The Counterfactual in the Age of Trump

Extract

“If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election …” Wouldn't it be nice to climb down into that imaginative rabbit hole and stay there for a while? The possibilities are so reassuringly normal—as opposed to the strange nightmare in which we find ourselves today. For the purposes of this roundtable, however, I wish to consider only one small potential consequence of a Hillary win: and that is what it would have been like to read Catherine Gallagher's new book if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. I would probably have experienced Telling It Like It Wasn't as a fascinating intellectual history of a mode or a discourse that has enormous political purchase today, largely as a result of its “affiliation with legal and political historical justice projects.” Although thinkers of all political persuasions use this mode, Gallagher explains, the political counterfactual has played a particularly prominent role in “the pressure exerted by the civil rights movement in favor of a Second Reconstruction, affirmative action programs, and claims for reparations” (124–25). It has served as a way to right the wrongs of history, in other words, and as such has served us extremely well. Or, at least, that is how I would have felt if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. But she did not. As a result, rather than simple intellectual pleasure and political hopefulness, reading Telling It Like It Wasn't filled me with a strong sense of dread.