Digital Purgatory and the Politics of Keeping Receipts

Our patron saint, Hillary Clinton, putting the digital in Digital Purgatory. Photo Courtesy of the Clinton Library.

With the lyric, “No one else was in the room where it happened,” Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda captured a political reality that feels increasingly foreign today: some of history's most consequential moments simply disappear once the door closes. Written to illustrate the secret bargains that led to the Compromise of 1790, the song—or dare I say banger—recounts the private meeting over the location of the Capitol between Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Historians know the agreement they reached: the Capitol would be in Washington DC. But what remains up in the air even today, is the question of what exactly transpired inside the room; which arguments changed minds, what concessions were privately offered, and whether any of the three left with newfound reservations. 

Nowadays, the notion of a major political moment happening in total secrecy feels ludicrous. For the love of God, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden—barricading the arena and sending conditional watermarked invitations equipped with mandatory non-disclosure agreements. The guest list was leaked by breakfast. The concept of a “Room Where it Happened” hasn’t disappeared. It simply has Wi-Fi and four beaming bars of AT&T.

Before the internet, there was room for politicians to change their positions without being accused of political deception. People could change their minds without leaving behind a searchable trail of evidence that they had ever believed otherwise. It was in these archaic times that changing one's political position didn't mean dragging an old version of yourself behind like an anchor, pulling you further and further into a sinkhole you could never escape. Today, admitting that you were wrong can feel like an admission about who you are, rather than simply what you once believed. “True colors” become shorthand for the belief that a past position, particularly a morally wrong one, says more about someone's character than anything they might believe in the present.

The byproduct is the creation of a digital purgatory.

Not to be confused with its theological namesake, digital purgatory comes to fruition when considering how every tweet, interview, campaign promise, and deleted post sits in a suspended limbo until a political opponent or internet sleuth decides it's worth resurrecting. 

If digital purgatory has a patron saint, it might just be Hillary Clinton.

With her unofficial campaign slogan of “breaking the glass ceiling,” Hillary Rodham Clinton’s career often reads like a political almanac, each edition reflecting the political climate of its time. For a politician who built her brand on progress, she remained publicly opposed to same-sex marriage throughout her 2008 campaign and four years as secretary of state, only endorsing marriage equality after leaving office in 2013.

Now, undeniably, the timing is odd, but isn’t that the point? Between 2003 and 2013, support for same-sex marriage climbed from just 33% of Americans to 51%. Public opinion on LGBTQ+ rights dramatically changed during those years, shaped in part by cultural shifts reaching far beyond the oasis of Washington. Millions of Americans welcomed Ellen DeGeneres into their living rooms, as Modern Family's electrically lovable Mitch and Cam became one of television's favorite couples. By 2013, it was discovered that 14% of Americans said they had personally changed their minds in favor of same-sex marriage, evidence that attitudes were evolving rather than remaining fixed. 

Whether Clinton's reversal reflected conviction, calculation, or some combination of the two is beside the point. Since the archive of our past lives is instantly accessible, the digital purgatory leaves little room for personal and ideological evolution, as one’s old views can always be dredged up and held against them.

Consider the photograph of Clinton visiting a working-class home in East Harlem during her 2016 presidential campaign: now an iconic image perforating the elusive barrier separating Getty Images and bona fide meme classics. Like any respectable reaction image, it has lived a dozen lives. According to Know Your Meme, it's deployed whenever someone wants to mock a rich person attempting to cosplay as middle class, usually accompanied by captions that all but scream, "How do you do, fellow poor people?" 

Clinton’s bulging eyes may reinforce an existing criticism that she struggled to connect with working-class voters, but digital purgatory has discarded her intention of connecting with the average American she yearned to represent. The intention, while simple, is beautiful. Yet as the matriarch of a then-thriving political dynasty, she became a target upon which people were quick to project their own assumptions, permanently rewriting the images with subtitles that reversed their original intent entirely.

Digital purgatory, it turns out, is anything but impartial. If Clinton is its patron saint, President Trump is its Harry Houdini, its greatest escape artist. Due perhaps to the hex he seems to have over his tribe of dedicated soldiers, Trump course-corrects and contradicts himself more than perhaps any other politician in modern American history, with the Washington Post reporting he had made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his first presidency alone. Despite an inexhaustible abyss of material for political commentators, much of the discourse surrounding Trump is oddly tired. We've reached a point where another reversal doesn’t evoke the same cultural zeal: the shock factor has worn off.

Though conversations surrounding a woman's right to an abortion carry more political and cultural weight than ever before, according to the White House itself, President Trump now stands as one of the movement's most recognizable opponents. Yet every few months, his 1999 Meet the Press interview somehow finds its way across my desk—much thanks to my For You Page, which appears convinced it is performing a civic duty. There, Reform Party presidential drop-out Donald J. Trump matter-of-factly declares, "I am very pro-choice."

In theory, this is digital purgatory in its purest form. A past conviction, preserved in 4k with a digital transcript, resurrected to confront the present. Yet the clip lives a strange afterlife. It resurfaces every few months, briefly collecting outrage before disappearing back into the digital graveyard from which it came. (And yes, the irony is not lost on me that I am contributing to its latest resurrection.) Consider this its next stop in the endless cycle of internet reincarnation. Though there is a difference between remembering something and reckoning with it: something we’ve gotten remarkably good at avoiding. Remembering is easy: resurfacing an old interview or reposting a forgotten quote. Reckoning is more demanding, requiring us to place that old version of a politician alongside the person they've become and ask the questions: what changed, why, and does that explanation hold up?

Having previously stated he would not place a national ban on abortion, Trump's later record stands in direct contrast to his claim of being pro-choice. His attempted defunding of Planned Parenthood in 2016, his advocacy for a 20-week national abortion ban, and his selection of three Supreme Court justices who ultimately helped overturn Roe v. Wade comes to mind. The Reform Party candidate who once declared "I am very pro-choice" is now the president bringing us closer to the dystopian reality of Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. Unlike Clinton, whose ideological evolution became evidence of calculation and dishonesty, Trump's contradictions are simply folded into the mythology of a politician whose supporters have long accepted inconsistency as part of the package.

But this phenomenon extends beyond the presidency. Consider Senator Susan Collins, who has faced annual reminders of her 1996 pledge to serve only two terms as she continues to win reelections in Maine. The promise has not disappeared. It has simply become another artifact in the endless archive of political memory. Critics outside of Maine continue to draw attention to these words, though for the voters who decide her fate, it has remained a footnote rather than a disqualifying contradiction.

Perhaps the problem isn't that we've forgotten too much, but that we've remembered without context. It's hypocritical, in the name of progress and accountability, to turn a politician's past mistakes into a source of embarrassment rather than an opportunity to understand how this change will trickle into our nation's image and legislation. We've built the world's most comprehensive political archive, but it serves no purpose unless we are willing to use it to bring about a reckoning.

Braden Mendiburu (CC ‘29) is a Senior Editor at CPR studying political science and film & media.