Yesterday at TPMCafe, Rick Perlstein kicked off a week-long examination of his new book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I’ve been asked to join this week’s cafe (a fun departure from writing about politics through a feminist lens), and I recommend checking it out, because the book is wonderful. And very relevant to today’s post topic: “Reagan Democrats“. The seeds of creation for this group of voters means they’re probably more “Nixon Democrats”, a name that would at least show how fruitless getting them back into the fold might be.
Ezra’s post gently puts to rest the ancient Democratic hobbyhorse of lamenting the loss of that percentage of white working class voters that long ago quit voting their economic interests and started voting against uppity black people and women, and against the “liberal elite”. Interestingly, the “elite” label doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to liberals—the lower you go on the income ladder, the more liberal you tend to be statistically speaking:
So why do Republicans win when (because of Republican policies no less), the number of people falling below the cutoff line greatly outnumbers the people falling above it? In part, because the higher you get up the income ladder, the more likely you are to vote. Also, there’s racial issues (gender a bit less, because while women are more liberal than men, they also vote more regularly, so it probably evens out):
However…
While I agree with Brad (and Lauren, as an aside) that the “everyhick” method of reporting on better-than-urban* America is complete bullshit, I think he’s wrong about one thing: The perception of Obama as Muslim is hurting him in West Virginia.
Maybe not as much as the Financial Times implies:
“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist,” said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.
Mr Simpson’s remarks help explain why Mr Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, by 40 percentage points ahead of Tuesday’s primary election in the heavily white and rural state, according to recent opinion polls.
Brad replies:
Well no, dude, they really don’t.
Only 10% of voters think that Obama is a Muslim. And unless they all happen to be West Virginia Democratic primary voters, I don’t think that Mr. Simpson’s remarks explain anything other than his own psychosis.
Not quite.
Have you ever tried to talk someone out of a bad idea? Maybe the person they’re dating is all wrong for them. Or a job change or some economic investment is just going to end in tragedy? If so, you’ve probably gotten a quick lesson in basic psychology. A percentage of people are going to be open-minded and listen to your objections, and if you’re actually right, they’ll consider the evidence and take your advice. Most people will get defensive, however, and refuse to listen. Some people will get so defensive that they’ll actually double down to prove the nay-sayers wrong—they’ll marry that bad boyfriend or put more money into the bad investment. They will, rather than risk the chance that they might get proven wrong and open themselves to a chorus of “I told you sos”, will live in denial about their bad decisions until the last possible moment when it’s becoming clear that they cannot sustain this bad decision any longer.
Now, the thing about this is that everyone does this sometimes. I realize there are a lot of people on the internet who preen like they rarely make bad decisions, and when they do, they recant immediately, but you’ll see that such people rarely offer examples of how this has actually happened in their lives. We all get into the rationalization cycle, some more than others, but we all do it. If you come across someone who claims to be above rationalization or standing by bad choices, that person probably does it more than anyone else, because they’ve got a mistake-free self-image that means they are especially prone to rationalization.
You want to read a book that will make you uncomfortably reexamine the kind of rhetoric you use, right down to your choice of metaphors? Well, if you don’t, you should: Jeffrey Feldman’s new book Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. It’s a convincing argument that the right wing punditry has adopted a violence stance, tone, and choice of words and media battles that undermines the concept of deliberative democracy. And while deliberative democracy can be unbelievably frustrating for liberals, a step back shows that it does work in our favor, because slowly over time, Americans have really become a more liberal (read: gentle, considerate people).
I can hear the bristling, but think about it. Liberals, for instance, have won the ideological war about equality. Conservatives have to find another way to frame issues when they’re arguing against equality, and thus have created empty concepts like “abortion is murder” or “reverse racism”. Those phrases burn, but it’s wise to remember that they’ve been forced into a dishonest territory because liberals have won the argument over equality. Conservatives can’t win in a fair debate where all sides present their views to be hashed out in the public forum, and they clearly know it, because instead of submitting themselves to the debate, the right wing pundits have instead turned to fear-mongering and reimagining our objectively peaceful country as a war zone. Think of how the gun control debate goes down, an example Feldman turns to early in the book. There’s not much of an honest debate about gun control in this country, because right wingers skip the facts and go straight for the mythologizing about how every Republican man is besieged by a bunch of gun-wielding maniacs, attacking him in airports and fast food joints, and even coming into his home to rape his wife, and if he wasn’t able to periodically litter the landscape with bullets, it would be worse. That this doesn’t reflect reality seems inconsequential to this image, probably because the image of violence has so much power over reason.
Atrios, in his pony watch series, has a new low for George Bush: least popular President ever. 71% of pollees disapprove of Bush now, which is kind of remarkable if you think about it in psychological terms. Basically, the concept of cognitive dissonance and rationalization would say that people usually don’t admit that they were in error so much as they rationalize how they were right all along. Bush got enough votes to win, and we can expect that people who voted for Bush, instead of saying, “Damn, I fucked up,” are going to say things, well, like right wing nuts say all the time. Things like: History will vindicate Bush. Iraq is going great! The economy isn’t depressed, that’s just the liberal media telling lies. Etc. But as Bush’s polls slip, we can expect a lot of people are having serious moments of reckoning, which are never easy. It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it.
That, or they’re finding some sort of cheat to explain why they weren’t wrong. This is probably likely for a good number of Bush voters and explains why we should not assume that it will be so easy to beat McCain. I’ve seen hints of this in some conservative writings, and suspect it’s much more widespread in the non-pundit conservative community. Basically, it amounts to telling yourself that Bush isn’t a real conservative, that he lied to you and that you were completely right but just working on bad information. Which makes it real easy to justify voting for McCain, because you just have to tell yourself that he’s the straight shooter, going to be the things that Bush promised to be, and tah-dah! Will show that you were right about that conservatism stuff all along.
We need a smackdown win that’s impossible to steal. I just don’t see it happening. If it does, it won’t be without a massive fight.
Well, I did take notice of the Karl Rove article in Newsweek, but I didn’t, until today, see the fucking cover of the magazine.
Yes, the cover is about how much Obama is an “elitist” because there’s a vegetable called arugula and a beverage called beer, and while there’s not a whole lot of evidence that either substance is consumed to the exclusion of the other by Obama or that either imparts magical elitist or non-elitist properties, you’re supposed to believe this makes Obama unelectable. No word yet on the elitist properties of mustard, turnip, or collard greens. And if you’re holding your breath waiting to hear if John McCain has ever fouled his lips with the fancier foods, you can keep waiting. I’m sure his family’s private chef only makes them food that Bubba would eat. I find these food wars to be amusing as hell, since I’m like half redneck, because I guarantee you that some of the food I ate growing up would make the “journalists” who trumpet these kinds of non-controversies spin with confusion. Chicken and dumplings? I’m so electable. Quail, venison and elk? Elitist! What if I told you that my stepdad shot it all himself, though? Er, people do that? I’d also venture to mention that Mexican food has been 50% of my diet since I was able to chew, but that kind of information could cause a short-circuit. How do you read the tea leaves? Are you an elitist if you drink Miller but not Bud? I suppose it’s a gracious favor to the press corps that I’m never going to run for President with this sort of confusing background. Are all candidates supposed to submit a typical week’s diet for examination, or are only the Democrats?
Original context.
This piece is semi-contrarian, and I feel the strong need to be contrarian against it. Well, not against the general idea that a sex scandal just to have one is a bad thing—I still maintain that garden variety adulteries and kinks are nobody’s business but their own, and the media needs to butt out of it, barring other factors that make the story news. But let’s face it, everyone agrees to those rules these days, barring the Clinton sex scandal, where the whole “perjury” trap was set up just so there could be an excuse for a pointless, salacious sex scandal that helped distract our nation’s capital right when more attention needed to be paid to the movement of terrorists that, you know, wanted to kill us all as we soon found out.
But outside of that, most of the sex scandals that have rocked the political world as of late might better be called “patriarchy scandals”, and since they involve the very same politicians who make a living preening around as great patriarchs, ripping their mask off and showing the squirmy insides is a favor to us all. Which is why I blanched at this:
This article in Salon is really cute. It’s about candidates who wear the flag pin non-stop seem to be the ones dropped out of the race the fastest, so maybe the best explanation for why Obama opts out is that he doesn’t want to lose.
Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel….
Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don’t want sticking to your fingers these days.
For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies and a cruel war with neither point nor end.
No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.
But what I found interesting was that while the writer noticed that McCain, Huckabee, and Clinton all go without the lapel pin, only Obama gets shit for it, he didn’t offer any explanations as to why. Maybe he thinks everyone knows why, but I’m not sure it’s universal knowledge as to what right wingers who give a shit are getting at. Complaining about Obama’s non-existent flag pin is a classic right wing dog whistle, like Bush mentioning the Dred Scott decision during a debate as a hat tip for those who think so little of black people’s historical sufferings that they compare that to the sufferings of embryos who, unlike actual black persons, can’t feel or think or have personalities and families and friends who love their unique selves.
In the rest of the interview, she basically suggests that about 60% of the evangelical community is politically conservative and won’t ever vote for a Democrat. But the other 40% will, and those 40% are worth trying to appeal to. And one way to appeal to them is to acknowledge their moral qualms about abortion even if you don’t happen to share them yourself. Like this guy:
I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There’s the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it’s potential life. I think people recognize that there’s a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.
I don’t think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I’ve arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don’t think they make it lightly.
That’s Barack Obama, likely the next Democratic candidate for the presidency. All he’s doing is acknowledging the moral dimension of abortion, while remaining solidly in favor of abortion choice, reducing unwanted pregnancies, and encouraging responsible sexual behavior.
McCain has the Republican nomination, but Huckabee’s continuing ability to win certain states is still a major story. Now that he can’t get the nomination and the schadenfreude pleasure is over, it’s time for us to very carefully examine why an out-and-out ayatollah is so fucking popular in this great, modern nation. Regardless of his supposed cover story about being a nice guy, let’s face it—when he wins, it’s because people support his Bible-thumping, intolerant, sexist philosophy. They are largely voting on Christian identity politics, and their definition of “Christian” is very specific. We’re all familiar with it—extremely misogynist, with the fetus as the symbol of the male property rights over women, and abortion as the symbolic rejection therefore of male dominance. Extremely homophobic and not just a little bit racist. Creationist. Believes that the Rapture is nigh.
I agree with Digby that all the calls for unity coming from the media and the political class are a cynical attempt to shield the Republicans from a new progressive majority of voters. I enjoy a little partisan rancor, but most people don’t, and I accept that these calls are appealing. But partisanship is a good value. Even though I’m loathe to admit that the Republicans have a function, they at least will function to keep us from being a one-party nation, with all the attendant corruption. (In fact, one of the problems with the BushCo era has largely been that we were functionally a one-party nation, with the Democrats shut out of power, and you can see the corruption that occurred.) I have a really good reason to think that this is all a cynical attempt to save the Republican party, because I’ve been busy today working with this video:
I was working it over for the podcast, and I’m going to talk about the actual sex stuff in the podcast, but I want to draw everyone’s attention to something else that’s going on. Frank Luntz—you know, the conservative genius of focus group testing of language, and therefore the architect of so many nasty, divisive terms the Republicans have put into circulation—is talking a lot about how this survey was conducted in the interest of unity. This tells me a few things, not the least of which is that save-the-party-by-talking-unity is something Luntz is pushing really hard.
I’ll just echo what Jill said: This is sad.
Update: Lauren notes in comments that the survey has a reductive definition, limited to “literature” and excluding non-fiction. While I think fiction should be part of one’s reading diet, I also think that it’s stupid to think you don’t get the benefits of complexity if you only read non-fiction. Plus, histories aren’t literature but can be as rich in story-telling detail as novels.
I’m usually the first to decry the hand-wringing over young people these days and calls of social decline. I even have a blog category called “Signs Of The Non-Apocalypse”, I’m so dedicated to my opposition to moral panics. But I can’t help but think there’s a problem when people don’t read books at all. Hopefully the surge in Internet use indicates that people are reading something, though.
I’m not going to bash other forms of entertainment, like TV or video games. In fact, I think different mediums improve different kinds of intelligence. My skill at picking up foreshadowing has improved more from watching “The Wire” than reading a dozen novels, so that show has ironically made me a better reader of novels. Video games have taught my clumsy ass some necessary motor skills, and weirdly they’ve really improved my self-esteem. I don’t feel the need to defend movies—they’ve finally been allowed into the pantheon of culturally redeeming media by the reactionary snob patrol.
So for those who maintain that they have nothing against women presidents in general, but object to Senator Clinton in particular, I ask this question:
What women would you endorse for president, were they to enter the race tomorrow.
We’ll set aside his weird hostility towards the safety of the workers who keep this country running and focus on the question. I’ll also ignore that two out of three of his picks are “safe” for a conservative, in that those women couldn’t muster up a decent chance of winning, and even Christine Todd Whitman has managed to alienate some party elite, so possibly all three are candidates he can safely endorse in the hypothetical because he’ll never be called up to endorse them in reality. But I would gladly support Nancy Pelosi if she ran, and governor of Kansas Kathleen Sebelius is getting some attention that indicates that she’s a contender in the future. (I would really love Pelosi, in all honesty. She’s not perfect, of course, but she was right about the war from the beginning, and that buys a lot of credibility with me.) And Clinton has my full support if she wins the nomination—any Democratic contender does, which is why I’m upset by all the dirty politicking going on in the primaries. Someone’s got to win, and when they do, it’s important that their win doesn’t alienate the people who voted for someone else in the primaries, and these kind of dirty politics are polarizing.
There is a reason I bring up possible future candidates of the female persuasion, and it’s to point out that opposition to sexist pandering against Clinton isn’t an endorsement of her, nor is it just about patting one’s self on the back for one’s righteous feminism, though the latter is not an unproductive way to spend your time. It’s about good politics and long-term thinking, which we need a lot more of. Because if we luck out and get to support Candidate Pelosi or Candidate Sebelius in the near future for a presidential bid, we can expect that these images will immediately be transferred from being anti-Clinton to anti-whatever-Democratic-woman-is-running.
How does the farmer’s market factor into Boehner’s either/or equation?
The presidential race is not the only place where change is an issue.
Members of Congress returning to the Capitol this week are being confronted by transformational happenings that have shaken the building to its foundations: Democrats have hired a new company to run cafeteria services. Naturally, this has caused an outbreak of partisan skirmishing.“I like real food,” proclaimed Republican leader John Boehner when asked about the new menu by a producer for another cable news outfit. “Food that I can pronounce the name of.”
Boehner is now forced to wrap his lips around such phrases as “broccoli rabe and shaved persimmon,” “balsamic glazed butternut squash,” and “calico pinto beans”…all on this afternoon’s menu, along with the downright patriotic “American Regional Yankee Pot Roast,” which, even Boehner would have to admit, kind of rolls right off the tongue. On Fridays, there is a real sushi bar tended by a bona fide Japanese sushi chef. Gone are such grade-school cafeteria specialties as Salisbury steak and fried chicken, slathered in gravy and served with a side of chips.
Chris Bowers wrote an inspired rant about how this is further evidence that there’s something deeply fucked up about the conservative revolution, that even the pluralism that allows for balsamic vinegar is held up as some evil scourge on good, old-fashioned American conformity. Halfway through his post, I knew one thing was inevitable. As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, there are people on the internet who want to give the appearance of having intelligent opinions without having to do the work of it, and those people would go for the easy kill: “But not all conservatives abhor the sushi! You’re stereotyping!” Apparently, there were a lot of people who wanted to sound smart without being smart, because Chris had to update to clarify that he wasn’t saying that eating only grilled cheese with American “cheese” slices only wasn’t a baseline requirement to vote Republican or anything.
Via Digby, this post about the events of this month 9 years ago is a must-read. Nine years ago was one of the most humiliating and shameful events in our nation’s history prior to the Bush administration—the Clinton-got-a-blow-job-and-you-didn’t-America impeachment fiasco. D-Day’s post covers the basics and quotes Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.’s speech during the 3 ring circus. Here’s the part I think is most critical:
Let us not be confused. Today Republicans are impeaching Social Security, they are impeaching affirmative action, they are impeaching women’s right to choose, Medicare, Medicaid, Supreme Court justices who believe in equal protection under the law for all Americans.
I had been a Republican growing up, because that’s just what you were. Upon leaving the nest and going to college and learning a thing or two about reality, I switched affiliations without looking back. By the time the Clinton impeachments came around, I was well aware that the crazy right wing Republicans that had taken over the party were somewhere between evil and crazy, but it wasn’t until the impeachments that it began to really dawn on me that Republicans and their allies in the media are fundamentally opposed to the idea of democracy. It wasn’t just that the Republicans and the media were trying to oust a duly elected leader on trumped-up charges with the hope that the sexy parts would distract people from the fact that they were attempting a coup, though god knows that alone would be enough. It was also that the more the media and the Republicans persecuted Clinton, the more popular he got, and then the more frantic the persecution got. It really showed how conservatives and the mainstream media hate the workaday voter, and hate the very fact that we have any say at all. The more people liked Clinton, the more his enemies hated him, because he became this proxy for their very hatred of The People.
I suppose if the nation was better educated, we’d have seen it coming. Republicans and their Democratic allies have never met a pro-capitalist military coup they didn’t love, and while the attempted coup on President Clinton was not a military coup, it was still in the same spirit as the coups conducted worldwide. Hell, some of them were supported by Clinton himself, in a sick twist of irony that demonstrates how the anti-democratic forces already control D.C. to a large extent.
The failed coup warmed up the American public to the idea of coups, and when the successful one came in 2000 (complete with mobs of fascist thugs dressed like they come in our culture, as khaki-clad young Republicans), people rolled over for it, sick of it all. Which isn’t to say that Al Gore doesn’t share the blame, despite the fact that he’s a bona fide victim of this entire situation. He ran a crappy campaign, because he misread the tea leaves and thought that distancing himself from the popular President Clinton was the best strategy. It was a shining example of how the Beltway insiders are completely out of touch with the voters, in no small part because, as the impeachment fiasco showed, a lot of them just hate us and hate that we have a say at all in the system. The Village hated Clinton, ergo Gore thought it best to get away from Clinton, but since Clinton walked away from the fiasco as something of a living symbol of the people’s choice over the kingmakers’ choice, he probably would have done well to cozy up to Clinton. Instead, he cozied up to Lieberman—imagine what that man would have said in the wake of 9/11 to a President Gore. I shudder to think of it.
Gore’s learned his lesson. So did a lot of us sleep-walking liberals. The media hasn’t. I dread the upcoming election year, because it’s going to speak volumes about whether or not we can salvage democracy in this environment.
Anna Clark has a column up at RH Reality Check about an issue that’s central to maintaining and furthering reproductive justice in this country—converting anti-choicers to pro-choicers. She herself used to feel “pro-life”, but upon growing up and realizing that anti-choice positions were about hurting actual women instead of the airy feel-good politics of their baby-saving rhetoric, she shifted. Meeting women that had abortions and realizing they’re not the crazy, baby-hating sluts of the anti-choice imagination. Having sex herself and waking up to the fundamental misanthropy that posits that sex is a bad thing that requires “consequences”, i.e. punishment. Realizing that it’s fucked up to frame having a baby as punishment for sin.
What changed?
I don’t remember the day. But that day didn’t come until after I’d met people — surprise! — who’d chosen abortion. It came after my school friends became parents; after I began having sex and selecting birth control; after I experienced and witnessed sexual harassment.
In short, it happened after pro-choice rhetoric took a human shape. I saw those I loved. I saw myself.
Today, I have the passion of a convert for reproductive rights. I remain equally passionate in my resistance to the machine that bypasses all ambiguity about abortion.
I didn’t “switch sides;” I’m against the notion of “sides” in the first place.
I spent years in ambivalence, despite an inward belief in reproductive rights. While acknowledging my cowardice, I would’ve allied myself with the cause sooner had choice advocates talked with me, rather than dismiss me as an anti-choicer not worth the breath. I would’ve spoken sooner had I not felt that I must forsake anti-choice family and friends to do so.
Reading that the Texas Board of Higher Education is considering accrediting The Texas Based Institute for Creation Research made me have to lay down for awhile, which meant I got behind on my work, which makes me fucking crabby. I blame the god botherers directly for my problems today, therefore. If Texas does this, then we rightfully deserve repercussions of the sort described by PZ Myers.
I hope Texas scientists can slap that Board into wakeful reality before that meeting, because if this goes through, the trust I can give Texas-trained teachers is getting flushed right down the sewer. And if Texans can’t fix this, the rest of the country has to step up and deny certification to anyone trained in Texas — their diplomas and degrees will be worth about as much as Monopoly money.
Between this post and the fact that the wingnuts are rapidly spreading a rumor that Hillary Clinton is having a lesbian affair with her aide Huma Abedin, who is incredibly beautiful, creating unconcealed jealousy from the Freepers. Which is just extremely weird, to be jealous of an event that is only happening in your mind. Do you ever wake up from a dream that your partner is cheating and find yourself glaring at him/her in anger, only to realize in less than 15 seconds that it was just a dream and that you need to step off and that everything’s just fine? Well, it’s like that, except without the rational second half. But logic isn’t going to enter into this, because they’re off like fire, because Wingnut Rule #72 has come into play: If three or more wingnut obsession buttons are pushed, reality doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of penetrating the paranoia. And this rumor is more than three buttons: powerful woman, beautiful and unattainable woman, the belief that Democrats and liberals have these jealousy-inspiring non-stop orgiastic lifestyles,* the hint of foreignness and especially Muslim foreignness, Teh Ghey. Reality doesn’t stand a chance.
Feministe is down right now, but Jill had a great comment in one of the threads, noting something like that this isn’t necessarily a nationwide expression of closet casedom in the gay sense, but more a widespread resentment of the strawliberals they’ve built up in their mind, who apparently do everything short of fucking in the streets with wild abandon. For those of us who don’t get the non-stop obsession with the 60s, I think there’s a clue in this. It’s unbelievably frustrating, for two major reasons: 1) Seriously, no one has as much crazy sex or other wild, abandoned fun as the liberals of the paranoid right wing imagination do and 2) Nothing is stopping the bitter resenters from hanging up their resentment and embracing a little freedom.
*Those who do don’t go into politics, and really, why should they?
The Washington Times is, in a moment of right wing desperation, trying to revive the latte liberal libel, publishing a supposed study by the Heritage Foundation demonstrating that Democratic districts are wealthier on average than Republican ones. Roy Edroso has a round-up of information on why this “study” is incredibly flawed and proves nothing, specifically pointing out that the study ignores the average income of voters, most likely because that more accurate measure of class and party affiliation is also the one that turns up inconvenient results. But just off the cuff, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find that Democratic districts are wealthier, but I think the causation that the Times is trying to imply is completely backwards. It serves one well to remember the adage about how all politics are local. Democrats, unlike Republicans, are not ideologically committed to the idea that the government’s only legitimate functions are graft and panty-sniffing,* and therefore are far more likely on average to do crazy things like represent their district’s interests, making their districts far more pleasant places to live and thereby attracting the coveted tax-paying professional class to live there. I got another strong reminder of that over the holiday, after visiting with my family in a Republican-heavy area that’s notable for being unpleasant and ugly and the sort of place that most people of means get the hell out of. And move to places like….Austin, TX, where things are far from perfect, but at least the place isn’t falling apart by the seams.
Common sense aside, it’s clear that the whole point of this non-study is to give wingnuts a chance to indulge the latte liberal libel, a bit of political smearing that’s never quite made sense to me. It’s wrong that some liberals have money because…..? It’s hard to really say, especially when the people whining about it usually think that having any wealth at all is an indication of moral uprightness and the authority to tell other people what to do. You get the sense that some slow-witted wingnuts tend to think there’s some hypocrisy involved, but if so, that’s a really weird understanding of hypocrisy. In the real world, a hypocrite is someone who tells other people not to do things (recycle, get abortions, fuck strange men in airport bathrooms) , but the latte liberal’s crime is having enough (food, housing, health care, opportunities) and wanting everyone else to have enough. It might actually be the opposite of hypocrisy, in fact.
I didn’t want to write about the John McCain and the word “bitch” incident for precisely the reasons that Cara articulates here—having to deal with all the people who’d scramble make excuses for his reaction, when they know full well that if someone had gotten up and made a similar racist slur about Obama, if McCain laughed and said, “Excellent question,” he’d probably be resigning from the campaign in disgrace right now. Not that I’m trying to set up some competition between racism and sexism, by any stretch,* but in just this very narrow area, there’s a social acceptance of misogynist terms where their equivalent in racist terms are considered beyond the pale. There’s a series of complex reasons for this that don’t actually speak that much to the oppression people face on an individual basis,** but the bare minimum issue in this case is pretty simple: By accepting the word “bitch” in discourse about candidates for major elections, you’re signing tacitly onto the idea that women’s very presence in politics is unwelcome.
But I can see and have sympathy for the argument that McCain was just being a natural politician and doing what politicians do, which is to be hyper-agreeable to everything said by potential voters in an effort to get their vote. That doesn’t explain, as Cara notes, his refusal to participate in the ritual denunciation after the fact, which again I can grant wide berth for good intentions, because I personally hate the ritual denunciations and would pretty much like to see them disappear from the discourse completely, since it’s gotten to this point where not tripping over yourself denouncing this or that is being treated as acceptance of it. But that McCain has turned around and channeled what you might call the “pro-bitch” sentiment into a fund-raising letter crosses a big fat line and makes it hard to deny that he’s fully behind the use of derogatory terms intended to marginalize women from politics.
The feminists meet monthly to run the world.
From Roy, it looks like the Anchoress is grinding away at that odd conspiracy theory that we radical feminists run the world through a secret cabal. Indeed, I expect one day that the website Mens News Daily will be remembered as a weak 21st century version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
In fact, it was when Buster was about 2 or 3 years old that I turned off Sesame Street because nearly every episode had some Muppet carrying on about how “women can be anything.” I realized that my generation was preaching to a generation that did not need the conditioning or the indoctrination - they were not being raised with the same reality as my generation’s, or the ones before, of women being held back by gender expectations. This generation is being raised differently, already has the female scientists, doctors, astronauts, journalist, newscasters and politician role-models, I thought, so who are these puppets singing for - the little girls and boys who have never heard of gender discrimination and therefore do not need the lecture, or for the women who cannot stop defensively “celebrating” themselves, like an old scratched record that can’t move past a skip?….
The first commercial had the Stupid Spoiled Father stamping his feet and holding his breath (literally) outside of a Subway because he wanted the meat-and-cheese whatever. The Insufferably Sensible Mother said, “no, honey, we have to take Chris to his soccer game.” When Stupid Spoiled Father began whining and holding his breath, Superior Life Form Child said, “yeah, Dad, grow up!” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist of it. The whole commercial was appallingly insulting and had me muttering that if I did eat Subway sandwiches, I’d have to stop because of those ads.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, charged with electing Democrats to the United States Senate, asked State Sen. Kay Hagan to run. She initially showed interest in challenging Elizabeth Dole, but she stepped aside when the DSCC decided to favor prospect state Rep. Grier Martin. When Martin didn't bite, the Dems were left without anyone to field against Liddy Dole, a weak, ineffective tool of the Bush Administration.
In jumped businessman and NC native Jim Neal. In the process he also announced matter of factly that yes, he was gay, and that he was running on the issues and was ready to sweep Dole out.
The first sign something was afoot at the DSCC is that two weeks after Neal announced, his presence was nowhere to be found on its site as a challenger.
Hagen then miraculously announced last week that she had a change of heart and was getting in the race. Suddenly, the same day she announced and her web site went live, the DSCC web site was updated with all announced challengers.
The PC reason cited for Hagen getting in was that Jim Neal's chances for beating Elizabeth Dole were slim because he's a political newcomer (though he is a proven fundraiser), and he has little name recognition. That is completely disingenuous (Hagen doesn't have name rec either). We're not talking about a conspiracy; we're talking about strings being pulled because pols here didn't want to back an openly gay man already out there running. From the Southern Political Report:
The inside story, according to one Raleigh source, is that both Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and ex-Gov. Jim Hunt (D-NC) had asked Hagan to stay out of the race in favor of state Rep. Grier Martin (D). Hagan agreed to step aside for Martin. Then Martin, son of popular former Charlotte congressional candidate D. G. Martin, backed out, leaving Neal as the only significant contender.Some people. You know, the unnamed people that never seem to want to go on the record. More after the jump.Schumer and Hunt then went back to Hagan, an influential member of the state senate, and asked her to get back in the race. Moreover, given that Neal, 50, though a North Carolinian by birth and education, had lived in New York and Los Angeles until a year ago, there is some doubt about whether he would be a strong nominee even were he not gay. (Neal has, however, raised money for Tar Heel Democrats in the past.)
Another informed Raleigh source tells essentially the same story, but adds that once Martin bowed out and some Democratic powers-that-be found out that Neal is gay — which was known to his friends and family but not to the public at large — “they intensified their pressure on Kay” to get back in the race, “for fear that [Neal] would bring down the rest of the ticket.” A Charlotte source adds, “I’m sure that some people see [being gay] as a non-starter in North Carolina.”
(more…)
Red for coathanger territory.
Via Dana at Tapped, George Will makes the “fuck red state women” argument in support of voting for an anti-choice candidate.
Again, so what? Many, perhaps most, Americans, foggy about the workings of their government, think that overturning Roe would make abortion, one of the nation’s most common surgical procedures, illegal everywhere. All it actually would do is restore abortion as a practice subject to state regulation. But because Californians are content with current abortion law, their legislature probably would adopt it in state law.
It is not irrational for voters to care deeply about a candidate’s stance regarding abortion because that stance is accurately considered an important signifier of the candidate’s sensibilities and sympathies, and of his or her notion of sound constitutional reasoning. But regarding abortion itself, what a candidate thinks about abortion rights is not especially important.
So, who cares is Roe is overturned, because that will only hurt those of us in the flyover states, and who gives a shit about our rights and our lives? We’re only here to be pandered to with flag-waving and 9/11 memorabilia to get us to vote for Republicans, but it’s not like we matter. And it’s liberals who are supposedly the ones who are coastal elitists who don’t care about the red staters.
This blog is a brilliant idea: My Right-Wing Dad, a repository for the demonizing of liberals, feminists, and fully literate types that stands in for thinking about the issues for the wingnutteria. It’s cringe-inducing but very, very funny. I like this post that really captures how misogyny and gay-baiting is rather belligerently used to scare people out of voting in their own economic interests and for the Republicans.
Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement. Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q’s and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girliemen.
Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided…..
Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare.
Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, fighter pilots, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.
Liberal women usually have higher testosterone levels than their men folk. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, IRS auditors, Hollywood Actors/singers, and group therapists are liberals. By the way, it was liberals that invented the designated hitter rule because they felt it was unfair to make a pitcher also have to bat.
So on and so forth. In sum, if you are deeply afraid that you’re not all man, then it’s very important to quiet your internal anxieties by voting Republican. Who wants to bet that Chris Matthews got this email and laughed until he peed himself, and then had to go throw darts at a picture of Hillary Clinton to calm himself down about his babyish lack of bladder control?
One day historians will look back at this era and shake their heads in wonder that our nation allowed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die because some of our men have deep-seated fears that they’re not grunting and scratching their balls enough, and need to have the President clearing some brush and killing some foreigners so they worry slightly less about it.
Scott and Matt are talking about a favorite diversionary tactic of conservatives:
One has to keep in mind the broader picture here, too. The right’s main tactic whenever Democrats want to do something that might be helpful to any group of citizens everywhere is to identify some even more desperately poor group and claim that their opposition to helping out is driven by a die-hard commitment to these truly needy types. Try to help the working class, and the underclass are trotted out for moral blackmail. Try to help the middle class, and what about the poor? But then when push comes to shove, these are the same people trying to cut section eight housing programs, trying to cut food stamps, etc. The only people they’re really serious about helping are the extremely wealthy beneficiaries of their tax cuts.
Scott correctly identifies this as part of a larger issue for the right when it comes to framing their arguments, which is that their end goals/results are generally unpopular, so they at least have to put up a semblance of caring about progressive goals while undermining them.
Which creates what I call the “stupid or evil?” conundrum. Stupid-or-evil tends to be the major question when it comes to a slightly different tactic of the right, which is to claim that their asinine ideas are actually better at achieving progressive goals than progressive policies. Like claiming that dismantling Social Security will improve the retirements of the poorest elderly in our nation. Or claiming that bombing the shit out of people and making them hate you is a good way to win people over to Western-style democracy. A lot of the time, I think that evil wins out over stupid, such as the free market capitalist nuts who think that sending economies spiraling into widespread inequality and overwhelming levels of poverty will eventually help the poor (those TVs will come if you can weather the starvation now! soon! yes, TVs any day! we swear!). Right now, only the extremely stupid are wowed by the theory of trickle down economics; everyone else who trots it out is just taking advantage of the assumption of good faith.
The S-CHIP fiasco lends credence to “evil” over “stupid” as well, since conservatives who realized there was no way to advance the argument that you could get more health care to kids by denying them health care resorted not to giving in to reality—sort of the gold standard of arguing in good faith—and instead went straight into shit-flinging mode. Score one for evil.
I keep thinking about this post where Matt Yglesias and Atrios violently agreed with each other that once you allow people to start injecting, nay, demanding that everyone toes the line on the god talk, the very real differences between theologies and dogmas becomes a serious danger to the peace. It’s clear that the Pollyannaish hope behind all the vague talk of “faith” for politicians is an attempt to smooth over the serious quarrel between people who want a secular society and people who want a theocracy of sorts based on their particular religious beliefs, an attempt to make this serious quarrel “apolitical”, like, “Gosh, guys, we all have faith isn’t that good enough?” No we don’t and no it’s not. The only way that religion can’t be politically divisive is for everyone in a society to agree on a strict separation of church and state, that religion is a private matter and that we make no laws based on religious beliefs.
There’s very few people that think that basing laws on dogma is a good idea unless they have repugnant political ideas that can’t be explained logically, so they have to hide behind god. Christians who agitate for social justice might have private religious motivations, but their views are generally sound when held up to secular standards—the greatest good for the most people, equality under the law, democracy, etc. But people who have to wave their Bibles around all the time are generally trying to cover up ideas that don’t hold up well under scrutiny, like the belief that women and gays shouldn’t be equal citizens. I don’t have an issue with the religious left at all—they’re good allies—but a lot of the god talk coming from the Democrats now is directly attributable to some on the religious left who’ve been clamoring for more of it. They shouldn’t. Bringing religion into a secular arena like this will only backfire, because the people who benefit the most from waving Bibles instead of making arguments are those on the right.
Anita Hill is a rock:
In 1992, I bought Sonic Youth’s Dirty along with a pile of CDs through one of those mail order CD clubs that were basically our only source of non-country or non-pop-schlock music out in the boondocks of West Texas. The song “Youth Against Fascism” referenced the recent Senate hearings for Clarence Thomas’ confirmation as a Supreme Court justice.
Black robe and swill
I believe Anita Hill
Judge will rot in hell
It’s the song I hate, it’s the song I hate
A lot of people have sent me a link to this site Marry Our Daughter. I thought it was a hoax straightaway, but could sort of see how in our current world of purity balls and virginity pledges how people might be hoodwinked into thinking daughter-selling was on the horizon. My thought is that it’s not out of the question that those who want a return to hardcore patriarchy would like to have outright daughter-selling, but there are many more steps to take before they get there. So, knowing it’s a hoax, the next question is what’s the point?
Jessica Bennett, writing for Newsweek, dug around and found out that the site’s owner is John Ordover, a consultant from Brooklyn who does have a point (though he’s probably showing off his viral marketing skills to get new clients, as well). He wanted to highlight the way our culture still has a patriarchal bent that manifests itself in things like overly youthful marriages and purity balls. As the article points out, in a lot of states, the age of consent to marry is lower than the age of consent to fornicate, and with parental consent, you can marry extremely young in some states. The oddness of laws like that reflects the fact that we still live in a patriarchal culture and there’s still some fondness for the ideal of the submissive child bride.
Most people who still get the patriarchal joy flutters at the idea of the child bride won’t outright admit it (though there’s still a few, like Rep. Bonnie Huy of Kansas who voted against raising the age of consent to marry to 16 on the theory that getting married at 13 worked out for Loretta Lynn), but as Ordover discovered running this website, there’s plenty of men out there who were quite eager to buy themselves a teenage bride as soon as they got the slightest hint that they could get away with it.
In the thread below my post on what an ideal policy situation to encourage zero population growth without getting coercive would look like, a number of people objected to the concept of zero population growth on the grounds that conservatives will try to exploit it for racist ends. A typical example:
Like one commenter has mentioned so far, you NEED to take race into account. For you, a white woman, of course the message is pro-fertility. For the black woman on welfare? Pretty much the opposite. Population control issues always end up disproportionately affecting poor women and women of color. It’s a product of our white supremacist society.
It’s a legitimate concern, but I’d like to raise another concern, which is that progressives will be so busy being afraid of having our ideas manipulated by conservatives that we allow conservatives to silence us, which would be much more damaging in the long run to the progressive agenda than anything else. I advanced a non-white supremacist argument in favor of voluntary population control. In fact, I argued very specifically and deliberately for a policy agenda that increased freedom and countered the messages that Jen mentions, the pressure on white middle class women to reproduce without question. Can my ideas be manipulated by conservatives with a racist agenda? Yes, but after a certain point, anything can be. We see this same kind of tip-toeing fear when it comes to criticizing the patriarchy outside of home, because there’s a fear that conservatives will misuse feminist exposes about women’s oppression in non-American countries as a cover story for imperialism. And they will, but I don’t see that there’s any reason to think that the better solution is to remain silent, because then conservatives will just come up with another excuse to make war and in the meantime, we’ll have stymied our ability to help women worldwide.
Make no mistake, conservatives are trying to exploit the liberal fear of releasing any idea that could be turned against us in order to silence liberals altogether. Barbara at Mahablog had a great post recently about how a lot of conservatives are misrepresenting basic liberal ideals, particularly the notions of pluralism and tolerance, in order to wage a war on the existence of liberalism itself.
Ironically, anti-liberal forces in America use the values of liberalism against liberalism. For example, creationism is argued to be an alternative view to evolution that is owed respect…..
See, science is supposed to “compromise” with religion, because to deny religion equal say with science violates the liberal values of “inclusiveness” and “freedom.” And the goal is to destroy liberalism. Of course, if the creationists had the authority they’d see to it that only their version of creation is taught in public schools, because they aren’t liberals.
While I can see the value in caution, there comes a point where the fear of having conservatives lie and misrepresent your views cultivates learned helplessness, where people are afraid to say anything. After all, the wingnutteria will lie and misrepresent absolutely anything you say; nothing is safe. It’s a matter of deciding what is and isn’t in your control. Can you control wingnut hacks who will do or say anything about you, no matter how false and ridiculous, to gain some weird political advantage? Not really and silencing yourself in an attempt to do so ends up giving them control over what you say. But in order to regain control over yourself and your ideas, it’s generally best to actually exert control, presenting what you believe as-is and not censoring yourself to avoid (somewhat inevitable) distortions.
Now that Senator Craig is resigning, it’s time for everyone to pull up a chair and start talking about all the double standards that have been exposed by this little bathroom sex incident. First, the double standard of David Vitter vs. Larry Craig—even though the former’s crime was arguably worse than the latter’s (hiring a prostitute is both legally and ethically more suspect than simply signaling that you want sex-between-equals), Craig was pressured into resigning when Vitter wasn’t. But of course, homophobia couldn’t possibly be the reason, right?
A GOP leader Sunday denied a double standard in pushing Sen. Larry Craig to resign after a sex sting guilty plea, while remaining silent over GOP Sen. David Vitter’s involvement with an escort service.
A senior Democrat said a double standard by Republican leaders is exactly what occurred.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., the Senate Republican campaign chairman, said Craig “admitted guilt. That is a big difference between being accused of something and actually admitting guilt.”
I find it interesting that Republicans try to deny homophobic motivations in an atmosphere where they still run on undisguised homophobia. Being against same-sex marriage and for sodomy laws is to homophobia as opposing the CRA is to racism—definitional, really. I can see a day down the road after marriage equality is the law of the land where Republicans move to Phase II of homophobia, where they do what they do with racism now and pretend that they gays are just oppressing themselves, but we’re not quite there yet. They’re fooling no one with the “we’re not homophobes” line.
