Former President Bill Clinton warned on a podcast Monday that he believes there’s a “war” on “diversity” within American politics following President-elect Donald Trump’s win in November.
During Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, Clinton publicly supported her, joining the trail in key battleground states in October. On the “Leading” podcast, co-host Alastair Campbell asked the former president what had “gone wrong” in American politics to bring Trump back into office, saying that populism is “on the march.”
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“Well, I think several things have gone wrong, and we’re sort of responsible for not winning when I think we should but it’s important for our friends in the UK and throughout Europe to remember that since I was elected and then re-elected we have only lost the popular vote in America twice,” Clinton said.
“Once when George Bush was given the narrowest re-election margin since Woodrow Wilson just before World War I. And once in this most recent election when we had to run with an enormous number of problems, and we lost by a million and a half or a million and six votes — less than Hillary beat Donald Trump by in 2016,” Clinton added. “So it’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world, but there is a war going on in America now essentially to try to dismantle the politics of inclusive tribalism.”
Clinton went on to say that he believes there is an attempt to push identity politics as a “zero-sum game.” He said that the issue lies in both “identity” and “economics.”
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“That is a politics that treats diversity as an asset, and no one can repeal it. But the idea is to make people around the edges feel that identity is a zero-sum game not a positive-sum game. I think a lot of it is the extreme income inequality that we’ve seen that in America beginning with a financial crash and 2008 things were getting very tough,” Clinton said.
“As you saw in the UK the left moved left and basically saying the government can fix all this and a lot of this is about culture, how we treat each other, how we live together, what we hold on to and what we give up and it’s highly complicated,” Clinton said. “But mostly it’s about the sense that life is being constantly upended and a lot of people want to hold on to at least what they’ve got and to do better without giving up social conventions and arrangements that they believe in. So people ask me all the time, is this about identity or economics and the answer is both.”
While on the campaign trail, Clinton received mixed reactions after making a slew of bizarre comments, including his admission that he found former Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake “physically attractive” in October.
Democrats, following Trump’s win in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, were confused about how the former president had won over voters, especially key voting blocs for Democrats. However, some political pundits had been warning Harris about her and her team’s rhetoric, specifically after she called Trump a fascist and compared him to former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.