Hillary's empty moralism is a reflection of the greater progressive movement

The Clintons’ long effort to convey the key attributes of that moral decency is, as noted, a work in progress that has never made any progress. The junkyard of bellowed, didactic banalities that constitute Mrs. Clinton’s inventory of pronouncements is not, however, simply a random assortment. Two recurring themes suggest how she understands the larger purpose of her political career.
The first is the determination to secure a better future. In keeping with anti-foundationalism, however, all questions about the attributes that would make one future better than another, or than the present, are left unasked and unanswered. Since liberalism has discarded the idea of a human nature with any particular intrinsic qualities, human flourishing can mean nothing other or more than facilitating the pursuit, by as many people as possible, of as many of their aspirations as possible. Upon ending her 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton said, “I entered this race because I have an old-fashioned conviction that public service is about helping people solve their problems and live their dreams.”

The second theme amounts to a sprawling elaboration of the feminist axiom that the personal is political. Its original meaning was that catcalls from construction workers, or the awarding of a coveted promotion to an inferior male co-worker, were not just affronts but consequences flowing directly from the power structures that feminists had to discern and dismantle. The underlying idea was that men and women were so fundamentally similar that the detail of being one or the other should, in a just world, have a negligible impact on how any individual’s life unfolds. As an undergraduate at Wellesley in the late 1960s, and then a law student at Yale, Hillary Rodham was certainly well acquainted with this viewpoint. It’s hard to believe she didn’t share it, at least in part.

In her maturity, however, Mrs. Clinton has drawn heavily on the older, supposedly discredited idea that women are innately, distinctively preoccupied with family cohesion and, above all, children’s well-being. On that basis she has asserted, over and over, that the personal is political and the political is personal. To care for a child now requires acute, often alarmed, cognizance of the endless list of social and economic conditions that can help or hinder children’s development. Citizenship, whether it consists of volunteering for some community-improvement project or voting for candidates dedicated to helping children, is an extension of responsible parenthood. To govern a modern nation, by the same token, requires fully grasping the array of trends and problems besetting families. Public officials must, accordingly, subordinate all other policy concerns to fashioning government responses that meet and master those challenges. As a result, leadership is a kind of parenthood writ large.