Young peo­ple, many of whom have no mem­o­ry of Hillary Clin­ton as First Lady, have vot­ed for Bernie Sanders by almost com­i­cal­ly wide mar­gins. They favor him 54 per­cent to 37 per­cent in a USA Today poll tak­en in March. In the Iowa cau­cus, Sanders beat Clin­ton by a near­ly 6‑to‑1 mar­gin — 84 to 14 per­cent — among vot­ers under 30. Clin­ton won vot­ers 65 and old­er by sim­i­lar­ly impres­sive num­bers, 69 per­cent to 26 percent.

Is it real­ly the case, as some have implied, that young peo­ple pre­fer a 74-year-old demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist to Clin­ton because they’re the most sex­ist generation?

It’s not that Hillary Clin­ton is, as she said recent­ly, ​“not a nat­ur­al politi­cian.” It’s not that she’s a pow­er­ful and self-assured woman. Sex­ism sure­ly explains some of the hos­til­i­ty toward her, but it doesn’t begin to account for the fact that Clin­ton is among the most dis­liked and dis­trust­ed can­di­dates in mod­ern Amer­i­can politics.

For insight, per­haps we could turn to a younger Hillary Clin­ton — the one who said, dur­ing her grad­u­a­tion speech to Wellesley’s Class of 1969, ​“We’re not in the posi­tions yet of lead­er­ship and pow­er, but we do have that indis­pens­able task of crit­i­ciz­ing and con­struc­tive protest.”

The one who said, in the same speech: ​“There are some things we feel — feel­ings that our pre­vail­ing, acquis­i­tive and com­pet­i­tive cor­po­rate life, includ­ing trag­i­cal­ly the uni­ver­si­ties, is not the way of life for us. We’re search­ing for more imme­di­ate, ecsta­t­ic and pen­e­trat­ing modes of living.”

The one who con­clud­ed that speech with these lines from a poem: ​“And you and I must be free/​Not to save the world in a glo­ri­ous crusade/​Not to kill our­selves with a name­less gnaw­ing pain/​But to prac­tice with all the skill of our being/​The art of mak­ing possible.”

It isn’t quite fair to com­pare the Hillary Clin­ton of her ear­ly 20s to the Clin­ton of near­ly 70. But near­ly half a cen­tu­ry on from her Welles­ley speech, Clin­ton is in a posi­tion of lead­er­ship and pow­er — pre­cise­ly the tar­get of her crit­i­cism and con­struc­tive protest. That young vale­dic­to­ri­an would under­stand why her cur­rent self is now so dis­trust­ed by young people.

She and her class­mates were part of a gen­er­a­tion that demand­ed and cre­at­ed change. ​“We arrived not yet know­ing what was not pos­si­ble,” as she said then.

Con­se­quent­ly, we expect­ed a lot. Our atti­tudes are eas­i­ly under­stood hav­ing grown up, hav­ing come to con­scious­ness in the first five years of this decade — years dom­i­nat­ed by men with dreams, men in the civ­il rights move­ment, the Peace Corps, the space pro­gram — so we arrived at Welles­ley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expec­ta­tion and real­i­ties. But it was­n’t a dis­cour­ag­ing gap, and it did­n’t turn us into cyn­i­cal, bit­ter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do some­thing about that gap.

By many accounts, Clin­ton has been an effec­tive and often under-the-radar advo­cate for women over the past half cen­tu­ry. Her lega­cy is, nat­u­ral­ly, com­pli­cat­ed and fraught, but she seems to have gen­uine­ly aimed to use her pow­er to change realities.

But there is also this. The gap between expec­ta­tions and real­i­ties can be nar­rowed by chang­ing real­i­ties — or by low­er­ing expec­ta­tions. In their youth, Clin­ton and her gen­er­a­tion of ide­al­ists and pro­tes­tors believed and worked for the first kind of change. They’ve spent much of the sub­se­quent half cen­tu­ry work­ing for the sec­ond. In the 1960s, they rewrote the script that they had inher­it­ed. In the 1980s and 1990s, when they became the pow­ers that be, they rewrote it again.

Today, the lat­ter script says that we face dire chal­lenges across a range of sec­tors — cli­mate change, the cor­rup­tion of our pol­i­tics by pri­vate mon­ey and spe­cial inter­ests, gun vio­lence, racial injus­tice, our dete­ri­o­rat­ing infra­struc­ture, health care costs, income inequal­i­ty and more. Yet the best we can hope for, those adher­ing to that script argue, is main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo or, in the best case sce­nario, incre­men­tal reform.

What­ev­er her ear­ly ambi­tions about ​“practic[ing] with all the skill of our being the art of mak­ing pos­si­ble,” for much of her career Clin­ton has worked from a script whose cen­tral theme is, as George W. Bush once put it, the soft big­otry of low expec­ta­tions. Its plot is deter­mined by the path of least resistance.

It would have tak­en courage for Clin­ton to vote against the Iraq War in 2002; or to ​“evolve” on same-sex mar­riage before her par­ty did; or, as a sen­a­tor from New York, to oppose the bank­rupt­cy bill of 2001, which favored banks and the cred­it card indus­tries; or for to her lead the fight for a $15 min­i­mum wage rather than sup­port­ing a $12 fed­er­al stan­dard. But polit­i­cal courage has nev­er been the Clin­ton brand, of course.

Tak­ing the path of least resis­tance isn’t a crime. No one expects more from Clin­ton than the cau­tion and incre­men­tal­ism that she promis­es. And it’s cer­tain­ly true that if she wins the nom­i­na­tion and the elec­tion, she will be a bet­ter pres­i­dent than most of the alternatives.

And yet there is a vac­u­um in our pol­i­tics wait­ing to be filled. There is a long­ing to rip up the script we’ve been using for so long, the one that every­one — Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats alike — knows isn’t rel­e­vant and isn’t serv­ing us.

Con­sid­er the breath­tak­ing audac­i­ty of what Repub­li­cans have put on the table, and the lev­el of frus­tra­tion and anger their choic­es reveal. One of the fron­trun­ners, Ted Cruz, a man famous­ly repel­lant to and held in con­tempt by near­ly all of his Sen­ate col­leagues; the oth­er, Don­ald Drumpf, a man will­ing to defy many of the cher­ished prin­ci­ples of the party’s plat­form, from his Iraq War cri­tique to his call for clos­ing the trade bor­ders, while open­ly insult­ing near­ly every vot­ing bloc the par­ty needs to win. Those Repub­li­can vot­ers have gone off script.

So, too, have many young peo­ple vot­ing for Sanders. The off-script Clin­ton of 1969 — the one who aspired to a more ecsta­t­ic and pen­e­trat­ing mode of liv­ing, and who said that ​“fear is always with us, but we just don’t have time for it. Not now” — would under­stand. ​“We are, all of us, explor­ing a world that none of us even under­stands,” as Clin­ton put it then, ​“and attempt­ing to cre­ate with­in that uncertainty.”

What we might cre­ate from the uncer­tain­ty of 2016 is still unknown. For the first time since the 1960s, tru­ly pro­found pro­gres­sive changes seem pos­si­ble — in the realms of racial jus­tice, envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice, eco­nom­ic jus­tice and more. Clin­ton comes off as inau­then­tic — not because she’s too ambi­tious, as the crit­i­cism often goes, but because she isn’t ambi­tious enough. She doesn’t appear true to her own val­ues or equal to a moment that begs for some­thing more, begs for some­one who will expect more from her­self, and from us.

Last fall, a friend and I were talk­ing, and one of us asked the oth­er who the Repub­li­cans would nom­i­nate. We made half­heart­ed cas­es for each of the can­di­dates. Final­ly, once none of them seemed like remote­ly plau­si­ble pres­i­den­tial mate­r­i­al, my friend said with a smirk of res­ig­na­tion, ​“Why don’t they give it to Clin­ton now and get it over with?”

For me, that smirk of res­ig­na­tion summed up just about every­thing there is to say, good or ill, about Hillary Clin­ton. Her can­di­da­cy has seemed fat­ed all along. It’s easy to imag­ine a much, much worse pres­i­dent — and a much, much bet­ter one. She would no doubt be per­fect­ly com­pe­tent at coor­di­nat­ing and pre­sid­ing over the same old song and dance of the last few decades. She wouldn’t exact­ly stand in the way of progress, but prob­a­bly wouldn’t help advance it much, either.

And her elec­tion wouldn’t be a tragedy. It would just be the last, sad­dest chap­ter in the Class of 1969’s renun­ci­a­tion of its youth­ful ambi­tions, and the final leg of its long, half-cen­tu­ry march toward dimin­ished hope and low­ered expec­ta­tions. Young peo­ple have lived with the bur­den of that soft big­otry for most, if not all, of their lives. Is it any sur­prise that they now seem ready to try their hands at ​“the art of mak­ing possible”?

A con­densed ver­sion of this op-ed appeared in the June 2016 issue of In These Times. Pur­chase it here.