, when critiquing Bill's track record on welfare, one essay argues that the short-term gains resulting in prosperity in the late 1990s were followed by far-worse long-term losses. The proposed solution? The policies put in place by other countries in 2011. You know, the ones that have not reached the long-term and thus we cannot know what their long-term consequences will be. Another is when an essayist says that Hillary likens family and children to slavery. A cursory look at the quotation in question shows that Hillary explicitly explains "the rationale" behind laws that liken family and children to slavery, not that she herself actually believes they are comparable. There was also an inexplicable description of Monica Lewinsky as powerless, while just a few paragraphs prior there existed a lamentation of Hillary's purported removal of political agency from women.

It also interests me that the authors explicitly note their radical feminism in several places, when most of the issues discussed were class issues, and thus a socialist feminist lens would be much more apt to explain their thoughts.

It was peculiar to see criticisms of the Violence Against Women Act from this book. I was not expecting that.

In summary, if you want to critique Hillary from a left-wing radical feminist perspective, it should be relatively easy to do so. I can agree that she represents a sort of neoliberal way of thinking and that these criticisms are different than ones coming from the right. However, this book really criticized Bill the most, the twofer Clintons second, and Hillary last.

[Ais · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a series of essays by different individuals addressing different parts of the Clinton ideology, politics and legacy. Though based in the time before the 2016 Presidential Election and aimed at Clinton's Presidential run, reading it in retrospect was nonetheless a learning experience.

I learned a lot from the essays and highlighted many parts to look into later and find out more information. As a book about US politics, it was accessible and easy to understand. I really enjoyed some of the anger and expression in the varying essays- all of the writers have something pivotal to say and they say it with true grit and determination. The language here is mostly great.

How lovely would it be to have a President who truly cares about women (ALL women), sex workers, the homeless, the non-white, the poor? Some of the essayists write fondly about Bernie Sanders, which is, in retrospect, somewhat quixotic. To this extent, the book occupies a space beyond reality. It would be wonderful to have a complete rebellion against the status quo- but unfortunately, that feels either far ahead or an opportunity long past. In either case, the book is important to comprehend the scope and power of the Clinton Dynasty- and usurps somewhat Clinton's podium-perfect 'we're all in this together' image.

[Rhiannon Fennell · Rating 4 out of 5]

**DON'T COMMENT UNLESS YOU HAVE READ THE BOOK THANX :-)

Great set of essays written by radical left feminists criticising Hillary Clintons decisions and actions throughout her career.

Something I have learnt from this book is that almost nothing would've been different if Hillary won the election.

This is a great quote from the book that sums up how I feel about it:

"We must Critique the racist, patriarchal, capitalist and global market that turns 70% of women into migrants and refugees. Stand against the newest expressions of structural racism and misogyny to save the planet and the rest of humanity. Begin to create the networks of solidarity and trust to end the misery that too many suffer daily. We can start not by insulting Hillary Clinton, but by creating resistance and revolutionary alliances of refusal - refusal to go along with the cruel forms of neoliberalism she has worked so hard to enact."

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a split occurring in feminism right now, partially influenced by the backlash against neoliberalism. Third wave feminism got really cozy with capitalism and that has resulted in feminism now being used to sell products, movies and opportunistic female politicians. Many feminists now want to reject this "faux feminism."

This book of essays came right before the 2016 election and challenges the notion of Hillary Clinton as a feminist. Some of them are harsher than others, but they offer a glimpse of how Clinton profited from the oppression of poor women and women of color to make her own feminist narrative.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to grasp what this book is about, or who the intended audience is. Is it an attempt to suggest an alternative praxis to Clinton, or is it simply a challenge of her policies in order to guarantee that we are not satisfied with what she has to offer? Is it a warning of things to come? Many of the texts are well written and make excellent points, but I'm having a hard time grasping what collecting them like this brings to the table.

[Nathan Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely designed for entry-level and for gifting the fence-straddlers in your family; for that purpose, it's probably somewhat effective as it covers most of the bases quickly. For those acquainted with the territory, it's safe to skim around, by which I mean jump straight to Tkacik's standout piece.