What if Clinton had won?

Amidst all the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of molars over the very real horrors of Donald Trump’s election, almost no one has talked about the very probable horrors of Hillary Clinton’s presidency had she won.

She was an unrepentant hawk. An interventionist (Libya, Iraq). She was a fan of drone warfare. She wanted to put in place a “no fly zone” over Syria, which could quite possibly have led to direct military conflict with Russia.

She would have been almost as abject a servant of the Israeli extreme right as Trump has turned out to be. This would, as under Trump, have bolstered the longstanding and accurate impression that the U.S. aids and abets Israel in its theft of Palestinian lands and in its oppression of the Palestinian people. If you want  permanent conflict in the Middle East, this is the recipe.

She, like Trump, would have been in bed with the brutal, authoritarian Islamists currently in power in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Turkey, as well as the repressive military regime in Egypt.

She was obsessively secretive and an advocate, likely an architect, of Obama’s war on whistle blowers. She would have continued that war.

Like Obama, she was chummy with the bankers and corporate elite — remember her $5,000-a-minute speech to Goldman Sachs?

I could go on. The similarity of many of her positions, both domestic and foreign, to those of Trump, Obama, and Bush the Lesser are legion.

But let’s talk about why she would have been a disaster from a domestic politics standpoint.

Had she won, she’d have faced a hostile Congress, and even if she’d wanted to make progressive economic changes (she didn’t), the Congress would have stymied her. (Her true priorities were revealed in her “no we can’t” responses to Bernie Sanders during the primary season.) Economically, it would have been more of the same for the next four years: the rich getting richer and the poor and middle class getting screwed.

It would also have meant that the corporate-lackey wing of the Democratic Party — a wing whose strategy has been purely to pander on social issues while serving the corporate and banking elite on economic issues — would have remained firmly in control.  Clinton’s victory would have cemented their control. Now, progressives might seize control of that party.

Had Clinton won, anger over economic inequality would have built, as the Republican propaganda machine (read Fox “News” and Breitbart) cast the center-rightist Clinton as a “leftist” or even a “socialist.”

This would have fed directly into the alt-right/neo-Nazi Trump-base narrative of “elite liberals” thwarting the economic well-being of ordinary Americans.

As gridlock set in even more deeply, anger would have continued to build, likely resulting in even more far-right Republican gains in the House and Senate in 2018, and the likely election of a smoother, more skilled Republican theo-fascist as president in 2020.

As is, we’re saddled with a grotesque excuse for a president: a narcissistic pathological liar, a whining, paper-thin-skinned bully who is obviously and grossly unfit for office.

As such, he’s inciting massive opposition. Millions of people who have never before been politically active have become so, doing everything from taking to the streets and engaging in civil disobedience to simply calling their congressional representatives or showing up at town halls.

Would this have happened under Clinton? No. Not a chance. At least on nothing approaching the current level.

Rather than the rise of massive progressive opposition, the neo-fascist, phony-populist right would have continued its ascension.

Now, Trump and his alt-right tools are in control, and they have to own what they produce. Their economic policies insure that they can’t deliver on their economic promises and will instead deliver more misery to the working class and what’s left of the middle class.

Thus, there’s already mass progressive opposition. And it will grow.

Some misinformed leftists have argued that the election of Trump was a disaster. It was. What they forget is that the election of Hillary Clinton would, in the long run (barring mass incineration), have been an even bigger disaster.