Hillary Clinton launches group at Columbia dedicated to preventing more Trumps getting elected

by Monica Showalter 

What's failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton up to these days?

Based on what I saw in my Columbia University just-out alumni magazine, she's out and about trying to prevent the election of More Trumps.

In early 2024, she had been installed as a 'professor of practice' at Columbia University's prestigious School for International and Public Affairs, known as SIPA, and from there, founded something called the 'Institute of Global Politics.'

Now the Institute of Global Politics, partnering with the lefty Reynolds Foundation (which is linked to more famously lefty Jane Street Capital), has launched something called the 'American Democracy Initiative,' dedicated to 'saving democracy' here in the U.S. by finding ways to prevent the election of More Trumps.

Oh, they didn't say it that way, but if you read their output, that's what they have in mind.

Hillary was quoted in the alumni magazine this way:

"This work could not be more urgent,” said Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton ’22HON, a professor at SIPA and chair of the IGP faculty advisory board. “American democracy is facing serious threats, and it will take rigorous research, fresh thinking, and broad and bipartisan coalitions to meet them."

 

The American Democracy Initiative's website gives this dreamy description:

Led by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs, IGP’s American Democracy Initiative convenes leading scholars and practitioners with SIPA’s world-class faculty to develop and disseminate actionable ideas to deepen and defend American democracy. IGP’s American Democracy Initiative will bring fresh ideas and strategies to these challenges, facilitating original research, convening scholars and experts, translating research into actionable strategy, and communicating with civil society leaders and government officials across the political spectrum.

 

Which is weird stuff, given that SIPA is a school for future diplomats, not an American campaign outlet for opposition research.

The program includes a tacked-on mission of educating Latin American journalists, which is kind of duplicative with other Columbia programs, and probably there for the foreign affairs flavor, and the main first paper brings up right-wing populist surges in Europe, which they intend to 'dampen' down, too.

This means placing the U.S. experience with right-wing populism into the broader context of the global shift toward this movement, and to look for potential causes and levers to dampen support both abroad and at home.

Can't have citizens voting a certain way, you see.

But the core mission let the cat out of the bag with these details:

In a collaboration with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez commissioned a series of essays from economists, political scientists, and sociologists on why economic policymakers need to consider defining the protection of democracy as a goal for economic policy design. The essays outline how economic policy failures contributed to the rise of right-wing populism, how populist leaders channeled mass discontent from economic policy failures into political power, and how future economic policy design might dampen the mass appeal of right-wing populism that threatens democracy. You can read more about the essay series and read Alexander Hertel-Fernandez’s essay with Equitable Growth President Shayna Strom here: 

Last I heard, President Trump was democratically elected despite electoral cheating, a massive barrage of lawfare, bids to get him thrown off the ballot, and at least two assassination attempts. But that's a threat to democracy, you see.

The policy prescriptions are predictably banal, suggesting that Clinton's fingerprints are all over this. 

A button follows. I clicked the button and read further:

This essay is the first in a series Equitable Growth will publish by a number of experts exploring the implications of right-wing populism for those making and following U.S. economic policies. In this essay—and throughout the broader essay series—we stress three intellectual contributions of the overall series.

First, we argue that the surge in support for right-wing populism merits attention not just from political pundits and strategists, but also from policy leaders who research, design, and implement economic policies. Put simply, the downstream effects of economic policy for politics and democracy merit far more attention than they have been getting in policy design and implementation.

Second, we argue that meeting this new view of economic policymaking will require drawing from a broader set of scholarship than traditionally has been engaged in the U.S. economic policy process. That includes economics but also expands to cover work in political science and sociology.

And third, we argue that U.S. policymakers, who often are used to thinking about American exceptionalism, need to learn from the broader global shifts in support for right-wing populism around the globe. This means placing the U.S. experience with right-wing populism into the broader context of the global shift toward this movement, and to look for potential causes and levers to dampen support both abroad and at home.

It's so 2008:

They basically say: Trump voters are workers in rust-belt states like Ohio. They're unhappy with free trade taking their jobs. They're upset at greenie regulations raising their cost of living. They blame foreigners.

Best way to deal with them? Put them on the public dole.

What are their solutions? 

Well, put more Americans on welfare, making them wards of the state. 

In a similar vein, an analysis of elections from 1990 to 2017 across rich democracies found that populist parties did better when incumbent parties made cuts to social spending, especially unemployment benefits, and populist parties fared worse when countries spent more on such benefits—evidence that compensating individuals and communities facing economic shocks can blunt demand for right-wing populism.22 And a third study found that government austerity, especially cutbacks to income support programs, pulls economically vulnerable regions and individuals to the populist right.23

Throw money at them, make them go away. That's prevent them from electing More Trumps.

I'll bet.

It get worse when they start bringing up Joe Biden's economic policies as objectively wonderful, but victims of bad 'messaging' which is pretty much what the Bidenites claimed.

I added some boldface:

While in office, former President Biden pursued a set of economic policies that broke from traditional approaches for economic governance, recognizing the ways that trade, antitrust, and consumer regulatory policies have, over decades, often eroded working- and middle-class jobs and advantaged concentrated economic interests over workers.47 President Biden and his team sought to leverage historic new infrastructure investments to create high-quality new jobs in stagnating communities across the country. Building on new scholarship in economics and law, this bundle of approaches pursued by the Biden-Harris administration came to be dubbed “Bidenomics.”

 

The thinking behind Bidenomics and the framework we have laid out in this essay are quite aligned. Specifically, they both highlight how past economic policy decisions around trade and regulation have hollowed out working-class communities across the country and both focus on strengthening unions as an economic and democratic imperative, on checking outsized corporate influence on the economy and politics to boost government responsiveness to working- and middle-class workers and their families, and on investing in good jobs in specific communities and places, not just transferring money to people.

 

But there are some important ways in which our framework either goes beyond the Bidenomics approach or departs from it. Perhaps most notably, much of the Biden-Harris administration assumed that good economic policy decisions would speak for themselves. When presidential administrations make policy, they inevitably have a heuristic they use to quickly check whether a given policy design meets their internal goals. The Biden-Harris administration’s shorthand was sometimes dubbed “deliverism”—a strategy to achieve political support by producing concrete material gains for the public—and policies were evaluated internally in part by whether they fit the goals of deliverism.48

Oh, give me a break. Does it ever occur to these scholars that maybe there was a problem with Biden's policies? That foisting greenie regulations was a very good damper for creating startups, and raising the minimum wage was a very good way to knock the lower rungs off the job ladders for the lowest-skilled workers,. ensuring that many never got a start at all? Yeah, yeah, put them on welfare as wards of the state, that'll shut 'em up.

 

That workers are fed up with unions and don't want their dues going to kickbacks to Democrats? That Biden opened the border to all comers, numbering in their millions, driving down wages for workers across the board? Or that corporate America essentially shut young white male workers out of the workplace in the name of pursuing DEI? Or that those who took the time and effort to pursue STEM majors in engineering and other non-gut majors were on the unemployment lines as H1-B visa holders, who worked cheaper and were exempt from taxes, got the jobs? 

 

Those are the things that elected Trump, along with worker anger over election cheating with cardboard taped over the windows of the ballot counting stations and truck drivers reporting ballot deliveries to be counted, over and over, in multiple states? And don't forget the lawfare, lots and lots of lawfare, that tried to knock Trump out of the presidential race in 2024. And the suppression of free speech on social media, extending even to major newspapers such as the New York Post, which had a significant scoop on the Hunter Biden laptop, revealing untold corruption from Democrats.

 

Nobody addressed those things, and yes, they were and are lethal threats to democracy, which motivated voters of all colors and ages to get to the polls for Trump as the only one who could be relied upon to stop them.

 

What is Hillary Clinton doing this for? And why is Columbia University allowing this disguised campaign to elect Democrats ho on as a university that claims to prize diversity of thought and idea, but in reality, is dedicated to electing more dreary Hillaries? It's disgusting. The only thing good about it is that it won't persuade many voters. They ought to shut this partisan program down.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/01/hillary_clinton_launches_group_at_columbia_dedicated_to_preventing_more_trumps_getting_elected.html