The Left is still trying desperately to rationalize Hillary Clinton's loss. Tomes will be written about it. Movies will be made about it. And articles like the one written by Joan Walsh for the January edition of The Nation will continue to abound. The "reasons" for Clinton's loss are legion, and thus far none on the Left have settled on a single catalyst. From Comey to "fake news" to Russia, we are back now, thanks to Walsh, to "whitelash." 

According to Walsh, Obama disciples were expected to come out with the same enthusiasm for Clinton on Election Day, if for no other reason than to secure Obama's "political, social, and racial legacy." What happened instead, to Walsh's horror, was that an "unexpected surge of white voters took their country back from a black man [and] refused to hand it over to a liberal white woman."

Newsbusters obtained a copy of Walsh's upcoming article and parses relevant portions below: 

Walsh suggested that Obama hurt Hillary’s chances of winning pretty much by just being himself for eight years. Even though it was Clinton’s name on the ballot, “we can’t look away from the fact that [she] was defeated by Donald Trump…who went from being a washed-up reality-TV star to the leader of the Republican Party because of his cruel and irrational birtherism…That conspiracy theory, and everything it drew into its orbit, resonated strongly with the GOP’s overwhelmingly white base.”

And birtherism, Walsh maintained, was part of “a sustained movement to racialize and marginalize the president—to paint him as siding with African-American cop killers, illegal Mexican immigrants, Muslim terrorists, slutty women who want free birth control, and uppity gay people who demand that Christians bake them wedding cakes—stoked white grievance, especially but not exclusively on the right. Trump’s victory thus represents the culmination of the GOP’s 50-year project to fully racialize electoral politics—to scare an aging, declining white majority into voting as white people in a self-conscious way.”

It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Democrats have spent the better part of two decades alienating white working class voters, condescending to them and vilifying them as backwoods troglodytes and ramming progressive agendas down their throats regardless of how they felt. 

Walsh also leaves out the fact that President-elect Trump fared better with women, Hispanics, and African Americans than did his predecessor Mitt Romney. But in Walsh's mind Trump was catapulted to the White House through the white supremacist vote alone, because that's what entirely comprises the GOP, apparently. 

Walsh then fawns, "[Obama] was a moderate who publicly testified to the greatness of American meritocracy because he believed in it, as he was one of its finest products."

"He succeeded because he had the capacity to make white people feel seen and understood. He gave them the benefit of the doubt about their goodness, and that became a source of his electoral strength—so he was never going to call out the racial animus against him."

Are we living on the same planet? Obama made whites feel "seen and understood?" When? When he was stoking racial divisions over the last eight years, pitting blacks against whites? Did he achieve that when he egged on rioters in Ferguson? Or politicized every justified police shooting? Or was it when he disparaged white Christians as "bitter clingers"? 

Never mind that. Walsh maintains that despite Obama's unifying grace, he provoked "whitelash." 

"It’s tempting to say that he wasn’t well served by his optimism about America…A racial and political pessimist might have faced up to Republican obstruction and the white, right-wing backlash earlier and more forcefully. A pessimist might have had less faith in the goodwill of white people and been better prepared for the backlash."

"Optimism about America" is certainly not a descriptive anyone living in reality would bestow upon a man who spent the last eight years disparaging his country at home and abroad, painting it as an inherently racist subjugating force that needed to be "cut down to size."

Reality, however, is not a world the Left inhabits. It's why they need to cling to fairytales like this.