Whew!
The past month or so has been a lot, yeah? It appears that Joe Biden is on track to the Democratic nominee for president. And, fine. Whatever. He wasn't my top choice at all, but the COVID-19 pandemic, and Trump's massive failures around managing it, is one of many issues that highlights the urgency of defeating Trump in 2020.
It's a low bar, but Biden would be exponentially better than Trump. And, if Bernie Sanders were to pull off a surprise win, he would be as well. Whoever the nominee is just needs to be smart enough to name a progressive woman as vice president.
Anyway, it appears many of us will be stuck indoors, at home, isolating ourselves from others during this pandemic. Also, shoutout to those providing essential services right now who cannot do so, including health workers, firefighters, caregivers, law enforcement, delivery people, and more.
During this time, I've been thinking of doing a Xena rewatch (and possibly recaps, but not sure what I will have time for, given my other responsibilities).
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to check in. Please stay safe and healthy (and at home, if you are able!). How are others occupying themselves during this time?
Showing posts with label Bernie Sanders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernie Sanders. Show all posts
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
On White Daddy and Electability, Again
When you think about it, a white male Democrat hasn't won a US presidential election since Bill Clinton did in 1996, a quarter century ago.
At the same time, polling data from the past year or so consistently have white men - specifically Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders - as performing better against Trump in 2020 general election matchups than do the candidates who are women and/or people of color. Here's one sample poll from early February 2020, for instance, from Real Clear Politics:
Interestingly, the numbers for Trump tend to stay about the same no matter who he's matched up against. It's voters for the Democratic candidate who tend to peel away the further away from "cishet white man" the Democratic candidate is. Some polls, for instance, even show billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who entered the race relatively recently, doing about the same as Joe Biden.
Another data point is that historical polling data from February 2016 shows that Hillary Clinton was polling at about where Joe Biden currently is polling versus Trump. In fact - unlike Biden or any other 2020 candidate - she regularly had a double-digit advantage on Trump at around this point in the campaign. Current numbers, of course, are also before Trump and the Republicans really start going after the nominee. Although I'm sure their efforts to cause chaos and in-fighting are already well underway, we can expect such things to amp up after the Democratic National Convention when they can really solidify around different narratives and attacks on the nominee.
All of these factoids together concern me for our 2020 prospects.
Hillary Clinton bested Trump in the 2016 popular vote by literal millions of votes, of course, and Trump squeaked out an electoral college win in swing states after a, to put it mildly, clusterfucked cascade of colliding factors worked against her. The thinking this time around is that Bernie or Biden or, I guess, Bloomberg would be able to win at least some of the swing states that Clinton lost, a premise that seems to rest largely on the usually-unstated assumption that these men would win because they are white men.
Yes, I know other reasons are put forth as to why these men would win, and they usually involve some variation on the narrative that, unlike the fine specimens of politicians that these white men are, Hillary Clinton was History's Worst Candidate Ever. As white male politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and even Martin O'Malley (yes really) looked around the post-2016-election aftermath and thought the world needed their gloat-bragging that they could have done what "the woman" didn't do, they helped write into existence the pervasive narrative that the USA was in dire need of White Daddy to come to the rescue.
Now, I don't think it's even necessarily sexist to point out that much of the electorate has bought into the sexist hype around the dire need for a white male candidate "because of everyone else's bigotry." What was largely lost in the national discourse, if one can call it that, around whether Bernie Sanders actually told Elizabeth Warren that he thought a woman couldn't win the presidency, is that a presidential contest is not like a one-on-one chess game. It's a popularity context, the results of which are an expression of millions of voters' prejudices, hopes, dreams, fears, and countless factors outside of the control of the candidates themselves.
That supposed frontrunner Joe Biden, who would perform catastrophically in a debate against Trump anyway, is treating the match-up like a boxing match and, like most 2020 candidates, has yet to acknowledge everything Clinton was up against, demonstrates primarily that he is not anywhere near equipped to face the challenges of the general election that are yet to come.
Trump is unquestionably so terrible that I think many people and institutional powers are circularly settling for mediocre candidates who don't, actually, have a great chance at beating Trump because they "reason" that "everyone else" is settling for these candidates because these are the only candidates who can win.
Or, they felt deeply threatened by Clinton's near-win in 2016 and so are implicitly or explicitly demanding consolidation around certain white male candidates. We are, I believe, still experiencing the fallout of a 2016 election cycle that was deeply misogynistic across the political spectrum and in which, in true American form, many people demanded everyone immediately stop "relitigating" (ie, processing, analyzing, writing about).
And so, here we are, with many of the same issues cropping up. That one of the major players in the 2016 Democratic Primary decided to run again while the other was largely told to go knit in the woods for the rest of her days hasn't helped the situation.
But, such is life, here in the backlash.
On the Bernie front, I think hardcore Bernie supporters, many of whom operate in a rhetorical environment as though Republicans simply don't exist, are in serious denial about how he would fare against Trump/Republican attacks against him and "radical socialism." In the recent Iowa Caucus, Bernie halved his support in the state after 5+ years of campaigning for president and ended up essentially tied with the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana that no one had heard of a year ago.
My strategy for 2020 is therefore to vote for the candidate whose policies I most agree with and who I think would be most effective as president. For me, that person is Elizabeth Warren. If that person, for you, is Biden or Bernie, more power to you. But, if you're only supporting certain candidates because you think a white man is the "safer" candidate against Trump, I think that's questionable logic.
No candidate is a safe one in this age of propaganda, disinformation, and foreign collusion. Certain candidates have been granted a huge assist from the hype about white male electability, but none of that has accounted for all of the additional noise that exists in our current political landscape.
At the same time, polling data from the past year or so consistently have white men - specifically Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders - as performing better against Trump in 2020 general election matchups than do the candidates who are women and/or people of color. Here's one sample poll from early February 2020, for instance, from Real Clear Politics:
 |
| General Election Poll vs. Trump, 2/2/20: Biden +6, Sanders +4, Warren +3, Buttigieg +1 |
Another data point is that historical polling data from February 2016 shows that Hillary Clinton was polling at about where Joe Biden currently is polling versus Trump. In fact - unlike Biden or any other 2020 candidate - she regularly had a double-digit advantage on Trump at around this point in the campaign. Current numbers, of course, are also before Trump and the Republicans really start going after the nominee. Although I'm sure their efforts to cause chaos and in-fighting are already well underway, we can expect such things to amp up after the Democratic National Convention when they can really solidify around different narratives and attacks on the nominee.
All of these factoids together concern me for our 2020 prospects.
Hillary Clinton bested Trump in the 2016 popular vote by literal millions of votes, of course, and Trump squeaked out an electoral college win in swing states after a, to put it mildly, clusterfucked cascade of colliding factors worked against her. The thinking this time around is that Bernie or Biden or, I guess, Bloomberg would be able to win at least some of the swing states that Clinton lost, a premise that seems to rest largely on the usually-unstated assumption that these men would win because they are white men.
Yes, I know other reasons are put forth as to why these men would win, and they usually involve some variation on the narrative that, unlike the fine specimens of politicians that these white men are, Hillary Clinton was History's Worst Candidate Ever. As white male politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and even Martin O'Malley (yes really) looked around the post-2016-election aftermath and thought the world needed their gloat-bragging that they could have done what "the woman" didn't do, they helped write into existence the pervasive narrative that the USA was in dire need of White Daddy to come to the rescue.
Now, I don't think it's even necessarily sexist to point out that much of the electorate has bought into the sexist hype around the dire need for a white male candidate "because of everyone else's bigotry." What was largely lost in the national discourse, if one can call it that, around whether Bernie Sanders actually told Elizabeth Warren that he thought a woman couldn't win the presidency, is that a presidential contest is not like a one-on-one chess game. It's a popularity context, the results of which are an expression of millions of voters' prejudices, hopes, dreams, fears, and countless factors outside of the control of the candidates themselves.
That supposed frontrunner Joe Biden, who would perform catastrophically in a debate against Trump anyway, is treating the match-up like a boxing match and, like most 2020 candidates, has yet to acknowledge everything Clinton was up against, demonstrates primarily that he is not anywhere near equipped to face the challenges of the general election that are yet to come.
Trump is unquestionably so terrible that I think many people and institutional powers are circularly settling for mediocre candidates who don't, actually, have a great chance at beating Trump because they "reason" that "everyone else" is settling for these candidates because these are the only candidates who can win.
Or, they felt deeply threatened by Clinton's near-win in 2016 and so are implicitly or explicitly demanding consolidation around certain white male candidates. We are, I believe, still experiencing the fallout of a 2016 election cycle that was deeply misogynistic across the political spectrum and in which, in true American form, many people demanded everyone immediately stop "relitigating" (ie, processing, analyzing, writing about).
And so, here we are, with many of the same issues cropping up. That one of the major players in the 2016 Democratic Primary decided to run again while the other was largely told to go knit in the woods for the rest of her days hasn't helped the situation.
But, such is life, here in the backlash.
On the Bernie front, I think hardcore Bernie supporters, many of whom operate in a rhetorical environment as though Republicans simply don't exist, are in serious denial about how he would fare against Trump/Republican attacks against him and "radical socialism." In the recent Iowa Caucus, Bernie halved his support in the state after 5+ years of campaigning for president and ended up essentially tied with the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana that no one had heard of a year ago.
My strategy for 2020 is therefore to vote for the candidate whose policies I most agree with and who I think would be most effective as president. For me, that person is Elizabeth Warren. If that person, for you, is Biden or Bernie, more power to you. But, if you're only supporting certain candidates because you think a white man is the "safer" candidate against Trump, I think that's questionable logic.
No candidate is a safe one in this age of propaganda, disinformation, and foreign collusion. Certain candidates have been granted a huge assist from the hype about white male electability, but none of that has accounted for all of the additional noise that exists in our current political landscape.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Clinton on Sanders: It's the Culture Around Him
Zero fucks Hillary Clinton is the best Hillary Clinton.
In an interview with Hollywood Reporter about the upcoming series about her, here she is on Bernie Sanders:
Of course, last week's conversation, if one can call it that, about whether or not Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren he didn't think a woman could win the presidency, after which Warren was viciously attacked online by influential Bernie supporters and surrogates, demonstrates why female candidates might choose not to foreground gender, and misogyny, in their campaign.
There is absolutely a toxic left misogyny culture around Bernie Sanders, a culture that he has let fester.
Observe, for instance, my reaction last week to well-known Bernie supporter Michael Moore's attack on Elizabeth Warren, which he tweeted out to his 6 million followers:
This type of vitriol from influential Bernie supporters isn't even rare. Shaun King, who has over 1 million followers, was also repeatedly tweeting attacks on Warren, claiming to have inside knowledge about how Warren is dishonest.
It's also hard to overstate how the festering of this culture is made so much easier on social media, particularly Twitter. For instance, on Twitter, once a high-follower, pro-Bernie account tweets a general soundbite about another candidate, bots and Bernie supporters begin swarming with riffs on that soundbite, targeting that candidate and the ordinary people who support that candidate.
Bernie could de-escalate a lot of what we see, online, from his hard-core supporters, but too often, we see that, through his silence, he lets the abuse and misogyny work in his favor. Historically, to "address" the abuse, he has just given a general statement saying he doesn't want his supporters to attack people, and they continue to do so anyway.
Interestingly, though, when one of Bernie's surrogates attacked Joe Biden in a piece at The Guardian, Bernie just recently outright apologized to Biden, in public.
It's a notable distinction to how he treats his female/POC opponents.
[1/23/20 - UPDATE: Conspicuously proving Hillary Clinton's point about the culture that permeates Bernie's campaign, with his endorsement, today Bernie Sanders approvingly tweeted a clip of Joe Rogan speaking well of Bernie and saying he's probably going to vote for him. As Sady Doyle notes, Joe Rogan is, uh, pretty problematic for a host of reasons.]
In an interview with Hollywood Reporter about the upcoming series about her, here she is on Bernie Sanders:
"I will say, however, that [the problem is] not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don't think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don't know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you're just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that's a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions."I appreciate Clinton bringing gender to the forefront in the 2020 election, because gender has oddly not been, despite a primary that started with record numbers of women running.
Of course, last week's conversation, if one can call it that, about whether or not Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren he didn't think a woman could win the presidency, after which Warren was viciously attacked online by influential Bernie supporters and surrogates, demonstrates why female candidates might choose not to foreground gender, and misogyny, in their campaign.
There is absolutely a toxic left misogyny culture around Bernie Sanders, a culture that he has let fester.
Observe, for instance, my reaction last week to well-known Bernie supporter Michael Moore's attack on Elizabeth Warren, which he tweeted out to his 6 million followers:
This rhetoric is so unnecessarily violent and is like throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire, yet typical as to how so many men perceive even the mildest, most tepid suggestions that they said or did something sexist. https://t.co/AozUHjnoAW— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) January 15, 2020
This type of vitriol from influential Bernie supporters isn't even rare. Shaun King, who has over 1 million followers, was also repeatedly tweeting attacks on Warren, claiming to have inside knowledge about how Warren is dishonest.
It's also hard to overstate how the festering of this culture is made so much easier on social media, particularly Twitter. For instance, on Twitter, once a high-follower, pro-Bernie account tweets a general soundbite about another candidate, bots and Bernie supporters begin swarming with riffs on that soundbite, targeting that candidate and the ordinary people who support that candidate.
Bernie could de-escalate a lot of what we see, online, from his hard-core supporters, but too often, we see that, through his silence, he lets the abuse and misogyny work in his favor. Historically, to "address" the abuse, he has just given a general statement saying he doesn't want his supporters to attack people, and they continue to do so anyway.
Interestingly, though, when one of Bernie's surrogates attacked Joe Biden in a piece at The Guardian, Bernie just recently outright apologized to Biden, in public.
It's a notable distinction to how he treats his female/POC opponents.
[1/23/20 - UPDATE: Conspicuously proving Hillary Clinton's point about the culture that permeates Bernie's campaign, with his endorsement, today Bernie Sanders approvingly tweeted a clip of Joe Rogan speaking well of Bernie and saying he's probably going to vote for him. As Sady Doyle notes, Joe Rogan is, uh, pretty problematic for a host of reasons.]
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Woman: Feminists Care Too Much About Misogyny
I won't link to it but on Monday, The New Republic ran a horrendo anti-feminist piece (entitled "Moving Beyond Misogyny," if you want to look it up) in which a leftist woman critiqued "liberal feminists" for focusing too much on misogyny and not giving progressive men rape passes.
If you think I kid, here's a sample:
Here, the writer disingenuously acts like progressive men mostly do inconsequential, trivial things that feminists hysterically overreact to, and don't really engage in bigger things like rape, harassment, or predation. And yet, as a grown adult woman, this writer in all likelihood knows that progressive men, in reality, are as fully capable of heinous acts as conservative men are, and thus seems to instead be indirectly suggesting that feminists should ease up and give these men a pass because they're on "our" side.
Leftists today often claim the mantle of society's most enlightened political thinkers, so it might seem confounding to see them write and publish such retrograde "think pieces" that, with a few select edits, could just as easily be posted at rightwing forums like The American Conservative or Townhall.
Things begin to make more sense once you understand that, in their hatred of "liberals," feminists, and identity politics, a lot of today's vocal leftists, far from being enlightened, are just sexually-liberal socialists who have internalized the conservative right's ideologies around race and gender. The end goal is more akin to redistributing wealth while keeping white supremacist rape culture intact, with the promise that things might be a bit better if it's progressive men at the top, rather than conservative.
The more general argument from this person's "thinkpiece" is that feminism today is a big depressing, victim-mentality downer because "misogyny feminists" (her term, sure) focus too much on, you guessed it, misogyny.
If that doesn't want to make you guzzle vodka from a beer bong, I don't know what will.
Nevermind that that "argument" has been a standard rightwing "critique" of feminism for literal decades, emanating from such "socially-enlightened" sources as Phyllis Schlafly, but criticizing feminists for focusing too much on the hatred of women is as absurd as criticizing Black Lives Matter for focusing too much on racism, the LGBT rights movement for focusing too much on bigotry against LGBT people, or PETA for focusing too much on the ethical treatment animals.
This sort of critique, rather, is a good example of the feminist, misogynistic backlash in which we find ourselves. For, when one argues that highlighting, analyzing, and critiquing misogyny is something bad and unworthy of devoting time to, one is essentially arguing that one of feminists' more important, if not the most important, contributions to social justice should be eradicated. And that, my friends, would only benefit misogynists.
More broadly, we see that it's not just rightwing women who espouse anti-feminism. I think many women across the political spectrum look around and see the breadth and depth of misogyny in this political climate and come to the conclusion that joining in is simply the better deal. Why not, as a leftist woman, join in and help mainstream anti-feminist opinions about "liberal feminists"?
I'm also realizing that so much of the anti-feminist work that women across the political spectrum do consists of "defending" men from "the evil feminists."
It's not lost on me, as just one example, that as the 2020 election gears up, a number of leftist women - including the author of this piece - have been "defending" Bernie Sanders and his male supporters by going after specific progressive feminists who are known to not support Bernie, as well as "liberal feminism" in general for its cardinal sin of promoting the notion that a woman can and should be president.
I suppose that is one way - having women attack women - to deal with the "Bernie Bro" narrative that has persisted since 2016.
Another strategy, of course, would be for leftist Bernie fans, as well as his campaign, to try to unify with progressive feminists. But that's a bridge too far, apparently.
If you think I kid, here's a sample:
Here, the writer disingenuously acts like progressive men mostly do inconsequential, trivial things that feminists hysterically overreact to, and don't really engage in bigger things like rape, harassment, or predation. And yet, as a grown adult woman, this writer in all likelihood knows that progressive men, in reality, are as fully capable of heinous acts as conservative men are, and thus seems to instead be indirectly suggesting that feminists should ease up and give these men a pass because they're on "our" side.
Leftists today often claim the mantle of society's most enlightened political thinkers, so it might seem confounding to see them write and publish such retrograde "think pieces" that, with a few select edits, could just as easily be posted at rightwing forums like The American Conservative or Townhall.
Things begin to make more sense once you understand that, in their hatred of "liberals," feminists, and identity politics, a lot of today's vocal leftists, far from being enlightened, are just sexually-liberal socialists who have internalized the conservative right's ideologies around race and gender. The end goal is more akin to redistributing wealth while keeping white supremacist rape culture intact, with the promise that things might be a bit better if it's progressive men at the top, rather than conservative.
The more general argument from this person's "thinkpiece" is that feminism today is a big depressing, victim-mentality downer because "misogyny feminists" (her term, sure) focus too much on, you guessed it, misogyny.
If that doesn't want to make you guzzle vodka from a beer bong, I don't know what will.
Nevermind that that "argument" has been a standard rightwing "critique" of feminism for literal decades, emanating from such "socially-enlightened" sources as Phyllis Schlafly, but criticizing feminists for focusing too much on the hatred of women is as absurd as criticizing Black Lives Matter for focusing too much on racism, the LGBT rights movement for focusing too much on bigotry against LGBT people, or PETA for focusing too much on the ethical treatment animals.
This sort of critique, rather, is a good example of the feminist, misogynistic backlash in which we find ourselves. For, when one argues that highlighting, analyzing, and critiquing misogyny is something bad and unworthy of devoting time to, one is essentially arguing that one of feminists' more important, if not the most important, contributions to social justice should be eradicated. And that, my friends, would only benefit misogynists.
More broadly, we see that it's not just rightwing women who espouse anti-feminism. I think many women across the political spectrum look around and see the breadth and depth of misogyny in this political climate and come to the conclusion that joining in is simply the better deal. Why not, as a leftist woman, join in and help mainstream anti-feminist opinions about "liberal feminists"?
I'm also realizing that so much of the anti-feminist work that women across the political spectrum do consists of "defending" men from "the evil feminists."
It's not lost on me, as just one example, that as the 2020 election gears up, a number of leftist women - including the author of this piece - have been "defending" Bernie Sanders and his male supporters by going after specific progressive feminists who are known to not support Bernie, as well as "liberal feminism" in general for its cardinal sin of promoting the notion that a woman can and should be president.
I suppose that is one way - having women attack women - to deal with the "Bernie Bro" narrative that has persisted since 2016.
Another strategy, of course, would be for leftist Bernie fans, as well as his campaign, to try to unify with progressive feminists. But that's a bridge too far, apparently.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
The Electoral College: Watch Shit Get Real If It Happens To Bernie!
Yesterday on Twitter, I spent a fraction of the day being intrigued by a particular pro-Bernie perspective.
A history grad student wrote, "I think it’s tremendously underrated just how many young Americans will simply reject wholesale the legitimacy of the U.S. constitutional order if a Warren or a Sanders wins the popular vote in a landslide and Trump stays in office."
True enough, I suppose, although many folks like myself who came of age circa Bush v. Gore have been there since 2000. As I've written before, the Supreme Court's effective installation of George W. Bush into the presidency was, even at the time, a recognizable constitutional crisis and erosion of the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court, electoral college, and executive office. The abolition of the electoral college should have been a top progressive priority since at least then, especially as Republicans increasingly began adopting a McConnell-esque "win at any costs" approach to politics.
Two more revelatory statements followed in the Twitter thread, however.
The first, the grad student continues, "If anything, I suppose this is an argument for Sanders, because he’s the only candidate I can imagine who would help organize mass protests—even a general strike—with his campaign infrastructure in the event of another anti-democratic election."
I... huh.
Interesting.
Here we see the popular narrative that, unlike other candidates who I suppose are supported by droids or Sim people or something, Bernie has "a movement" behind him. That is one benefit, it seems, to a politician not being widely told to go knit in a cave for the rest of one's days after losing an election. Nonetheless, while Bernie has a base of support that seems to be neither growing nor shrinking, the reality is that whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being will, in all likelihood, consolidate support from the Democratic base during the general election.
However, the idea that such a protest has to, or should, be led by the "losing" candidate seems more like a pretext for arguing why "Bernie must be the Democratic nominee instead of Warren (or anyone else)."
After all, in 2016, an actual anti-democratic election, it was women - not Bernie Sanders - who organized, led, and participated in the largest single-day protests in US history, largely in response to Donald Trump's electoral college "win" and popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton (in addition to the fact that Trump is a racist, xenophobic admitted sexual predator).
And sure, because I know some people might be thinking it, Bernie was not the Democratic nominee in 2016 and thus some might say he had "no" responsibility to lead such protests, but why not? Why would he not have that moral responsibility now, in fact, when there are kids in concentration camps, when sexual predators are in the White House and on SCOTUS, when climate change poses an existential threat to our planet, or any myriad of issues beyond "I got an election stolen from me so now it's a crisis"?
The other interesting note about this opinion is that we already have historical precedent for how Bernie would react to real and perceived anti-democratic elections.
In the 2016 primaries, of course, many of his supporters believe he only lost the primary to Hillary Clinton because it was "rigged" against him. Yet, while Bernie did little to put that narrative to rest, he also didn't organize protests against the "unfairness." To me, that suggests he wanted to devote his energies elsewhere, he didn't really believe it was rigged, and/or he correctly ascertained that such protests would be a distraction from the more important goal of defeating Trump.
Thus, to think that Bernie, an almost-80-year-old man who just had a heart attack, by the way, might lose to Trump in 2020 and then lead the nation in revolutionary protests seems like more of the extremely-bizarre leftist magical thinking around "the Bernie movement" in light of the reality that what Bernie Sanders did during the national crisis of the 2016 election aftermath was: went on a book tour, made a lot of money, and never stopped campaigning for president.
But, in light of everything, I'm especially curious what this grad student thinks would be different and, specifically, more effective about a Bernie Sanders-led protest, compared to the Women's March, after his hypothetical electoral college loss to Trump in 2020, other than the fact that this hypothetical mass protest would be led by a white man who some segments of the left have anointed as their savior.
Here, we turn to The Nation's David Klion, who says, in the second revelatory statement of the thread (emphasis added), "It’s like... imagine how 2016 felt, except this time we also like the candidate and they won by an even bigger popular margin. I already think the constitutional order is indefensible! And I’m regularly shocked that not every other thinking person does!"
A-ha! And there it is.
Some Bernie fans simply can't fathom that a large segment of the Women's March protestors were motivated by actually liking Hillary Clinton. So, a Bernie March in 2020, they believe, would be different and special and effective because people like Bernie, unlike History's Greatest Monster Hillary Clinton, and people would therefore see it as America's Greatest Travesty if Bernie won the popular vote but lost the electoral college to Trump. And, they - The Left - are serious, important political actors in the world, unlike the - from their perspective - vapid wine moms who marched in their ridiculous pink pussy hats hashtag resistance.
To that point, in retrospect, I will just offer my opinion that it was quite possibly the Bernie-adjacent consolidation of leadership over the national Women's March brand that has dampened its reach and effectiveness over the past 3+ years. Regardless of the leadership's motivations, which I do not know, it became hard to trust a movement that appeared to be trying to funnel progressive women's support, not toward general progressive politics and progressive female candidates, but toward a polarizing man's 2020 presidential campaign (Bernie Sanders. I'm talking about Bernie Sanders).
But, from a bigger picture, "Vote for Bernie in the primary, so he can lead mass protests after he loses to Trump" is not actually the ringing endorsement one might think it is.
The electoral college should be abolished. We need an actual plan and path to make that happen, not vague, regressive mumbling among leftists about how an old cranky male politician's likeability will cause the revolution.
A history grad student wrote, "I think it’s tremendously underrated just how many young Americans will simply reject wholesale the legitimacy of the U.S. constitutional order if a Warren or a Sanders wins the popular vote in a landslide and Trump stays in office."
True enough, I suppose, although many folks like myself who came of age circa Bush v. Gore have been there since 2000. As I've written before, the Supreme Court's effective installation of George W. Bush into the presidency was, even at the time, a recognizable constitutional crisis and erosion of the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court, electoral college, and executive office. The abolition of the electoral college should have been a top progressive priority since at least then, especially as Republicans increasingly began adopting a McConnell-esque "win at any costs" approach to politics.
Two more revelatory statements followed in the Twitter thread, however.
The first, the grad student continues, "If anything, I suppose this is an argument for Sanders, because he’s the only candidate I can imagine who would help organize mass protests—even a general strike—with his campaign infrastructure in the event of another anti-democratic election."
I... huh.
Interesting.
Here we see the popular narrative that, unlike other candidates who I suppose are supported by droids or Sim people or something, Bernie has "a movement" behind him. That is one benefit, it seems, to a politician not being widely told to go knit in a cave for the rest of one's days after losing an election. Nonetheless, while Bernie has a base of support that seems to be neither growing nor shrinking, the reality is that whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being will, in all likelihood, consolidate support from the Democratic base during the general election.
However, the idea that such a protest has to, or should, be led by the "losing" candidate seems more like a pretext for arguing why "Bernie must be the Democratic nominee instead of Warren (or anyone else)."
After all, in 2016, an actual anti-democratic election, it was women - not Bernie Sanders - who organized, led, and participated in the largest single-day protests in US history, largely in response to Donald Trump's electoral college "win" and popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton (in addition to the fact that Trump is a racist, xenophobic admitted sexual predator).
And sure, because I know some people might be thinking it, Bernie was not the Democratic nominee in 2016 and thus some might say he had "no" responsibility to lead such protests, but why not? Why would he not have that moral responsibility now, in fact, when there are kids in concentration camps, when sexual predators are in the White House and on SCOTUS, when climate change poses an existential threat to our planet, or any myriad of issues beyond "I got an election stolen from me so now it's a crisis"?
The other interesting note about this opinion is that we already have historical precedent for how Bernie would react to real and perceived anti-democratic elections.
In the 2016 primaries, of course, many of his supporters believe he only lost the primary to Hillary Clinton because it was "rigged" against him. Yet, while Bernie did little to put that narrative to rest, he also didn't organize protests against the "unfairness." To me, that suggests he wanted to devote his energies elsewhere, he didn't really believe it was rigged, and/or he correctly ascertained that such protests would be a distraction from the more important goal of defeating Trump.
Thus, to think that Bernie, an almost-80-year-old man who just had a heart attack, by the way, might lose to Trump in 2020 and then lead the nation in revolutionary protests seems like more of the extremely-bizarre leftist magical thinking around "the Bernie movement" in light of the reality that what Bernie Sanders did during the national crisis of the 2016 election aftermath was: went on a book tour, made a lot of money, and never stopped campaigning for president.
But, in light of everything, I'm especially curious what this grad student thinks would be different and, specifically, more effective about a Bernie Sanders-led protest, compared to the Women's March, after his hypothetical electoral college loss to Trump in 2020, other than the fact that this hypothetical mass protest would be led by a white man who some segments of the left have anointed as their savior.
Here, we turn to The Nation's David Klion, who says, in the second revelatory statement of the thread (emphasis added), "It’s like... imagine how 2016 felt, except this time we also like the candidate and they won by an even bigger popular margin. I already think the constitutional order is indefensible! And I’m regularly shocked that not every other thinking person does!"
A-ha! And there it is.
Some Bernie fans simply can't fathom that a large segment of the Women's March protestors were motivated by actually liking Hillary Clinton. So, a Bernie March in 2020, they believe, would be different and special and effective because people like Bernie, unlike History's Greatest Monster Hillary Clinton, and people would therefore see it as America's Greatest Travesty if Bernie won the popular vote but lost the electoral college to Trump. And, they - The Left - are serious, important political actors in the world, unlike the - from their perspective - vapid wine moms who marched in their ridiculous pink pussy hats hashtag resistance.
To that point, in retrospect, I will just offer my opinion that it was quite possibly the Bernie-adjacent consolidation of leadership over the national Women's March brand that has dampened its reach and effectiveness over the past 3+ years. Regardless of the leadership's motivations, which I do not know, it became hard to trust a movement that appeared to be trying to funnel progressive women's support, not toward general progressive politics and progressive female candidates, but toward a polarizing man's 2020 presidential campaign (Bernie Sanders. I'm talking about Bernie Sanders).
But, from a bigger picture, "Vote for Bernie in the primary, so he can lead mass protests after he loses to Trump" is not actually the ringing endorsement one might think it is.
The electoral college should be abolished. We need an actual plan and path to make that happen, not vague, regressive mumbling among leftists about how an old cranky male politician's likeability will cause the revolution.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
A Woman Will Win, Eventually, But Will the US Let Her?
I'm currently reading Rebecca Solnit's Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) and came across a statement about the 2016 election (emphasis added):
Newsflash: Left misogyny is real.
And then, of course, that roughly half of white women who voted voted for Trump has led to a post-2016 moral panic about white women as a class, a panic that obfuscates relevant distinctions of class, religion, sexuality, age, marital status, education level, and other aspects of one's identity including - oh, I don't know - political party that might help us more accurately describe why so many white women are conservative other than the general consensus that all white women are garbage human beings.
On Twitter in particular, it's been notable how swiftly "white feminist" has come to be used with a certain lack of precision. Or, rather, more precisely how it has come to refer to any woman who is white who expresses an opinion about something, whereas the more specific original meaning was a critique of the centering of class-privileged, cishet white women within feminism. The former is not how the term is always used, to be clear, but it's used often enough and by those with relatively large platforms such that people have largely just accepted it even though if all white women are purported practitioners of white feminism without regard to what they are espousing, then people have actually failed to describe a meaningful category of feminism that exists in reality.
Men, interestingly enough, are never called "white feminists," even if they are white men who purport to be feminists. More on that tidbit, in a moment. Cool Girls, too, seem exempt, although I suspect deep down they know that can change at any moment.
From this imprecise usage, progressive, moderate, and leftist men are taking their cues accordingly and weaponizing this new definition of "white feminism," despite the fact that it's extremely doubtful that most men using the term are aware enough of their own misogynistic thinking to be able to use it in a constructive way.
Even many moderate-to-left men are MRA-adjacent and misogynistic. So, they perpetuate slightly-modified talking points and "jokes" about "white women," "wine moms," and feminists that MRAs have been blathering about for decades, including first and foremost the pop idea that it's okay to leverage misogynistic narratives against "white women" or "rich women" or "privileged women" or "famous women" because such women are incapable of experiencing gender-based oppression since "other women have things worse."
Some people talk about how the white women who voted for Trump (or sometimes, just simply, "all white women") are "patriarchy's most eager foot soldiers," and sure that's certainly true for many. Less discussed are the progressive, moderate, liberal, and leftist women who are, as well, as they carry water for their dirtbag male peers by targeting progressive feminists who don't support a particular white male politician who shall remain nameless (just kidding, it's Bernie Sanders, but don't worry there's also the women who defend dudes like Joe Biden, Bill Maher, and Al Franken from the hysterical, vapid, no-sense-of-humor feminists) so that most feminists with even moderate followings are left fending off harassment from abusers left, right, and center for not staying in line.
It's telling, too, to watch how highly men reward women with likes, retweets, and positive reinforcement for engaging in this discourse. As a general rule, women are always rewarded for complicity under white supremacist patriarchy, a factoid that might also be relevant to the Trump-voting women.
When progressive feminists aren't being abused, they are often being ignored, which is an indignity in and of itself to not be treated like an intellectual peer of even mediocre male commentators. Quite often, they are often being gaslit, having their ideas co-opted by the mainstream without attribution, having their ideas co-opted by men who get ticker tape parades for being such good allies, being harassed/abused/doxxed/slandered/mocked, accused of hating men, and/or accused of ruining More Important Things like atheism, particular religions, socialism, capitalism, democracy, labor movements, political movements, podcasts, media companies, TV shows, men's careers, comedy, sports, workplaces, the Internet, and everything, basically.
In light of everything, it's not a wonder that women would vote for Trump. It's a wonder that there are any feminists at all.
Women are perpetually pitted against each other while it seems to me that we (the royal we, I guess) have largely given up on expecting men to be better. White men, in particular, are to be empathized with, in this political moment. A white man who is a feminist will not be called a white feminist, because hey, at least he's trying, and there's also the reality that behind the collective demand for white male himpathy is the ever-present threat: Don't ask too much of white men or else it's four more years of Trump and terror!
Ultimately, who is seen as deserving of the nation's, the media's, the political class' collective empathy is about power. And those who have power often try to narrate reality in ways that gaslight those with less relative power. "Identity politics are a distraction." "Only class matters." "Misogyny and rape culture don't exist." "Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate who didn't experience misogyny and her loss was entirely her fault, and the fact that the US has never had a female president is just a weird, flukey coincidence with no relevance to the 2016 post-mortem."
The reality back on Earth, however, is that the United States was simply not designed by its founders to account for a scenario in which a woman and/or non-white person might run against and beat a white man in a presidential (or any other) election, so when you think about it, we're largely winging this.
It's no coincidence that bigoted white Americans began escalating the collapse of American democracy after the election of the first Black president. It seems that the collective white male "Real Patriot" ego could not withstand the (to them) trauma, and neither could their wives, many of whom live in a state of hate-fear toward their husbands such that they constantly have to prove their loyalty in demeaning, self-flagellating ways ("Trump can grab my pussy! I don't mind!") while taking solace in their presumed superiority over non-white, non-Christian, non-cishet, non-conservative people.
It's a miracle the Washington Monument itself didn't explode in a fury of racist, eroticized rage. And after 8 years of President Obama, add losing to a woman? Hoo-boy. We never had a chance in 2016, did we?
I think a lot about the rage-entitlement SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh emoted during his hearings when confronted with a possible barrier, a woman - a mere woman - to the status he felt entitled to as his birthright. I'll never forget the day I watched his spittle-flecked defense of himself. Multiply that toxic attitude by millions and channel that fury into the avatar of Donald Trump, and boom, it turns out that a lot of the people who support Trump actually are racist, misogynistic, bigoted deplorables, and the sooner we collectively admit that the better.
So, unfortunately, while I believe a woman can and will eventually beat a man in a presidential election (in both the popular vote and the rigged-for-the-white-patriarchal-status-quo electoral college), I am not quite as certain that the establishment powers in this nation -
"The other story [besides that of white working class support for Donald Trump] was about white women, who voted 43 percent for Clinton to 53 percent for Trump. We were excoriated for voting for Trump, on the grounds that all women, but only women, should be feminists. That there are a lot of women in the United States who are not feminists does not surprise me. To be a feminist, you have to believe in your equality and rights, which can make your life unpleasant and dangerous if you live in a family, a community, a church, a state that does not agree with you about this.The highlighted statement is both profound and obvious (that is, obvious now that Solnit has articulated it). When women supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, women were (infamously) relentlessly mocked, harassed, and abused for supporting her - with much of the subtextual narrative being that Bernie was the better candidate with superior humanity, ethics, and policy positions compared to her, and accordingly, Hillary was only winning because she was establishment, had rigged it, and because frumpy, daft wine moms were supporting her "only" because they wanted a female president.
... So women were hated for not having gender loyalty. But here's the fun thing about being a woman: we were also hated for having gender loyalty. Women were accused of voting with their reproductive parts of they favored the main female candidate, though most men throughout American history have favored male candidates without being accused of voting with their penises."
Newsflash: Left misogyny is real.
And then, of course, that roughly half of white women who voted voted for Trump has led to a post-2016 moral panic about white women as a class, a panic that obfuscates relevant distinctions of class, religion, sexuality, age, marital status, education level, and other aspects of one's identity including - oh, I don't know - political party that might help us more accurately describe why so many white women are conservative other than the general consensus that all white women are garbage human beings.
On Twitter in particular, it's been notable how swiftly "white feminist" has come to be used with a certain lack of precision. Or, rather, more precisely how it has come to refer to any woman who is white who expresses an opinion about something, whereas the more specific original meaning was a critique of the centering of class-privileged, cishet white women within feminism. The former is not how the term is always used, to be clear, but it's used often enough and by those with relatively large platforms such that people have largely just accepted it even though if all white women are purported practitioners of white feminism without regard to what they are espousing, then people have actually failed to describe a meaningful category of feminism that exists in reality.
Men, interestingly enough, are never called "white feminists," even if they are white men who purport to be feminists. More on that tidbit, in a moment. Cool Girls, too, seem exempt, although I suspect deep down they know that can change at any moment.
From this imprecise usage, progressive, moderate, and leftist men are taking their cues accordingly and weaponizing this new definition of "white feminism," despite the fact that it's extremely doubtful that most men using the term are aware enough of their own misogynistic thinking to be able to use it in a constructive way.
Even many moderate-to-left men are MRA-adjacent and misogynistic. So, they perpetuate slightly-modified talking points and "jokes" about "white women," "wine moms," and feminists that MRAs have been blathering about for decades, including first and foremost the pop idea that it's okay to leverage misogynistic narratives against "white women" or "rich women" or "privileged women" or "famous women" because such women are incapable of experiencing gender-based oppression since "other women have things worse."
Some people talk about how the white women who voted for Trump (or sometimes, just simply, "all white women") are "patriarchy's most eager foot soldiers," and sure that's certainly true for many. Less discussed are the progressive, moderate, liberal, and leftist women who are, as well, as they carry water for their dirtbag male peers by targeting progressive feminists who don't support a particular white male politician who shall remain nameless (just kidding, it's Bernie Sanders, but don't worry there's also the women who defend dudes like Joe Biden, Bill Maher, and Al Franken from the hysterical, vapid, no-sense-of-humor feminists) so that most feminists with even moderate followings are left fending off harassment from abusers left, right, and center for not staying in line.
It's telling, too, to watch how highly men reward women with likes, retweets, and positive reinforcement for engaging in this discourse. As a general rule, women are always rewarded for complicity under white supremacist patriarchy, a factoid that might also be relevant to the Trump-voting women.
When progressive feminists aren't being abused, they are often being ignored, which is an indignity in and of itself to not be treated like an intellectual peer of even mediocre male commentators. Quite often, they are often being gaslit, having their ideas co-opted by the mainstream without attribution, having their ideas co-opted by men who get ticker tape parades for being such good allies, being harassed/abused/doxxed/slandered/mocked, accused of hating men, and/or accused of ruining More Important Things like atheism, particular religions, socialism, capitalism, democracy, labor movements, political movements, podcasts, media companies, TV shows, men's careers, comedy, sports, workplaces, the Internet, and everything, basically.
In light of everything, it's not a wonder that women would vote for Trump. It's a wonder that there are any feminists at all.
Women are perpetually pitted against each other while it seems to me that we (the royal we, I guess) have largely given up on expecting men to be better. White men, in particular, are to be empathized with, in this political moment. A white man who is a feminist will not be called a white feminist, because hey, at least he's trying, and there's also the reality that behind the collective demand for white male himpathy is the ever-present threat: Don't ask too much of white men or else it's four more years of Trump and terror!
Ultimately, who is seen as deserving of the nation's, the media's, the political class' collective empathy is about power. And those who have power often try to narrate reality in ways that gaslight those with less relative power. "Identity politics are a distraction." "Only class matters." "Misogyny and rape culture don't exist." "Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate who didn't experience misogyny and her loss was entirely her fault, and the fact that the US has never had a female president is just a weird, flukey coincidence with no relevance to the 2016 post-mortem."
The reality back on Earth, however, is that the United States was simply not designed by its founders to account for a scenario in which a woman and/or non-white person might run against and beat a white man in a presidential (or any other) election, so when you think about it, we're largely winging this.
It's no coincidence that bigoted white Americans began escalating the collapse of American democracy after the election of the first Black president. It seems that the collective white male "Real Patriot" ego could not withstand the (to them) trauma, and neither could their wives, many of whom live in a state of hate-fear toward their husbands such that they constantly have to prove their loyalty in demeaning, self-flagellating ways ("Trump can grab my pussy! I don't mind!") while taking solace in their presumed superiority over non-white, non-Christian, non-cishet, non-conservative people.
It's a miracle the Washington Monument itself didn't explode in a fury of racist, eroticized rage. And after 8 years of President Obama, add losing to a woman? Hoo-boy. We never had a chance in 2016, did we?
I think a lot about the rage-entitlement SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh emoted during his hearings when confronted with a possible barrier, a woman - a mere woman - to the status he felt entitled to as his birthright. I'll never forget the day I watched his spittle-flecked defense of himself. Multiply that toxic attitude by millions and channel that fury into the avatar of Donald Trump, and boom, it turns out that a lot of the people who support Trump actually are racist, misogynistic, bigoted deplorables, and the sooner we collectively admit that the better.
So, unfortunately, while I believe a woman can and will eventually beat a man in a presidential election (in both the popular vote and the rigged-for-the-white-patriarchal-status-quo electoral college), I am not quite as certain that the establishment powers in this nation -
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
On "Resistance Moms" and 2020
Today on Twitter, I made some observations about some 2020 polling data from Indivisible:
As I tweeted, these findings are interesting on several levels. Regarding Bernie, I think he dredges up a lot of history from 2016, most notably that he can't seem to admit that he lost to a woman. But in addition to that, I think he has earned the distrust many women probably have of him due to his consistent 1960s socialist rhetoric that dog-whistles the mantra that white working class men are to be prioritized with respect to the political solutions he's proposing.
There's also the reality that a good portion of the online left has spent far too much time and energy mocking "wine moms" and the "hashtag resistance" for not sufficiently feeling the Bern. Back in January 2019, I wrote about this. The refusal of the online left to take "the hashtag resistance" seriously as a political movement is, I believe, in no small part due largely to the fact that white, cisgender, straight men are not at the center of it.
We've seen some of these dynamics play out over the past three years, a notable example of which is the way many women have bristled at times when The Women's March has appeared to be a vehicle for channeling women's support toward a Bernie 2020 run, such as his invite to give what some were presented as a keynote speech at the organization's Women's Convention in 2017. (He accepted the invite, which caused a huge backlash, and then later backed out without acknowledging that invite/acceptance were controversial.)
The Biden numbers on the Indivisible poll are interesting, as well, not the least of which is because I think there is some "conventional wisdom" on Twitter that "resistance moms" are "neoliberal centrists" who probably disproportionately support him (or course, you have to factor in that "neoliberal centrist" has some bizarre definitions these days, most of which center around the degree to which one does/doesn't like Bernie Sanders).
I'm not sure what to make of Gillibrand's numbers, other than that she most likely has taken huge hits because she called on Al Franken to resign. So, perhaps these voters are resentful of her for that and/or they think other people would remain too resentful of that (ie, misogynistic) to vote for her.
Remember: a lot of women have internalized misogyny, and it's also pervasive among the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum. It's fully possible to support some female candidates, while not supporting others for misogynistic reasons.
All in all, it's still early. Biden and Bernie have near-universal name recognition, however, and I suspect that the more people see of the other candidates, the more people will realize that neither man is particularly well-equipped for this political moment.
I know Bernie's team is pushing the narrative that everyone is stealing his ideas*, but demeanor - among other things matters - and he simply doesn't have it. (*If everyone is stealing Bernie's ideas and supporting "his" agenda, are they also still neoliberals centrist sellouts? Hmmm, ponder the paradox).
The data shows that this group of voters - said to be disproportionately white, female, and suburban - disproportionately support Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. The numbers also show that more within this group do not support Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, than do.This is interesting on several levels.— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) July 3, 2019
One, if it's true that Indivisible disproportionately includes "resistance mom," I think there are many reasons this group doesn't support Bernie. For one, he dredges up a lot of history from 2016 and can't seem to admit he lost to a woman. https://t.co/4GxCGPEdTZ
As I tweeted, these findings are interesting on several levels. Regarding Bernie, I think he dredges up a lot of history from 2016, most notably that he can't seem to admit that he lost to a woman. But in addition to that, I think he has earned the distrust many women probably have of him due to his consistent 1960s socialist rhetoric that dog-whistles the mantra that white working class men are to be prioritized with respect to the political solutions he's proposing.
There's also the reality that a good portion of the online left has spent far too much time and energy mocking "wine moms" and the "hashtag resistance" for not sufficiently feeling the Bern. Back in January 2019, I wrote about this. The refusal of the online left to take "the hashtag resistance" seriously as a political movement is, I believe, in no small part due largely to the fact that white, cisgender, straight men are not at the center of it.
We've seen some of these dynamics play out over the past three years, a notable example of which is the way many women have bristled at times when The Women's March has appeared to be a vehicle for channeling women's support toward a Bernie 2020 run, such as his invite to give what some were presented as a keynote speech at the organization's Women's Convention in 2017. (He accepted the invite, which caused a huge backlash, and then later backed out without acknowledging that invite/acceptance were controversial.)
The Biden numbers on the Indivisible poll are interesting, as well, not the least of which is because I think there is some "conventional wisdom" on Twitter that "resistance moms" are "neoliberal centrists" who probably disproportionately support him (or course, you have to factor in that "neoliberal centrist" has some bizarre definitions these days, most of which center around the degree to which one does/doesn't like Bernie Sanders).
I'm not sure what to make of Gillibrand's numbers, other than that she most likely has taken huge hits because she called on Al Franken to resign. So, perhaps these voters are resentful of her for that and/or they think other people would remain too resentful of that (ie, misogynistic) to vote for her.
Remember: a lot of women have internalized misogyny, and it's also pervasive among the moderate-to-left side of the political spectrum. It's fully possible to support some female candidates, while not supporting others for misogynistic reasons.
All in all, it's still early. Biden and Bernie have near-universal name recognition, however, and I suspect that the more people see of the other candidates, the more people will realize that neither man is particularly well-equipped for this political moment.
I know Bernie's team is pushing the narrative that everyone is stealing his ideas*, but demeanor - among other things matters - and he simply doesn't have it. (*If everyone is stealing Bernie's ideas and supporting "his" agenda, are they also still neoliberals centrist sellouts? Hmmm, ponder the paradox).
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
The Threat of Populists in 2020
Via The New York Times, in an opinion piece by Jan-Werner Muller entitled, "Populists Don't Lost Elections":
Many smart people seem not to be taking this threat seriously, and hold a "it can't happen here" attitude. Donald Trump's multitudes of breaches of norms and laws have become slowly normalized, just as feared. And, it seems we're stuck with this guy for life, since Republicans who actually hold power are either happy that he's implementing their preferred rightwing agenda or, the ones who are "concerned," are nonetheless paralyzed with their dicks in their hands doing nothing meaningful to resist. (Whoops, #MuellerTime didn't save us!)
Yet, the US also has a left flank, we have to remember, with a destructive authoritarian populist streak of its own. This flank is currently represented by Bernie Sanders who cannot seem to fathom running a campaign in which he is not attacking The Establishment, and whose most die-hard supporters think he will magically implement the socialist revolution as president, as though checks and balances and a Republican-controlled Senate simply do not exist.
But perhaps worse, for now, is that if he loses in the Democratic primary it will be interesting to note the linguistic turns of phrase he, his supporters, and allied media are likely to adopt to suggest that he, yet again, only lost because the primary was rigged. For instance, rather than acknowledging that individual voters chose another candidate, the narrative will be that "the Democrats" (or, likely, the "Democratic Establishment") hand-picked someone else, thus erasing the millions of people who cast votes in the election - as though "the Democrats" are a disembodied, scheming hivemind.
In November 2017, a Rasmussen Poll showed that only 54% of Democratic voters believed Hillary Clinton won the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders fairly.
If Bernie doesn't win the nomination for 2020, expect a similar narrative to be pushed and to gain traction. This narrative will only help bolster Trump's erosion of our electoral system. After all, aren't Democrats and Republicans just as bad about rigging elections?
"Politicians like Mr. Erdogan are distinguished by their claim that only they truly represent the people. They suggest they can lose at the polls only when elections have been rigged by liberal elites.
....Contrary to conventional wisdom, populists are not distinctive just because they criticize elites. There’s nothing wrong with critiquing the powerful; in fact, it’s often healthy in a democracy. What is specific to populists is the claim that they are the only ones who represent those they often call 'the real people.' The implication is not only that all other contenders for power are corrupt or lack legitimacy, but also that citizens who fail to support populists do not truly belong to the people at all."Donald Trump has been telling us since at least 2015 that he won't accept the legitimacy of an election in which he is the loser. It seems rather obvious that he would continue to erode our political system in this way by refusing to accept a loss in 2020, as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has suggested.
Many smart people seem not to be taking this threat seriously, and hold a "it can't happen here" attitude. Donald Trump's multitudes of breaches of norms and laws have become slowly normalized, just as feared. And, it seems we're stuck with this guy for life, since Republicans who actually hold power are either happy that he's implementing their preferred rightwing agenda or, the ones who are "concerned," are nonetheless paralyzed with their dicks in their hands doing nothing meaningful to resist. (Whoops, #MuellerTime didn't save us!)
Yet, the US also has a left flank, we have to remember, with a destructive authoritarian populist streak of its own. This flank is currently represented by Bernie Sanders who cannot seem to fathom running a campaign in which he is not attacking The Establishment, and whose most die-hard supporters think he will magically implement the socialist revolution as president, as though checks and balances and a Republican-controlled Senate simply do not exist.
But perhaps worse, for now, is that if he loses in the Democratic primary it will be interesting to note the linguistic turns of phrase he, his supporters, and allied media are likely to adopt to suggest that he, yet again, only lost because the primary was rigged. For instance, rather than acknowledging that individual voters chose another candidate, the narrative will be that "the Democrats" (or, likely, the "Democratic Establishment") hand-picked someone else, thus erasing the millions of people who cast votes in the election - as though "the Democrats" are a disembodied, scheming hivemind.
In November 2017, a Rasmussen Poll showed that only 54% of Democratic voters believed Hillary Clinton won the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders fairly.
If Bernie doesn't win the nomination for 2020, expect a similar narrative to be pushed and to gain traction. This narrative will only help bolster Trump's erosion of our electoral system. After all, aren't Democrats and Republicans just as bad about rigging elections?
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Maybe It's Mostly Just Misogyny
In her book of observations about the political climate of the US in the 1960s, Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion talks of meeting one young leftist:
And, while members of Bernie's very online leftist fan club will think this makes me snobby to say, the conversation in the Twitter thread is a good reminder that the way many of the folks at Jacobin talk about politicians is probably not the way most Americans talk about politicians or decide who to vote for.
Of course, acknowledging that I'm correct would require acknowledging that a large part of Bernie's appeal is not that he's tapping into the latent socialist desires of the masses, but that he taps into white male grievance at establishment institutions, identity politics, political correctness, and women's expanding political power as represented by Hillary Clinton, who he seems to have never stopped running against since 2015.
"He was born twenty-six years ago in Brooklyn, moved as a child to Los Angeles, dorpped out of UCLA his sophomore year to organize for the Retail Clerks, and now, as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group of Stalinist-Maoists who divide their energies between Watts and Harlem, he is rigidly committed to an immutable complex of doctrine, including the notions that the traditional American Communist Party is a 'revisionist bourgeois clique,' that the Progressive Labor Party, the Trotskyites, and 'the revisionist clique headed by Gus Hall' prove themselves opportunistic bourgeois lackeys by making their peace appeal not to the 'workers' but to the liberal imperialists; and that H. Rap Brown is the tool, if not the conscious agent, of the ruling imperial class."The above particular essay came to mind yesterday, when I saw Jacobin predictably making its case against Elizabeth Warren, in favor of Bernie Sanders.
I'm sure the "fact" that Warren is a "Brandeisian" and Sanders is a "Debsian" matters to some people, but I'm more sure that the fact that Bernie is a white guy matters more, and to more people.Maybe the simpler explanation is that he's a man and she's a woman. I hope this helps.— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) April 22, 2019
And, while members of Bernie's very online leftist fan club will think this makes me snobby to say, the conversation in the Twitter thread is a good reminder that the way many of the folks at Jacobin talk about politicians is probably not the way most Americans talk about politicians or decide who to vote for.
Of course, acknowledging that I'm correct would require acknowledging that a large part of Bernie's appeal is not that he's tapping into the latent socialist desires of the masses, but that he taps into white male grievance at establishment institutions, identity politics, political correctness, and women's expanding political power as represented by Hillary Clinton, who he seems to have never stopped running against since 2015.
It's weird that Bernie never stopped running against Hillary Clinton. https://t.co/phVDCu23za— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) April 22, 2019
Monday, March 4, 2019
Quote of the Day
So says the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman, on Bernie Sanders:
"Policy is not everything. Trump has reminded Americans that in the Oval Office, qualities such as restraint, moderation, good humor and flexibility are indispensable. These are not traits generally attributed to Sanders. He brings to mind Winston Churchill’s description of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."Working in Bernie's favor, though, is that white men can get away with that shit. What are dealbreaker traits for female politicians - being a cantankerous asshole chief among them - are often seen as strength, authenticity, and charm in old white guys.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
United Methodists Choose LGBT Discrimination
Via Emma Green at The Atlantic, the United Methodist Church has voted to tough prohibitions on same-sex marriage and LGBT clergy:
White Christian conservatives comprise Donald Trump's base and continue to overwhelmingly support him, with 71% viewing him favorably as a person as of late January 2019. We have secular marriage equality in the US for same-sex couples, and the political will and mobilization seems to be lacking even as our rights remain under constant attack by the Trump/Pence administration and religious organizations.
Parts of the center-to-left side of the political spectrum seems to be living under this fantasy that conservative Christians will simply convert to socialism once they hear the right politician give the right speech that speaks to their economic anxieties, but that fantasy overlooks the faith-based reasons, such as they are, that many people support Republican politicians.
"This was a surprise: The denomination’s bishops, its top clergy, pushed hard for a resolution that would have allowed local congregations, conferences, and clergy to make their own choices about conducting same-sex marriages and ordaining LGBT pastors. This proposal, called the One Church Plan, was designed to keep the denomination together. Methodist delegates rejected their recommendations, instead choosing the so-called Traditional Plan that affirmed the denomination’s teachings against homosexuality."This is disappointing. And, as the article goes on to note, "It’s also a reminder that many Christian denominations, including mainline groups like the UMC, are still deeply divided over questions of sexuality and gender identity."
White Christian conservatives comprise Donald Trump's base and continue to overwhelmingly support him, with 71% viewing him favorably as a person as of late January 2019. We have secular marriage equality in the US for same-sex couples, and the political will and mobilization seems to be lacking even as our rights remain under constant attack by the Trump/Pence administration and religious organizations.
Parts of the center-to-left side of the political spectrum seems to be living under this fantasy that conservative Christians will simply convert to socialism once they hear the right politician give the right speech that speaks to their economic anxieties, but that fantasy overlooks the faith-based reasons, such as they are, that many people support Republican politicians.
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
On "Bernie vs. Centrists"
I obviously have not chosen a preferred 2020 candidate yet and it would strike me as absurd to do so this early.
Generally speaking, it would be great if someone could put me in a cryo-pod and wake me up in about 50 years. I say that because Bernie Sanders is running again, and while I would vote for him over Donald Trump, I almost certainly would not vote for him in a Democratic Primary.
With progressives running, including Elizabeth Warren, it's hard for me to see the point of him running. His entry makes me wary for multiple reasons. He stayed in the 2016 race long after it was clear he had lost, suggesting he will likely do so again. His campaign was aided by Russian agents and he's praised by Donald Trump. He didn't "almost" win in 2016 and yet many people continue to think he did, or that the DNC and Hillary Clinton bamboozled the win away from him, while he just silently lets people think that.
I also suspect that Sanders and his team know that in a diverse field of candidates, misogyny and racism will do a lot of heavy lifting in Sanders' favor, although it's nothing he/they would ever acknowledge, as Sanders habitually condescends like a white male college freshman when pontificating about representation in politics.
As I've noted on Twitter previously, the mainstream media often frames the Democratic Party as consisting of the so-called Bernie left vs. Centrists, ceding that Sanders is the standard-bearer for progressivism in the US and that everyone who doesn't like him is simply "more conservative" than him and his supporters.
It is endlessly infuriating and gaslighting.
The Bernie left vs. Centrists frame erases literal millions of voters and Democrats. It's simply not grounded in reality. Some people are neither Bernie fans nor centrist, but the very term "leftist" has come to be centered around Bernie Sanders in the US.
We will never have a broad, united progressive movement if that reality is not acknowledged. And, unfortunately, I question how many members of the Online Left even care about building a broad movement. Why do that when you can dunk on "centrists" all day for not liking Bernie, after all?
Relatedly, almost every feminist blogger I know still has leftist online stalkers/harassers who hate us for not liking Bernie Sanders.
I also question the oft-stated Internet nugget of wisdom that Sanders has single-handedly moved the Democratic Party to the left. But, let's concede that point for the moment. If "Centrist Dems" are indeed following Sanders like lemmings off a socialist cliff, then he should bear the brunt of the blame if/when Trump successfully red-baits all of the purportedly latent-socialists-in-waiting/economically anxious ordinary white people who comprise the Trump base into voting Republican once again.
I know a lot of Internet leftists barely pay attention to Republicans, since they are keen to thinking Democrats are The Real Enemy, but Republicans are rightwingers are already amping up the anti-socialist propaganda. Rightwing Christian and JD Vance fanboy Rod Dreher, for instance, is currently pitching an anti-socialist book. The Fox News crowd has a regular hate-obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Democratic candidates better start putting a strategy in place beyond thinking that everyone will just agree with them if people only learn more about socialism.
Generally speaking, it would be great if someone could put me in a cryo-pod and wake me up in about 50 years. I say that because Bernie Sanders is running again, and while I would vote for him over Donald Trump, I almost certainly would not vote for him in a Democratic Primary.
With progressives running, including Elizabeth Warren, it's hard for me to see the point of him running. His entry makes me wary for multiple reasons. He stayed in the 2016 race long after it was clear he had lost, suggesting he will likely do so again. His campaign was aided by Russian agents and he's praised by Donald Trump. He didn't "almost" win in 2016 and yet many people continue to think he did, or that the DNC and Hillary Clinton bamboozled the win away from him, while he just silently lets people think that.
I think Sanders does have strong appeal for leftist, moderate, and rightwing people, particularly white ones, who both dislike Trump and are uncomfortable with voting for a woman and/or person of color for president. So, that's something, and it's not even a small thing. But, I'm not sure that's enough to win a Democratic Primary.Trump on Bernie Sanders just now: "He was not treated fairly by Clinton."— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 19, 2019
I also suspect that Sanders and his team know that in a diverse field of candidates, misogyny and racism will do a lot of heavy lifting in Sanders' favor, although it's nothing he/they would ever acknowledge, as Sanders habitually condescends like a white male college freshman when pontificating about representation in politics.
Bernie Sanders as he launches 2020 campaign: “We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age.” https://t.co/JOCxKsKACc— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) February 19, 2019
As I've noted on Twitter previously, the mainstream media often frames the Democratic Party as consisting of the so-called Bernie left vs. Centrists, ceding that Sanders is the standard-bearer for progressivism in the US and that everyone who doesn't like him is simply "more conservative" than him and his supporters.
It is endlessly infuriating and gaslighting.
This article is a good example of the way so many in the media falsely frame the Democratic Party as consisting of the so-called Bernie left vs. the establishment centrists, which is a frame that is largely pushed by Bernie supporters. https://t.co/QHcjvVfDmH
— Fannie Wolfe 🌈 (@fanniesroom) February 6, 2019Meanwhile, the many people who are both progressive and distrustful of Sanders, and his die-hard fans, are almost never mentioned, nor are our reasons for being distrustful, such as prominent leftists' history of misogyny and racism, and Sanders' habitual gaslighting with respect to identity politics.
The Bernie left vs. Centrists frame erases literal millions of voters and Democrats. It's simply not grounded in reality. Some people are neither Bernie fans nor centrist, but the very term "leftist" has come to be centered around Bernie Sanders in the US.
We will never have a broad, united progressive movement if that reality is not acknowledged. And, unfortunately, I question how many members of the Online Left even care about building a broad movement. Why do that when you can dunk on "centrists" all day for not liking Bernie, after all?
Relatedly, almost every feminist blogger I know still has leftist online stalkers/harassers who hate us for not liking Bernie Sanders.
I also question the oft-stated Internet nugget of wisdom that Sanders has single-handedly moved the Democratic Party to the left. But, let's concede that point for the moment. If "Centrist Dems" are indeed following Sanders like lemmings off a socialist cliff, then he should bear the brunt of the blame if/when Trump successfully red-baits all of the purportedly latent-socialists-in-waiting/economically anxious ordinary white people who comprise the Trump base into voting Republican once again.
I know a lot of Internet leftists barely pay attention to Republicans, since they are keen to thinking Democrats are The Real Enemy, but Republicans are rightwingers are already amping up the anti-socialist propaganda. Rightwing Christian and JD Vance fanboy Rod Dreher, for instance, is currently pitching an anti-socialist book. The Fox News crowd has a regular hate-obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Democratic candidates better start putting a strategy in place beyond thinking that everyone will just agree with them if people only learn more about socialism.
Monday, January 14, 2019
Keep Your Trickle-Down White Male Socialist Revolution
Over at Shakesville, I wrote about the Bernie revolution, and recent revelations about allegations of sexual harassment on his 2016 campaign:
"So, how was it that Bernie Sanders, champion of the ordinary worker, had by his own admission "inadequate" procedures to deal with sexual harassment for the many ordinary people working on his presidential campaign?Read the whole thing!
Could it have been that Bernie seemed to think that the outcome — the revolution — could trump process; that is, how the revolution was won?
Now, some folks are waiving away these allegations by saying that women are harassed on all campaigns, but that strikes me as an argument to hold our leaders more accountable, not less. I would think the standards would be especially high for a politician, like Bernie, who consistently frames himself as not residing in the same swamp as the rest of America's political class."
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
The Iowa Polls: "I guess he'll do" 2020
It's 2019. Grab your barf bags because we're off to the 2020 races and three white men are leading in the polls of likely Democratic voters.
Here's from a recent CNN poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa (cite: PDF):
That's right, Joe Biden (32%), Bernie Sanders (19%), and Beto O'Rourke (11%). These are three men who have each lost the biggest political races in which they've competed. I'll just say for that reason alone, although there are many others, I am very concerned about 2020 and our chances of defeating Trump and the Republicans.
What could it possibly mean that Democrats and major media voices are not widely shouting at these men to retire into the woods and knit for the rest of their days?
Here are some theories, any combination of which might be playing out.
(1) It's Iowa, which is about 91% white.
Yet, in national polls, Biden has tended to lead, with Bernie Sanders coming in second, and someone else coming in third - often Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
(2) Biden, Bernie, and Beto all have a lot of name recognition right now. Biden, who lost his previous bid badly, can ride on President Obama's coattails. Bernie has essentially never stopped running for president, even when he lost badly to Hillary Clinton. And, Beto just lost a high-profile race with the extremely unlikeable Ted Cruz.
(3) Hillary Clinton's electoral college loss to Donald Trump was deeply humiliating for American women and many women have lose their appetite to endure both the misogyny she (and her supporters) faced and another loss.
(4) The center to left has been in a moral panic about "white women" since approximately 47% of the white women who voted voted for Donald Trump. It's as if some people have discovered, and just started thinking about, for the first time the very existence of conservative white women. Yet, rather than this 47% statistic being an indictment of conservatism, Christianity, misogyny, racism, or bigotry, in the framework of Clinton's loss, the 47% statistic is widely perceived as an indictment of "white feminism," a category that no longer means "non-intersectional feminism" but has come to mean, on the Internet, "words said by any feminist who is white."
I'm still teasing out the 2020 implications of this, but I've seen many men take advantage of this collapsing of many progressive feminists into the category of "irredeemably bad feminist who needs to shut up forever" in ways that are profoundly misogynistic. I see a lot of cynical mocking of the hashtag resistance because it's perceived as being comprised of dorky, white suburban moms who wear pussy hats. I see a lot of progressive white women internalizing this misogyny. Ironically, I see a lot of progressives who have just given up on intersectionality beyond the prism of one or maybe two intersections of identity, when there are so many more.
I think all of this contributes to the perception that it will take a white man to beat Trump.
(5) Relatedly, some people might want to vote for someone who isn't a white man, but they don't think enough other people will, so they perceive it as safer to support a white man.
(6) Many people are more tolerant of flawed white men, where women/people of color have their flaws amplified and used as dealbreakers. Every woman who runs will have her own version of "the emailz" to contend with, while her male competitors could be literal traitors to the nation and receive no comparable coverage.
(7) The beltway media portrays, and many people perceive, politics as akin to a boxing match, rather than a popularity contest that is largely framed by the media. And in a boxing match, people think it takes a man to beat a man. Hence the various male politicians and their fans with their "Bernie wouldas" and "Biden wouldas" after the 2016 election.
(8) Decades of rightwing anti-Clinton propaganda and attacks amplified Hillary Clinton's flaws and contributed to many people on the center-left thinking she was a uniquely bad candidate, thus masking the misogyny that lingers among the voting population, even among Democrats and Independents. See, for instance, how Elizabeth Warren is already being treated, now that it's almost certain she's running.
(9) The mainstream media is still dominated by misogynistic, white supremacist people, especially white men.
(10) Our society still widely hates ambitious women.
(11) Trump is so bad that many people have completely romanticized the Obama years. They want the perceived safety of Joe Biden, the daddy/husband figure, even though Russia interfered with the 2016 election on the watch of Obama/Biden.
(12) It's very early. Other candidates may rise in the polls over time, with more exposure.
Note, none of these reasons are grounded in any of the leading men being uniquely good politicians.
They're not.
Yet, the thing about many white male candidates is that they rarely acknowledge the invisible assists they get from white male privilege, instead taking it for granted that their polling numbers and/or popularity are an authentic reflection of their qualifications for the job.
What else?
Here's from a recent CNN poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa (cite: PDF):
That's right, Joe Biden (32%), Bernie Sanders (19%), and Beto O'Rourke (11%). These are three men who have each lost the biggest political races in which they've competed. I'll just say for that reason alone, although there are many others, I am very concerned about 2020 and our chances of defeating Trump and the Republicans.
What could it possibly mean that Democrats and major media voices are not widely shouting at these men to retire into the woods and knit for the rest of their days?
Here are some theories, any combination of which might be playing out.
(1) It's Iowa, which is about 91% white.
Yet, in national polls, Biden has tended to lead, with Bernie Sanders coming in second, and someone else coming in third - often Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
(2) Biden, Bernie, and Beto all have a lot of name recognition right now. Biden, who lost his previous bid badly, can ride on President Obama's coattails. Bernie has essentially never stopped running for president, even when he lost badly to Hillary Clinton. And, Beto just lost a high-profile race with the extremely unlikeable Ted Cruz.
(3) Hillary Clinton's electoral college loss to Donald Trump was deeply humiliating for American women and many women have lose their appetite to endure both the misogyny she (and her supporters) faced and another loss.
(4) The center to left has been in a moral panic about "white women" since approximately 47% of the white women who voted voted for Donald Trump. It's as if some people have discovered, and just started thinking about, for the first time the very existence of conservative white women. Yet, rather than this 47% statistic being an indictment of conservatism, Christianity, misogyny, racism, or bigotry, in the framework of Clinton's loss, the 47% statistic is widely perceived as an indictment of "white feminism," a category that no longer means "non-intersectional feminism" but has come to mean, on the Internet, "words said by any feminist who is white."
I'm still teasing out the 2020 implications of this, but I've seen many men take advantage of this collapsing of many progressive feminists into the category of "irredeemably bad feminist who needs to shut up forever" in ways that are profoundly misogynistic. I see a lot of cynical mocking of the hashtag resistance because it's perceived as being comprised of dorky, white suburban moms who wear pussy hats. I see a lot of progressive white women internalizing this misogyny. Ironically, I see a lot of progressives who have just given up on intersectionality beyond the prism of one or maybe two intersections of identity, when there are so many more.
I think all of this contributes to the perception that it will take a white man to beat Trump.
(5) Relatedly, some people might want to vote for someone who isn't a white man, but they don't think enough other people will, so they perceive it as safer to support a white man.
(6) Many people are more tolerant of flawed white men, where women/people of color have their flaws amplified and used as dealbreakers. Every woman who runs will have her own version of "the emailz" to contend with, while her male competitors could be literal traitors to the nation and receive no comparable coverage.
(7) The beltway media portrays, and many people perceive, politics as akin to a boxing match, rather than a popularity contest that is largely framed by the media. And in a boxing match, people think it takes a man to beat a man. Hence the various male politicians and their fans with their "Bernie wouldas" and "Biden wouldas" after the 2016 election.
(8) Decades of rightwing anti-Clinton propaganda and attacks amplified Hillary Clinton's flaws and contributed to many people on the center-left thinking she was a uniquely bad candidate, thus masking the misogyny that lingers among the voting population, even among Democrats and Independents. See, for instance, how Elizabeth Warren is already being treated, now that it's almost certain she's running.
(9) The mainstream media is still dominated by misogynistic, white supremacist people, especially white men.
(10) Our society still widely hates ambitious women.
(11) Trump is so bad that many people have completely romanticized the Obama years. They want the perceived safety of Joe Biden, the daddy/husband figure, even though Russia interfered with the 2016 election on the watch of Obama/Biden.
(12) It's very early. Other candidates may rise in the polls over time, with more exposure.
Note, none of these reasons are grounded in any of the leading men being uniquely good politicians.
They're not.
Yet, the thing about many white male candidates is that they rarely acknowledge the invisible assists they get from white male privilege, instead taking it for granted that their polling numbers and/or popularity are an authentic reflection of their qualifications for the job.
What else?
Thursday, December 6, 2018
Biden, Bernie, and Russia
In the purported feminist revival we're in, I continue to contemplate what it means that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders lead polls among Democrats of possible 2020 presidential candidates, with newcomer (to the national stage) Beto O'Rourke now coming in right behind them in third place.
Biden has done very poorly in previous presidential campaigns (1998 and 2008), but I think his recent popularity is due largely to name recognition, the effect of riding President Obama's coattails as Democrats continue to mourn the end of that presidency, and the fact that the Overton Window of what an acceptable candidate is has shifted quite far in the age of Trump. White men who merely quietly rape people and then half-ass apologize, as opposed to brag about it, are practically thrown ticker tape parades these days.
Bernie and Beto, like Biden, have a lot of name recognition right now, with Bernie losing to Hillary in 2016 and Beto losing a high-profile Senate race in Texas to the magnificently-unlikeable Ted Cruz.
What winners!
Plus, even those on the left side of the political spectrum can be racist and sexist. For many people who are not, they will support a white man simply because they are resigned to thinking that a woman/person of color cannot ever win because "everyone else" is still too racist and sexist to vote for anyone but a white man.
But, aside from these factors, I'm troubled by Biden because, as Melissa notes in an article about Biden's cocky comments about his qualification to be president, he "was vice-president while a foreign adversary stole our fucking election." For that reason alone, his national security credibility is, or should be, severely lacking.
With respect to Bernie, we know that Russia gave his campaign an assist against Hillary Clinton. Are they going to do so again,this time against other Democrat candidates, while getting further assists from his most hard-core, rabid online supporters?
The mainstream media should make it extremely awkward, to say the least, if Bernie and Biden in particular fail to address the integrity of our elections during their campaigns (assuming they both run).
And, given both men's relatively popularity, it seems that more Democrats need to fully understand that the Mueller investigation is less about removing Trump because he's a terrible person (which he is) and more because he and/or his campaign agents likely conspired with a foreign government to undermine our political system.
Biden has done very poorly in previous presidential campaigns (1998 and 2008), but I think his recent popularity is due largely to name recognition, the effect of riding President Obama's coattails as Democrats continue to mourn the end of that presidency, and the fact that the Overton Window of what an acceptable candidate is has shifted quite far in the age of Trump. White men who merely quietly rape people and then half-ass apologize, as opposed to brag about it, are practically thrown ticker tape parades these days.
Bernie and Beto, like Biden, have a lot of name recognition right now, with Bernie losing to Hillary in 2016 and Beto losing a high-profile Senate race in Texas to the magnificently-unlikeable Ted Cruz.
What winners!
Plus, even those on the left side of the political spectrum can be racist and sexist. For many people who are not, they will support a white man simply because they are resigned to thinking that a woman/person of color cannot ever win because "everyone else" is still too racist and sexist to vote for anyone but a white man.
But, aside from these factors, I'm troubled by Biden because, as Melissa notes in an article about Biden's cocky comments about his qualification to be president, he "was vice-president while a foreign adversary stole our fucking election." For that reason alone, his national security credibility is, or should be, severely lacking.
With respect to Bernie, we know that Russia gave his campaign an assist against Hillary Clinton. Are they going to do so again,this time against other Democrat candidates, while getting further assists from his most hard-core, rabid online supporters?
The mainstream media should make it extremely awkward, to say the least, if Bernie and Biden in particular fail to address the integrity of our elections during their campaigns (assuming they both run).
And, given both men's relatively popularity, it seems that more Democrats need to fully understand that the Mueller investigation is less about removing Trump because he's a terrible person (which he is) and more because he and/or his campaign agents likely conspired with a foreign government to undermine our political system.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Buckle Up, Bros
With an impending 2020 run on his horizon, Bernie Sanders is not going to receive the same delicate press treatment he received in 2016.
This is what's called foreshadowing, via NPR:
(Text of tweet from NPR Politics: "Bernie Sanders' new book, 'Where We Go From Here' is just what you might expect. His platforms are presented but not interrogated. There are stances, but few real questions and little self-reflection.")
From the NPR review of Bernie's new book:
The more I have learned about him over the years and have seen him in action, particularly his cantankerous asshole attitude during interviews, I have come to find him more and more unfathomably unlikeable. It's no wonder he's largely been an ineffective member of Congress with few allies in the decades he's been part of the political establishment of the US.
The way I see it, the fact that he was running as Not Hillary Clinton in a two-person race against Hillary Clinton in 2016 gave him a huge assist that he and his die-hard followers seem largely unaware of. He won't have that in 2020. And that, coupled with the fact that he basically hasn't stopped running for president since 2014, the mainstream media - including liberal and progressive sources - will be more prone to actually vetting and criticizing him.
I don't see that working in his favor.
What's unfortunate is that, as his campaign tanks, he'll most likely wipe his ass on the drapes on the way out, helping to ensure that The Democratic Establishment fails simply because he wasn't chosen as its big savior.
This is what's called foreshadowing, via NPR:
Bernie Sanders' new book, "Where We Go From Here." is just what you might expect.— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) November 27, 2018
His platforms are presented but not interrogated. There are stances, but few real questions and little self-reflection. https://t.co/VSgpM4NvHL
(Text of tweet from NPR Politics: "Bernie Sanders' new book, 'Where We Go From Here' is just what you might expect. His platforms are presented but not interrogated. There are stances, but few real questions and little self-reflection.")
From the NPR review of Bernie's new book:
"He also often accuses the media of not covering issues that they cover extensively, from climate change to healthcare to the Koch brothers — Sanders writes that the media has 'zero interest in what they stand for,' despite the amount of great reporting on their agenda from journalists such as Jane Mayer at The New Yorker.
His disdain, if more nuanced than Trump's, is hardly less self defeating, and at a certain point it begins to feel like what he is actually bothered by is the media's failure to cover his campaign as he would like it to be, rather than as it actually is."When I first learned about Bernie Sanders, I had neutral-to-good first impressions of him.
The more I have learned about him over the years and have seen him in action, particularly his cantankerous asshole attitude during interviews, I have come to find him more and more unfathomably unlikeable. It's no wonder he's largely been an ineffective member of Congress with few allies in the decades he's been part of the political establishment of the US.
The way I see it, the fact that he was running as Not Hillary Clinton in a two-person race against Hillary Clinton in 2016 gave him a huge assist that he and his die-hard followers seem largely unaware of. He won't have that in 2020. And that, coupled with the fact that he basically hasn't stopped running for president since 2014, the mainstream media - including liberal and progressive sources - will be more prone to actually vetting and criticizing him.
I don't see that working in his favor.
What's unfortunate is that, as his campaign tanks, he'll most likely wipe his ass on the drapes on the way out, helping to ensure that The Democratic Establishment fails simply because he wasn't chosen as its big savior.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
TFW You Realize Trump Wants Bernie To Lead the Dems
Even though self-avowed socialists and lefitsts make important distinctions between themselves and, gasp!, liberals, you can count on conservatives not to.
In response to what it deems the "comeback of socialism," the White House Council on Economic Advisers has published a report warning of the dire harm that results when nations try to implement socialism (PDF).
Some of it is silly, and some of it is not (but that would be a much longer post to parse out).
What I primarily want to observe is the following.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump promoted the narrative that Hillary Clinton rigged the election against both himself and Bernie Sanders, the man many credit for socialism's current popularity.
Bernie himself, and his campaign leadership, had problems conceding that he lost fair and square to Clinton. Partly as a result of this lingering belief that Bernie was "robbed" of a win, Bernie (and many people's support of him) never really went away the way it's demanded that certain other, ahem, election losers go away forever. In fact, Bernie is largely treated as a 2016 winner, for purportedly pushing the Democrats leftward.
It is true that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, some high-profile Democratic politicians have publicly expressed more left-wing positions, such as supporting Medicare For All. Moving left is not necessarily a bad thing, but some of it seems to have been done in a reflexive, follow-the-white-man way in which a lot of people are taking cues from either Trump or Bernie. The mainstream media, too, has dutifully conceded that Bernie is the leader of the left and that everyone he hasn't properly anointed as a true leftist is therefore a "centrist" or "moderate."
Aside from the particularities of broad socialist policies (For instance, what happens to reproductive and trans healthcare rights when Republicans control the government that controls "healthcare for all"? And when the fuck are we going to talk about childcare?), I think many of the what I call "online socialists" simply have no clue how socialism, and particularly rightwing caricatures of it, plays in much of rural white America. I grew up in rural America in the 1980s, in a town that was about 99% working-class white people.
The teachers at my public schools told us horror stories about what happened to people in communist regimes. "Communist" was used often as a synonym for fascist, liberal, n-word, and/or Democrat. Yet, many of the men were in labor unions. And, the women had low-paying service sector jobs where unionization either couldn't happen or unions in the area didn't give a shit about them. Yeah, there was potential for .... political education, I guess. But I remember zero socialists (or Democrats or Republicans) going there and trying to organize or educate (or learn from) people.
The truth is, in the US, a lot of white guys across the political spectrum seem to fetishize violent political revolution. I don't mean that in a "both side-ism" way. I think it's far, far more prominent and worse on the right in the US, mostly because the US has been rigged for the racist, anti-woman far right since its founding. Indeed, even as they adopt hammer/sickle avatars and so forth, the Internet left-wing "revolutionaries" seem not to realize that an actual violent leftwing revolution would probably be squelched in the United States very, very quickly, as both the military and police force are more conservative than the general population.
My larger point today is that if the "online left," and even academia to an extent, spent a tenth of the time doing real-world outreach and education to the ordinary people(tm) they think are latent socialists as they did "dunking on libs," "ironically" being misogynistic rape culture racists, and having esoteric circle-the-wagons intra-left debates, I wouldn't feel so hopeless at the moment. (Because, unfortunately, toxic cishet white men often hog the best gigs, the leadership positions, and the large platforms via which they spew their versions of "socialism").
All that said, I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong for Democrats to move leftward. But that the debates we're about to see regarding socialism are going to be very, very stupid in the age of Twitter and Fox News, so Bernie and the Democrats who have kowtowed to him better have a fucking plan if they're leading this shitshow.
In response to what it deems the "comeback of socialism," the White House Council on Economic Advisers has published a report warning of the dire harm that results when nations try to implement socialism (PDF).
Some of it is silly, and some of it is not (but that would be a much longer post to parse out).
What I primarily want to observe is the following.
During the 2016 election, Donald Trump promoted the narrative that Hillary Clinton rigged the election against both himself and Bernie Sanders, the man many credit for socialism's current popularity.
What a great evening we had. So interesting that Sanders beat Crooked Hillary. The dysfunctional system is totally rigged against him!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 4, 2016
Bernie himself, and his campaign leadership, had problems conceding that he lost fair and square to Clinton. Partly as a result of this lingering belief that Bernie was "robbed" of a win, Bernie (and many people's support of him) never really went away the way it's demanded that certain other, ahem, election losers go away forever. In fact, Bernie is largely treated as a 2016 winner, for purportedly pushing the Democrats leftward.
It is true that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, some high-profile Democratic politicians have publicly expressed more left-wing positions, such as supporting Medicare For All. Moving left is not necessarily a bad thing, but some of it seems to have been done in a reflexive, follow-the-white-man way in which a lot of people are taking cues from either Trump or Bernie. The mainstream media, too, has dutifully conceded that Bernie is the leader of the left and that everyone he hasn't properly anointed as a true leftist is therefore a "centrist" or "moderate."
Aside from the particularities of broad socialist policies (For instance, what happens to reproductive and trans healthcare rights when Republicans control the government that controls "healthcare for all"? And when the fuck are we going to talk about childcare?), I think many of the what I call "online socialists" simply have no clue how socialism, and particularly rightwing caricatures of it, plays in much of rural white America. I grew up in rural America in the 1980s, in a town that was about 99% working-class white people.
The teachers at my public schools told us horror stories about what happened to people in communist regimes. "Communist" was used often as a synonym for fascist, liberal, n-word, and/or Democrat. Yet, many of the men were in labor unions. And, the women had low-paying service sector jobs where unionization either couldn't happen or unions in the area didn't give a shit about them. Yeah, there was potential for .... political education, I guess. But I remember zero socialists (or Democrats or Republicans) going there and trying to organize or educate (or learn from) people.
The truth is, in the US, a lot of white guys across the political spectrum seem to fetishize violent political revolution. I don't mean that in a "both side-ism" way. I think it's far, far more prominent and worse on the right in the US, mostly because the US has been rigged for the racist, anti-woman far right since its founding. Indeed, even as they adopt hammer/sickle avatars and so forth, the Internet left-wing "revolutionaries" seem not to realize that an actual violent leftwing revolution would probably be squelched in the United States very, very quickly, as both the military and police force are more conservative than the general population.
My larger point today is that if the "online left," and even academia to an extent, spent a tenth of the time doing real-world outreach and education to the ordinary people(tm) they think are latent socialists as they did "dunking on libs," "ironically" being misogynistic rape culture racists, and having esoteric circle-the-wagons intra-left debates, I wouldn't feel so hopeless at the moment. (Because, unfortunately, toxic cishet white men often hog the best gigs, the leadership positions, and the large platforms via which they spew their versions of "socialism").
All that said, I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong for Democrats to move leftward. But that the debates we're about to see regarding socialism are going to be very, very stupid in the age of Twitter and Fox News, so Bernie and the Democrats who have kowtowed to him better have a fucking plan if they're leading this shitshow.
Friday, August 10, 2018
"Debate Me, Coward"
I swear I will at some point get back to writing recaps and fan vids, but here I am just randomly sitting here on a Friday night thinking about that time Bernie Sanders, after he lost the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, offered to debate her opponent, Donald Trump. The subtext, of course, was that Hillary was a weakling cowardly girl and that a man was needed to do a man's job of standing up to another man.
(Nevermind that Donald Trump declined Bernie's challenge. A man can decline such things and, rather than being widely viewed as a coward, he's just authoritatively setting a boundary).
That is my prelude to the apparent bafflement I'm seeing by some on "the left" that many Hillary supporters, particularly those who are not Bernie superfans, support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
It shouldn't be baffling at all, really, but when have some segments of "the left" ever stooped so low as to try to understand a "Hillbot alt-centrist." GLEEP GLORP.
The first step to understanding this great mystery is to first and foremost understand that many Hillary supporters aren't, contrary to peculiar "leftist" definition, "centrists" at all. Many of us are progressive, intersectional feminists who support various incarnations of democratic socialism but find white-leftbro and cool girl Twitter "socialism" completely dysfunctional, toxic, and counter-productive.
"Centrist" has only come to mean "someone who doesn't believe Bernie Sanders is the one true lord and savior" in very recent years, and it would be great if we could revert back to a less idiosyncratic and more accurate definition of the word. The mainstream media, of course, is of little help in this regard, as they've widely and lazily ceded this definition.
The second step is to understand that many of us experienced Bernie Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters as playing into misogynistic tropes about female politicians for his own political campaign. That's not something I've see Ocasio-Cortez do. Rather, rightwingers and her opponents are actually going to use such tropes against her. And, they already are, in fact.
I hope that helps clarify the situation.
(Nevermind that Donald Trump declined Bernie's challenge. A man can decline such things and, rather than being widely viewed as a coward, he's just authoritatively setting a boundary).
That is my prelude to the apparent bafflement I'm seeing by some on "the left" that many Hillary supporters, particularly those who are not Bernie superfans, support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
It shouldn't be baffling at all, really, but when have some segments of "the left" ever stooped so low as to try to understand a "Hillbot alt-centrist." GLEEP GLORP.
The first step to understanding this great mystery is to first and foremost understand that many Hillary supporters aren't, contrary to peculiar "leftist" definition, "centrists" at all. Many of us are progressive, intersectional feminists who support various incarnations of democratic socialism but find white-leftbro and cool girl Twitter "socialism" completely dysfunctional, toxic, and counter-productive.
"Centrist" has only come to mean "someone who doesn't believe Bernie Sanders is the one true lord and savior" in very recent years, and it would be great if we could revert back to a less idiosyncratic and more accurate definition of the word. The mainstream media, of course, is of little help in this regard, as they've widely and lazily ceded this definition.
The second step is to understand that many of us experienced Bernie Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters as playing into misogynistic tropes about female politicians for his own political campaign. That's not something I've see Ocasio-Cortez do. Rather, rightwingers and her opponents are actually going to use such tropes against her. And, they already are, in fact.
I hope that helps clarify the situation.
Friday, July 27, 2018
Here's Why Some People Can't Stand Bernie Sanders
Here's Bernie Sanders on July 26, 2018, talking about how the Democrats need a 50-state strategy:
Bernie's narrative also, of course, erases the hard work that actual Democrats in red states do every day against almost insurmountable conservative and right-wing forces. Of course, this day-to-day, lower-profile, and unglamorous work is likely disproportionately done by women and people of color so it's entirely possible that Bernie doesn't know it's occurring or doesn't view it as political labor.
(Cross-posted at Shakesville)
"Sanders told me by phone from Washington, a few days after his Kansas stop, that a 50-state strategy is common sense.Yet, in March 2016, during the Democratic Primary, Bernie's campaign manager Jeff Weaver admitted to doing that very abdication:
'It is beyond comprehension, the degree to which the Democratic party nationally has essentially abdicated half of the states in this country to rightwing Republicans, including some of the poorest states in America, those in the south,' Sanders said. 'The reason I go to Kansas and many so-called red states is that I will do everything that I can to bring new people into the political process in states which are today conservative. I do not know how you turn those states around unless you go there and get people excited.'”
Bernie Sanders is hypocrite who will take any and every opportunity to trash Democrats and act as though he alone is different because he cares about all the people that Democrats have ignored, forgotten, and abdicated, even if - in fact - he and his well-paid, internationally-connected consultants are as establishment, truth-spinning, and political as they come."Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said on the call that their campaign chose not to compete in eight of the 32 states that have held primaries or caucuses so far. Weaver identified Texas, Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia and Louisiana as the states where they didn’t mount a challenge to Clinton, who swept all of the Southern contests; he said the Sanders campaign did not broadcast television advertisements in those eight states or have 'a big campaign presence.''Almost all of Secretary Clinton’s delegate lead come from states where she faced little or no competition,' said Tad Devine, Sanders’ senior campaign strategist. 'Her grasp now on the nomination is almost entirely on the basis of victories in states where Bernie Sanders did not compete.'”
Bernie's narrative also, of course, erases the hard work that actual Democrats in red states do every day against almost insurmountable conservative and right-wing forces. Of course, this day-to-day, lower-profile, and unglamorous work is likely disproportionately done by women and people of color so it's entirely possible that Bernie doesn't know it's occurring or doesn't view it as political labor.
(Cross-posted at Shakesville)
Thursday, May 17, 2018
The Precedent of Donald Trump's Rigged Election
Yesterday, The New York Times ran an article about the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane.
It's worth a read, but what's striking to me is just how destructive Donald's pre-election claims about Clinton purportedly "rigging the election" were and continue to be, particularly to our democracy.
The piece discusses the disparate treatment of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, in which James Comey announced the reopening of the case immediately prior to the 2016 election, compared to the FBI's silence over the fact that multiple Trump contacts were under investigation for ties to Russia at the time:
Consider:
I'll also add that, quite frankly, Trump largely played the political press who continually let him make a rather weighty claim about the legitimacy of our electoral process without challenging him on it much or demanding that he back it up. The press also did this, and continues to do so, with respect to the "rigging" claim of the Bernie Sanders camp, a claim which will likely reoccur in 2020 if Bernie runs in the Democratic primary and, in particular, if he loses again.
This is now standard operating procedure for our presidential elections. Candidates claim that the election is rigged against them even if it's not, and sometimes, but only sometimes, it's actually true. Like a man expressing fantasies of locking up his political opponent, the Overton window has shifted so much that it is no longer all that newsworthy for a candidate to fictitiously claim that an opponent has rigged an election and, in the process, undermine the electoral process itself and any result that he finds unfavorable.
It's worth a read, but what's striking to me is just how destructive Donald's pre-election claims about Clinton purportedly "rigging the election" were and continue to be, particularly to our democracy.
The piece discusses the disparate treatment of the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, in which James Comey announced the reopening of the case immediately prior to the 2016 election, compared to the FBI's silence over the fact that multiple Trump contacts were under investigation for ties to Russia at the time:
"[U]nderpinning both cases was one political calculation: that Mrs. Clinton would win and Mr. Trump would lose. Agents feared being seen as withholding information or going too easy on her. And they worried that any overt actions against Mr. Trump’s campaign would only reinforce his claims that the election was being rigged against him."Donald Trump played the FBI, which so overreacted to Trump's claim that the system was rigged against him that they took action that had the effect of rigging the 2016 election for him.
Consider:
Chastise the qualified woman, play by the rules for the male authoritarian incompetent. Sounds about right."Mr. Comey has said he regrets his decision to chastise Mrs. Clinton as “extremely careless,” even as he announced that she should not be charged. But he stands by his decision to alert Congress, days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reopening the Clinton inquiry.The result, though, is that Mr. Comey broke with both policy and tradition in Mrs. Clinton’s case, but hewed closely to the rules for Mr. Trump."
I'll also add that, quite frankly, Trump largely played the political press who continually let him make a rather weighty claim about the legitimacy of our electoral process without challenging him on it much or demanding that he back it up. The press also did this, and continues to do so, with respect to the "rigging" claim of the Bernie Sanders camp, a claim which will likely reoccur in 2020 if Bernie runs in the Democratic primary and, in particular, if he loses again.
This is now standard operating procedure for our presidential elections. Candidates claim that the election is rigged against them even if it's not, and sometimes, but only sometimes, it's actually true. Like a man expressing fantasies of locking up his political opponent, the Overton window has shifted so much that it is no longer all that newsworthy for a candidate to fictitiously claim that an opponent has rigged an election and, in the process, undermine the electoral process itself and any result that he finds unfavorable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
