Hillary Clinton is done trying to be liked

In the months after the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton went into the woods. They became almost comic, the sightings of her that would pop up on social media, as the woman who had exercised uncommon influence over American political life, who had in fact won the popular vote and nearly became president, reduced to a soul-searching wanderer in the wilderness, wearing fleece and wondering what went wrong. People asked her for selfies in public locales whose mundanity stood in contrast to her former power. Here she was, the woman who had watched Osama bin Laden die in real time, who had led one of the first major fights for healthcare reform, who had sat with presidents and prime ministers and extracted from them commitments to do things that they did not want to do. Here she was, once one of the world’s most powerful people, walking on a low-altitude beginners’ hiking trail. Here she was, the former senator and secretary of state and very nearly the first female president, in a supermarket outside her tony suburb, posing with a fan in front of a stack of organic apples.

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There was a degree of schadenfreude in the sharing of these pictures of Clinton during the months following the 2016 presidential election. Even those most alert to the coming dangers and needless suffering that would be imposed by a Donald Trump presidency seemed a bit giddy at how far she had fallen, relieved to see her knocked from her perch of power. Much of the hate, of course, came from Republicans, people who resented the moments of her political career, fleeting and sporadic as they were, that seemed aimed at reducing the suffering of working people, or inching the nation towards justice. The rest of the hate came from liberals and leftists, people who had voted for Clinton in 2016 begrudgingly or with reserve, who considered their support of her against Trump as a kind of harm reduction.

Some of the left’s hostility to her was revived this week when an excerpt from an interview she conducted for a new Netflix documentary series, Hillary, was released by the Hollywood Reporter. In the interview, Clinton offers commentary on perhaps the one person in American political life it is most dangerous for her to comment on: her 2016 Democratic primary rival, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. She said that “nobody likes him” in Washington. She said he has accomplished little in his career. She said that other politicians are disinclined to work with him.

All of this may or may not be true, but it’s not clear why Clinton would say it. If these comments were meant to harm Sanders’ chances of winning the Democratic primary, they are more likely to do the opposite. Sanders’ own pitch to voters relies heavily on his outsider status in Washington, and tends to aestheticize his grumpy temperament as a sign of integrity. Many voters, alienated by Washington, will hear that a candidate is disliked there and think: good. Disapproval from Clinton may itself be seen as a virtue from a certain class of liberal voters, among whom her reputation is not good.

Because though she is hated passionately and without reserve on the right, the Democratic party and those roughly aligned with it rightly have at best a very ambivalent relationship toward Hillary. Ambivalence might be the most that she deserves. Her political career was long, and over her three decades of activity in national politics she was frequently on the wrong side of history. Many of her positions seemed motivated more by political convenience than by principle. She was too cozy with corporate interests as a senator, and she was too comfortable with military intervention as secretary of state. She seemed inscrutable; it was difficult to know what she really thought, perhaps because so many people who interpreted her career as pundits and commentators insisted that what she said was never what she really meant.

Over these decades, Clinton became an avatar of the Democratic party’s worst impulses: its frightened run to the center during the 90s and 2000s, its comfort with compromise and acquiescence, its elites’ preoccupation with convention and procedure at the expense of taking important moral stands or being accountable to its base. Hillary became a symbol of corruption, centrism and cynicism. At times, she really deserved it.

At other times, she didn’t. It is impossible to deny the reality that Clinton, as an uncommonly powerful woman, was also the object of tremendous sexist vitriol, a passionate fixation on her that animated even the legitimate grievances against her with an intensity unseen in critiques of similar male politicians. The media fixated on her thick ankles, and then they fixated on her masculine pantsuits. It became a common party joke to make strange and morbid speculations about her sex life. Her personal virtues were interpreted as suspicious: intelligence morphed into cunning, determination became ambition, resolve morphed into stubbornness, care and studiousness became dishonesty and scheming. Among the most fixated and rancorous of her critics, even valid complaints about her seem undergirded with a passion that is more psychological than moral.

This is what is so maddening about Hillary Clinton: she makes it clear that sexism can happen to women who are also bad people, or who have made bad choices. She makes it clear that righteous anger can also contain misogynist contempt. She makes it clear that sexist double standards often mean not only that good women are held unfairly responsible, but that bad women are held responsible where bad men are not. The role of sexism in our reactions to Clinton is complex, as complex as the messy reality that all of us who have been wronged have in fact done wrong ourselves. But complexity is something our political media, in particular, are ill-equipped to describe. Clinton’s example requires us to hold multiple inconvenient, contradictory thoughts in our minds at the same time: that sexism can be unjust even when it is directed at women who are themselves perpetrators of injustice; that sometimes bigotry is wielded even against people who are not impeccable or particularly deserving of sympathy. But even when its targets are unlikable, sexism, still, is wrong.

For her part, Clinton has turned into another kind of figure that our culture has difficulty parsing: a woman who is not just old, but old and angry. Her long career was punctuated with humiliations: the defeat of her healthcare reform effort, her husband’s public affairs, her loss of the 2008 presidential primary. And it was capped with the greatest humiliation of all: her loss, on a constitutional technicality, to a racist, sexist, boorish man, who outmatched even her in cynicism but possessed none of her intellect. She is angry at these humiliations, and she seems committed to her anger, directing it unhelpfully at some of the wrong people, uselessly at some of the right ones.

Still, there is something disarming about this version of Hillary, even as she kicks dirt bitterly at an old rival, and throws destructive bombs into the political conversation. The woman who has given interviews since the 2016 election is vulnerable, angry, resentful and tired, nothing at all like the consultant-polished entity she was before, speaking in vague, noncommittal terms that were so rigorously inoffensive that they hardly had any content. Now that her political career is over and she is no longer seeking power, the aura of suspicion and dishonesty about her has dissipated, and people no longer reflexively disbelieve her. Her statements are unvarnished, sometimes even frankly resentful. She says the kind of thing that would be disastrous if she were actually in power. To the voters who hate her, she seems comfortable letting them know that she hates them, too. For better and frequently for worse, Clinton has shed the pretense of trying to be liked. Finally, we feel sure she’s saying what she means.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist