Late last week, I came across a fascinating article published at Mondoweiss highlighting a recent study positing that Hilary Clinton may have lost the election to Donald Trump partly as a result of her well documented lust for imperial war and aggression.
Here are a few excerpts from the piece:
An important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year’s presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.
By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars.
The study is titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?” Authors Francis Shen, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a populist note.
And here are the authors themselves on the moral hazard at work here. The people who decide are not suffering as much.
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