We Took Hillary Clinton's MasterClass So That You Don't Have To

Current Affairs

Hillary Clinton has just released an online course on "The Power of Resilience" through the website MasterClass, where celebrities teach their skills. The course has made the news because in it, she delivers the speech she would have given had she won the presidency in 2016, which she did not. We were curious what else is in Hillary Clinton's MasterClass, so Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Nathan J. Robinson, and Lily Sánchez paid the fee and took the class. In this episode, we reveal all of the class's secrets, so that you can take Hillary's MasterClass without actually taking Hillary's MasterClass. Her useful lessons on resilience, negotiation, and more are helpfully summarized in this delightful conversation.

We discuss:

- Why the class seems to be more about helping Clinton process her loss to Donald Trump than a good faith attempt to teach anyone anything

- How the class rewrites history and leaves out all of the horrible things the Clintons have done over the course of their political careers

- How Clinton presents politics as the struggle of ambitious people to achieve personal goals and fulfillment rather than as a collective struggle that necessitates social movements

- Why it's necessary that nobody ever take the lessons of this class seriously, since the last thing we need is a new generation of vacuous Clintonian politicians

- Why it's strange to get lessons on political success from someone whose decisions led to a catastrophic political failure (campaign in Wisconsin is not one of the class lessons)

Yasmin's Baffler article on Clinton's dystopian elite feminism is here. Her article "Dynasties of Neoliberalism" also discusses Clinton. Nathan's book on Bill Clinton, Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America, is available here. His article dissecting the Clinton campaign is here. The quote from Bill Clinton about Obama is from a 2012 New Yorker article.