The Importance of Being Sympathetic

In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple expresses his shock at seeing his first post-election photo of a much older-looking Hillary Clinton:

I was surprised by my own feeling of sympathy for her, I who had previously detested her (quite without admiring Mr. Trump—very far from it) for her ruthless self-righteousness and self-righteous ruthlessness, with one eye always fixed on high moral principle and the other on the main chance, the latter always seeming to triumph over the former.
….
My sympathy did not, of course, go very deep or last very long. He who lives by ambition dies by ambition. If you make the achievement of power the meaning of your life and you are thwarted in it, some kind of collapse is only to be expected.

One thought on “The Importance of Being Sympathetic

  1. Carolyn Kunin

    Interesting – I voted for Mrs Clinton, because I didn’t really believe her campaign rhetoric. I assumed that like her husband, she would govern closer to the center and that she would be more aggressive in foreign policy than she was in Obama’s cabinet.
    I didn’t vote for Trump, first time I have voted Democrat since 1980, because I believed that he would govern as he campaigned. I knew he was a con-man, a bait-and-switch man, but I believed him more than her. Fortunately I find that he has yet again pulled the old switcheroo only this time it makes me hopeful, no, positively optimistic about the course this country will take. If only he’d get over Putin.

    Reply

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