By David Futrelle
Big day. Big big day. Lots of shit going on. Discuss.
Also: VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!
I mean, if you’re in the US. If you’re not in the US, I guess don’t vote, unless maybe you’re a citizen abroad but I don’t know how the mechanics of that work exactly.
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@Perry: I’m not saying that Warren is perfect; not hardly! I can understand why people would prefer Sanders. And I don’t think that Sanders fans in general are sexist; I acknowledged a handful of times here (including above) that most of them aren’t Bernie Bros. I’m just noting that Warren is getting a lot of crap that she wouldn’t have gotten to nearly the same extent if she were a man, and an awful lot of that is coming from a minority of Sanders fans who the rest of them largely seem to be pretending doesn’t exist.
To be completely fair, there are some loud Warren fans who are either trying to portray all Sanders fans as Bernie Bros, or aren’t doing a good job at making that distinction. This is getting a lot of Sanders fans all defensive, and may be contributing to the denial of Bernie Bros. So as a Warren fan myself, I’m going to call those people out: Stop it, or do it better. You have every right to feel slighted by the sexism, but you’re not helping things. Those people aren’t very reflective of Sanders himself – and he’s called them out both this year and back in 2016. Only once that I’ve seen each time, and the media largely ignored it both times, but still.
@Allandrel
Indeed, most of the worst films I’ve seen, including those of the so-bad-it’s-good variety, were directed by cishet white dudes. Yet somehow that’s never evidence that we need more diversity in cinematography.
Disappointed about Warren. My literal Bernie bro (brother who’s cheering for Sanders) isn’t gloating, but now my dad is saying Biden is the best candidate.
@Rhuu:
That wouldn’t be necessary. These phones all have accelerometers. They could just suppress that alert type if the phone hasn’t moved much in the past, say, five minutes. If it’s almost constantly moving for the past several minutes it’s probably in your car with you, or in your pocket while you are moving about. If it’s moved little or not at all in that time it’s likely on a table at home or on your desk at work, and therefore either you are not with it or you are not out and about in public.
A slightly more sophisticated version would learn where “home” and “work” was from GPS coordinates where it has spent the most cumulative time since changing owners, and if within a small radius (100m?) of the centroid of such a region, presume that its owner is not out and about.
It could even remember the alert and, if it’s still in effect, bring it up once you do leave that zone. It would likely go off walking out to your car or a bus stop, and the descriptions in the alert would be fresh in your memory as you began moving around outdoors where you might run across whoever is being searched for, instead of having been forgotten hours ago.
And all of this only requires the phone itself to filter, or time presentation of, the alert based on its own internal sensors, without disclosing any data to outsiders. (Though, the phone company will have a record of the phone’s movements anyway…)
@all
Re: Warren disappointment
I don’t deny that misogyny likely was a factor, of unknown magnitude in importance, but I agree with many who suggest that a lot of the disappointment from Sanders supporters that was directed at her, but not at other candidates, was because we expected better of her than we did of Biden, or Klobuchar, or Buttigieg. Not because she is female (note: Klobuchar is, too) but because she presented herself as a progressive rather than a centrist, but … well let’s just say that compared to Sanders she often seems to lack conviction.
On a somewhat related note, I’ve seen people and even an actual news headline moaning that Warren was “the last female candidate in the race”, which is false to fact: Tulsi Gabbard, last I checked, is still in it (though polling in the basement where Bloomberg, Steyer, and Klobuchar were, and with no plausible path to the nomination). There seems to be some weird forgetfulness or blind spot around Gabbard, at least in some quarters.
There has been some speculation that the smoky-back-room people know that senile gropey creepy old Biden is a sure loser in the general, and intend to replace him as soon as he bumps off Sanders in the primaries, usually implying or outright stating that they’ll bring back Hillary Clinton (which would be stone dumb, since she’s a proven loser vs. Trump) or run Obama (hello, term limits?) or some other prominent Dem. This leads to the weird thought: is the reason Gabbard hasn’t quit yet because they intend to throw the nomination to her? Say Biden widens his lead and Sanders throws in the towel, or it even goes to the convention and Sanders loses at the first ballot. Then Biden abruptly withdraws, citing “health issues” (likely the truth), if necessary right there on the convention floor. Gabbard’s the only one left standing.
I doubt that’s actually the plan. Given her polling during the primaries she’s an even surer loser in the general than Biden, and with her strongly antiwar stance she has the establishment and its giant defense-contractor donors even more spooked than Sanders does, hence why she is the only candidate who (before Sanders started winning contests) got even less media mention than Sanders did. Still … it’s weird.
@Lumipuna:
Haha, yeah, I’m an icelandic national and have seen these developments firsthand. I do agree though, this is indeed part of what fuels mass-tourism and exploitation, fuck Lonely Planet 😀
@ snowberry
those are data points that contribute to the picture they’ve formed of her, but none of them are the reason or really even part of the reason. sort of like microaggressions aren’t much of a cause hate someone in themselves, but they can be indicators of that person’s beliefs and attitudes and character, which are an excellent cause.
to simplify a lot, it’s mainly that leftists* really, really hate almost everyone whose major political goals fall into or near our lane but who is not one of us. this is a bitterness and paranoia that has been building up for centuries. rightfully or not, we tend to perceive merely having her politics (as a political figure) as inherently deceptive and cynical. politicians are generally under pressure to pretend to be more populist than they are, so being like the left in some ways while not being of the left does in practice often result in playing a role that from a left vantage point can be summed up as basically snake.
she is also extremely pmc. her core values and all of her identity cues and sociocultural signalling are of and for the professional-managerial class. that alone would make it basically impossible for leftists to like her even if her politics were actually good.
* i use ‘left’ to refer only to people with radical politics, ie. specifically exclude all liberals, no matter how “progressive”. progressive is imo an unhelpful term as it mainly serves to confuse people about the difference between the left and liberals and to erase left ideology and replace it with more liberalism. i understand the desire to differentiate between better liberals and worse liberals, after all it is often literally the difference between life and death for someone. but this distinction could very easily be made without aiding liberal political goals at the expense of the left.
@Surplus
I think the reason people are saying Warren was the last is either because Tulsi is exceedingly unlikely to win and has little media coverage, or they’ve actually forgotten she is running. Or they just really don’t like Tulsi.
@ wwth
i don’t think anyone is denying the misogyny is there? at least i am only arguing misogyny was only another layer on top of a shitcake a man in warren’s position would have been handed just the same. at least from where i’m standing it looks like her treatment has been roughly the same as buttigieg’s, adjusting for their importance, visibility and the severity of their crimes.
@surplus
Thank you. You articulated my feelings on this better than how I was doing it.
@naglfar and everyone
The distinction between liberals and leftists is really key to our difference in perspective here. Even though Bernie Sanders is certainly a liberal insofar as he only calls for social democracy to replace neoliberalism, the clarity of his populism is such that many leftists like myself have realized that he is our only opportunity to achieve anything close to our vision short of fast violence and revolution.
Elizabeth Warren was miles ahead of most candidates in terms of being left-leaning, but she was never interchangeable with Bernie politically. Her supporters are liberal feminists (as opposed to my own radical, leftist feminism) whom I want to make a coalition with in order to serve progressive goals.
But it’s just a reality that Warren, who had no momentum left on Monday after campaigning for a year, hurt progressive outcomes on Tuesday by running and losing just as expected. If the shoe was on the other foot, and she had won the first 3 states while Bernie was polling at 10%, and the centrists had just consolidated — I would have absolutely been screaming myself hoarse for Bernie to drop out and endorse the left-most candidate who also had a shot of actually making it.
For me, the success of an individual professional managerial woman is something to fight for if it’s the only option, or even a feasible option at all. But the success of that PMC woman when it not only competes with but also damages the chances to implement structural change that would impact the success of tens of millions of working class women in the US as well as billions of working class women outside our borders? This is where I perceive liberalism and its brand of feminism to be frustratingly short-sighted.
Give me an Elizabeth Warren with mass support and a viable electoral path vs. Joe Biden? Obviously, absolutely going with Warren. More to the point, give me a Hillary Clinton vs. Joe Biden? Despite her track record of pushing neoliberal policies and brutal imperialism, given all things are equal with Joe, I’d absolutely want to discuss how misogyny has impacted the perception of her as an individual. But how would getting her elected impact the broader structure of misogyny in this country and in this world? I have a feeling it would have the same impact that Obama did on racism. He was a president that symbolically inspired a lot of black folks, then preceded to preside over the same prison industrial complex, ruthless immigration system, and genocidal foreign policy that bore its weight down on brown and Muslim people. Did he face a lot of racism that needed to be combated? Absolutely. Did he better conditions for black people and people of color at-large? Absolutely not. Just because someone shares one facet of your identity does not not mean that they share your interests, especially if they happen to wield political or economic power.
There’s a pretty excellent journalist by the name of Krystal Ball who said this a couple months ago on a political news show, encapsulating my feelings perfectly — “My aspirations for this nation are greater than changing the gender ratios of our oppressors.” So when I see conservation about why people don’t like/support Warren boiled down to misogyny and while all other factors are dismissed, I get defensive and vomit my feelings in comment sections.
She put out detail plans for how to actually achieve the goals instead of talking big, which is necessary, and then got pummeled for it.
Dust Bunny,
Crimes? Are you fucking kidding me?
I do always love how half the Sanders base denies that there’s an issue with toxicity, but the other does some version of “she had it coming.” It’s very reminiscent of gamergate.
Sanders himself as been fine, but his stans are hurting the campaign and just saying some version of “radical leftists are angry and don’t like professional sounding people” just doesn’t cut it.
I mean, the reason I think progressive is a good term and useful is because there is a spectrum between liberal and leftist, it’s not one or the other. I share the goals, but I also want to actually accomplish things. It really seems to me like a lot of (but not all) people who are radical leftist would rather be right and be angry. I keep saying people say that we can’t do incrementalism, we need 100% free healthcare and the abolishment immediately. But how? The Senate is impossible to get things through. The court is packed with right wing judges. I don’t see the strategic value in getting upset at progressive candidates and voters for recognizing that is a going to be a long, long fight and incremental reforms might have to happen instead in the meantime. Neither Sanders or Warren could get Medicare for all passed and implemented right away. It sucks, but if you have a passing familiarity with politics in the US, it’s a reality. Acknowledging that is neither giving up not hating poor people and wanting them to die.
a lot of people think the whole plan thing was bad strategy, that this outcome was entirely predictable, and that the fate of her campaign was mostly a result of this and speaks for her poor political instincts. it’s definitely not a point of general agreement that detailed policy is necessary or even desirable for campaigning, and as such it’s not hypocrisy or sexism or whatever when people were not impressed by her, and not a double standard when people don’t think lacking such plans is a failing in bernie’s campaign.
Last thing. I promise.
I’m not saying misogyny is the only reason why someone might choose another candidate.
But the misogyny did exist.
The decent thing to do is give Warren supporters space to be sad or angry about that for a couple days.
Did people really have to come in here and be all defensive or dismissive about it?
I really don’t think that is asking too much on a feminist site.
Dust Bunny,
But if she didn’t have the plans, she would be pummeled for that too.
Because newsflash, women are held to different, basically impossible standards. Men just have to show up and give a nice speech. Hell, Bloomberg couldn’t even manage that and people still voted for him.
If Warren were a man, people would be hailing her as brilliant. If Sanders and Biden were women, they’d have been run out of the race immediately.
It’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
@Perry: No one has ever said that Warren would end institutional misogyny just by being elected president.
@WWTH
This is my stance as well. I’d much rather get a candidate that is pragmatic rather than idealistic. We don’t live in an ideal world, yet it seems there is a segment of voters who think that it’s better to vote for their favorite candidate and lose knowing they were right. I’d much rather get a candidate that isn’t perfect but wins, because even if I compromise my “ideological purity” it’s worth it for avoiding 4 more years of Trump, which would be much worse.
@Perry
First of all, hot take, “professional managerial class” isn’t a real thing. It’s regressive social politics dogwhistling disguised as leftist scholarship
2nd of all, apparently, Warren extremely is/cues and signals pmc. How so? I keep seeing this trope, and, for the fuckin life of me, can’t find a explanation that doesn’t, if ya dig hard enough, lead down to Chapo or some such ranting about identity politics *hissboohiss*
This right here, just so ya know, is one of the least feminist things people say without realizing it. It’s also one of the hardest mindsets to dislodge from someone. Everybody’s (at least a lil) sexist. Anyone who says they aren’t, or that the implication is “unconscionable” even, is either a grifter or… we’ll go with overconfident and undercritical
Or… just don’t 🙂
The last time I checked, Bernie has consistently been polling among the strongest vs. Trump in hypothetical general election matchups. (This was true during the 2016 primary as well.)
Meanwhile, I’m growing skeptical of the whole incrementalism thing. Historically speaking, it seems like incrementalism mostly works for the right wing. When conservatives do incremental, we get the last 40 years of rightward drift and end up in the mess we’re in now. When leftists do incremental, it seems to go nowhere (various UBI proposals and pilot projects), get immediately reverted at the first opportunity (Obamacare’s watering-down and some minimum wage increases), or at best it’s one step forward two steps back (minimum wage goes up somewhere, say, but housing affordability there goes down, e.g. Seattle).
About the only exception I can think of is FDR’s New Deal, and it took a Great Depression crippling the finances of the rich to loosen their stranglehold on the system enough for that to happen. And then it all got chipped away over the next seven or eight decades.
Even the emancipation of the slaves was to a significant degree reversed in the following decades by the implementation of Jim Crow, and that reform had taken a fucking shooting war to ram it through.
We’ve been trying incrementalism for a century. It isn’t working. All gains we do make that way are temporary, and most of them don’t even last much past the next time the other side wins an election.
Add in how often incrementalism is too little, too late for many of the poor and marginalized, and that whole bit MLK wrote about setting the timetable for another person’s freedom, and it starts to look like what is needed is a serious rupture in the system.
The only way to get permanent gains, in other words, is with a huge package of constitutional amendments, so a constitutional convention, and the only way that happens without being hijacked by the right and used to make things even worse instead is if a goodly chunk of the right is too dead or in jail to vote at the time. What did Diego say earlier? That Peru only saw lasting gains when they basically rounded up the worst of the right wing there and imprisoned them.
Most likely it will take another Civil War, and not subsequently making Lincoln’s mistake of being too lenient with the defeated Confederacy afterward. If the plantation lords had been jailed or at least expropriated and the wealth of the land redistributed, and the pro-slavery politicians disbarred and disqualified from ever again holding office rather than readmitted into Congress and the Senate, maybe Reconstruction would have stuck and the US would be a very different place today.
Short of that, the best bet is to capitalize (irony unintended) on the coming humongous economic crisis to discredit the capitalist system and round up all the banksters. That will give at least an opening for FDR-level reforms, but the gains would need to be consolidated with some combination of constitutional amendments and a wide-reaching program of wealth redistribution or 70-80 years later we’ll be right back where we started again. But the militia types in the southern half of the country might not let that happen without a shooting war anyway.
Oh, and there is one other way in which time is running out, besides for individual poor and marginalized people currently in the terminal stages of circling the drain. And that is fucking climate change. Take one look at the IPCC scenarios, or that ticking-bomb glacier in the Antarctic, and tell me we have any time left to fart around with “incrementalism”. Maybe back in the 1990s or so we still did; not anymore. It’s too late now to indulge in the luxury of not being radical.
@Axecalibur
It seems that lately “identity politics” (or “idpol,” which reminds me more than a little of Newspeak) just means “politics that don’t center around white men and that view axes of oppression other than class.” Don’t get me wrong, class is important, but reducing to just class is harmful.
I see it as analogous to saying that you “don’t see race.” It deflects from the issues without confronting.
@Surplus
Re: Lincoln and reconstruction
I’d say that was more Andrew Johnson’s fault. Lincoln picked Johnson as VP, but didn’t expect to be assassinated. After that, Johnson very quickly set to work undoing most of what Lincoln did.
Regarding radicalism: I’d love to see major changes quickly, but it seems too many people think revolutions are easy and will magically fix everything in one fell swoop. It would be very difficult and unlikely to be able to make massive changes now, so it’s better to do what we can in the mean time rather than waiting for the revolution. It’s like the old joke about the man progressively rejecting larger and larger rescue boats until he drowns: it’s better to make what progress we can now rather than expecting a magic revolution in the near future with no buildup.
@Alan – I, for one, don’t want to see Warren as VP. There are places in government where she’d be infinitely more effective. Like the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board or even, say, the US Senate.
There’s a reason Tom Lehrer sang this line about Hubert Humphrey:*
“Are you sad? Are you cross?
Are you gathering moss?
While you wait for the boss
To sneeze?”
The only real reason to accept a VP nod is as a springboard to another presidential run. Or to try to be another Cheney, I guess.
*VP to Lyndon Johnson 1965 – 1969
“…Second fiddle’s a hard part, I know
When they won’t even give you a bow!”
@Hambeast
I would very much hope Warren stays in the senate. Massachusetts has a Republican governor, and so if she left the senate that seat would almost certainly be filled by a Republican.
And if Sanders gets the nom; I hope he doesn’t pick Gabbard as VP like some of his fans want; since he has a fairly high chance of dying in office and Gabbard would be a bad replacement for multiple reasons.
Surplus,
I’m not arguing that incrementalism is preferable to larger, more radical reforms. I’m arguing that when the choice is incremental change or nothing, the former is preferable.
The Senate and judiciary are currently very right wing. Changing that is a years long ground up process. Not something a president can change overnight.
Revolution sounds nice in theory, but revolutions are violent, disruptive and rarely succeed. A revolution will kill a lot of the people that the left, at least in theory are fighting for.
It’s nebulous and imprecise which means it’s about as useful a word as “bourgeois.”
It means roughly these people
It also definitely originated in bonafide Leftist circles
Though the word is absolutely used by aspects of the right now as well.
Apologies, I suck at markup and I closed and reopened the page so I can’t edit.
First link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
Second link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ehrenreich
Revolutions are only happening when people get really desperate. Social democratic reforms are a way to prevent that from happening, just like FDRs reforms could.