Last week, Hillary Clinton made her first significant speech since losing the unlosable election. If you were hoping that the former nominee would stare her defeat square in the face and concede that her failure was also the failure of the US economy to provide for most of its citizens, let me bottle your optimism. I’d really like to huff on it the next time some neoliberal grandee talks about “inclusion” and “big hearts” instead of the everyday harm done to everyday people by elite faith in fictitious capital. Such as Clinton has long upheld.

No. What Clinton spoke about was not the urgent need for the Democratic Party to sever its ties and commitment to its most generous donors, one of who interviewed Clinton on this occasion. Not about critical wage stagnation or the damage of the state’s neglect. She spoke about the need for wide acceptance of her own unvarnished self. Not, of course, that the substance of her speech received much analysis at all. Instead, there was praise lavished on her choice of a leather jacket teamed with—can you believe it?—a blouse covered in flowers!

This fashion mind decay is everywhere.

This fashion mind decay is everywhere. As the people’s faith in the Democratic Party falls apart—Independent Senator Bernie Sanders regularly topping “which politician would you like to kill least?” polls among both registered Democrats and Republicans—the breathless faith by press in Clinton builds. You’d expect it, I guess, from middling US outlets whose hapless teen workers have no choice but to feed the prisoners of the USA SEO-friendly pablum about the fashion choices of strong women. But, what in the name of actual cosmic shit is it doing in our newspapers?

A piece in the Sydney Morning Herald announces that, “HRod is back, and she is boss”, the term “boss” functioning here, I suppose, as a routine “hip” theft by mainstream outlets of the black American vernacular from a decade ago. But also functioning as a reminder to its ingroup readership of women who can afford to make bold fashion choices that Clinton really is the boss, even if she lost the election. She’s our boss, and we know this because she’s “ditched the pantsuits” in favour of a “badass leather jacket”.

In short, it is only if you offer your full support to the policies of Malcolm Turnbull that you can lay claim to wanting Clinton, who actually lies to his economic right, as your “boss”.

Clinton and her centre-right, market-friendly interventionist politics are not what many Australians would nominate as their “boss”. I mean, sure, these principles go down very well at the IPA, but the rest of us retain a belief, albeit diminished since the time of Keating, in stuff like workplace protections and the welfare state. Clinton is an opponent of the welfare state and played a significant role in finally undoing those protections set in place by FDR. A few years before declaring her candidacy, Clinton was a great fan of the TPP that would strip many workers of the world of any protections at all. Actually, she selected a running mate who had praised the lopsided trade agreement just hours before his announcement.

In short, it is only if you offer your full support to the policies of Malcolm Turnbull that you can lay claim to wanting Clinton, who actually lies to his economic right, as your “boss”. Which is fine, of course. Far be it from me to smash your delusion that what the working-class needs is a good dose of starvation to really get them off their arses. You are thoroughly entitled to believe that the key to “inclusion” is held in the vaults of our biggest banks. But what you are not entitled to do, especially if you are a journalist writing in a storied newspaper, is obscure the fact of dominant, and clearly articulated, policy with a whole load of stinking tripe about how leather jackets make the Secretary look as though she is “not to be messed with, but not like she’s going to mess you up.” Pant, pant.

Clinton has messed the lives of many people up throughout her long career. The people of Libya and Honduras lost their lives in recent times. She messed with the lives of “super predators”, a code word for black American youth, for whose easy and profitable incarceration she successfully advocated in 1994. All of these “hard choices” made in favour of corporate America and to the detriment of the people are not choices we Australians have permitted our own leaders to so freely make.

Our neoliberalism has been softer than that of other Western nations….we don’t have some mad bag of circus peanuts running the nation just because he promised to give us jobs building a big dumb wall.

Our neoliberalism has been softer than that of other Western nations. As a consequence of this, and certain geopolitical factors (you guys really should be thanking China more often), our income inequality is less pronounced. As a consequence of this, we don’t have some mad bag of circus peanuts running the nation just because he promised to give us jobs building a big dumb wall.

Not to sound like my dad, but, FFS. Enough of this Americanisation. They’ve failed to manage their own capitalist crisis which we more or less evaded (you guys really should be thanking Wayne Swan more often. Also, China). To celebrate one of the prominent purveyors of the financialisation which screwed much of the world because of a “badass” leather jacket is folly of the first order.

If one listens to Clinton’s speech, and the sympathetic interview with her corporate donor, one can hear that her policies have not changed. This leader advocates still for “personal responsibility”, which goes for everyone in the USA save for financial institutions she voted to save after their own fuck-up. This leader tells the one percent feminists wealthy enough to attend her talk that it is up to business to lead the nation’s politics by example. She explicitly says that entities whose very existence depends on profit should be the political and moral arbiters of our time. Yes. Let’s leave it all up to Apple. They’ll really know what’s best.

What does Clinton have aside from Hallmark speeches about kind hearts and a fortune amassed from her close work with Wall Street?

What Clinton also says, of course, is that “inclusion” is important. This is the only thing that marks her difference from the IPA and, I guess, it’s the reason that the Sydney Morning Herald can listen to the same speech that I did and not hear a paean to profit but, as the reporter puts it, a critique of “well, everything”. No. She has criticised nothing save for the fact that her economic policies, which were absolutely communicated as an extension of previous economic policies, were rejected by many voters. Because, my god, if you can’t afford a leather jacket as nice as Christine Lagarde’s, also praised in the piece presumably for its good work in dooming several nations to decades of austerity, then economic policy matters.

There are many people who see Clinton, most especially when dressed in leather, as part of “the resistance”. But, her snappy Black Power-wear must be read, alongside her language of “inclusion”, as a costume. Are these the policies we want? Is this the sort of politician who merits our devotion? What does she have aside from Hallmark speeches about kind hearts and a fortune amassed from her close work with Wall Street?

A leather jacket.