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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Thank you everyone. I’m really excited. It’s something I never thought I’d be able to do
@ kindofsortaharmless
Probably not unless we suddenly become a collective native American tribe. Or a Egyptian workers village
@Lainy
Well, maybe everyone here could join together and form a village. Not sure if Egypt is the best location, but it could be good to have a collective village.
Though it is a bit too late for us to hunt the mammoth as a group.
An article suggests that maybe the rise of Trump and the other deplorables around the world is less fueled by racism than by sexism:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/authoritarian-sexism-trump-duterte/576382/
Congrats, Lainy!
@Surplus to Requirements
My belief was that it was at least in part due to an overall sense of powerlessness and insignificance and the urge to fight against it. Which of course has been directed away from the people actually responsible for said powerlessness because the old divide and conquer strategy never fails.
Given that, it makes more sense for women to be just one more scapegoat of many to keep the people most badly affected by globalization and crony capitalism from seeing that they’re doing the dirty work of the very people they should hold responsible for the whole mess. And because of all those deep-seated traditions it happens to be a very effective scapegoat indeed.
@Surplus
That could be it, though I would say that the two intersect often and it’s rare to see some person or group who is one without being the other.
Sad news: Warren is out.
I hope that Warren will endorse bernie – his policies and beliefs are closer to hers. She says she is a progressive and Biden supported the iraq war and also was homophobic in the past so if she gives support to him I will be disappointed.
Congrats Lainy! Hope it all goes well!
@Naglfar
Saw that, which is a damn shame. How did Biden even get more votes than her, despite her being more qualified and having a better track record? Not to mention his inexhaustible list of gaffes and bullshit, including telling people to go vote for someone else whenever they present valid criticism (entitled douchebag).
(Rethorical question, I suspect the answer is misogyny).
The man seems to be having dementia episodes as well. He is absolutely going to get clobbered by Trump. I hope not, but the writing is in the wall.
@Diego Duarte
All my centrist family members are all over talking about how I need to join them in supporting Biden. Every centrist has convinced themself that Bernie can’t win and that Biden can. I’m not a huge fan of Bernie either, but I’m pretty sure he’s more likely to win than Biden.
Yup, standard issue misogyny. News at 11.
@Naglfar
I got over the particular conundrum of differing political values with my family by being aggressively communist. Now they don’t invite me out anywhere in fear I’ll be a bad influence on the young ones.
While misogyny obviously plays a role in how female leaders are perceived, I’m skeptical that it’s the driving cause behind Warren’s failed candidacy. This entire election has been viewed by many, myself included, not primarily in terms of gender relations but in terms of broad ideology — centrism vs. progressivism.
Warren was one of the two major candidates to align herself on the side of the progressives, and she was at an immediate disadvantage to Bernie because he already a movement and name recognition left over from 2016. Not to mention they were never interchangeable to begin with, Bernie is notably further to the left of her on policy positions — foreign policy, free public tuition and total student debt cancellation — as well as rhetoric — “democratic socialist” vs. “capitalist to the bone”. Bernie’s messaging resonated more with more progressives.
I also think his broader coalition was more diverse because of their differences in proposed implementation.
A lot of liberals and centrists don’t take Bernie seriously because they see his proposals as unrealistic, but that’s the point. They are unrealistic within our current government, which is why he’s always been clear that his presidency will require a grassroots movement of regular people behind it. “Not me, us” is something a lot of us have taken to heart. On the other hand, Warren also had a really good vision, but hers was more explicitly reformist. She wanted to use the system to make top-down changes, and I think what her supporters viewed as competence many others viewed as technocratic bureaucracy. There’s a reason why she polled best among college educated white people, whereas Bernie had a much stronger working class and non-white base. And this isn’t to insult white postgrads, or say that what appeals to them is wrong. I’m simply saying, as an electoral reality, you can’t go very far on a populist message if that’s your primary base.
So Elizabeth Warren definitely had some great momentum last year, but she never had the populist support of Bernie, and that might have been the motivation for her move towards the center. But by the time she walked back on her Medicare for All plans and lost even more ground with the progressives, she couldn’t make way with the centrists because she was already known as one of M4A’s biggest champions.
So essentially she was boxed out by both Bernie, Biden and to a lesser extent Buttigieg because she tried to strike a middle path and lost both sides. I don’t think her gender was the deciding factor, I think it was her overall strength/appeal as a politician. Which isn’t to say that women won’t face electoral opposition simply for being women, especially in the general, but I believe that a woman can absolutely win the democratic nomination, which is obviously borne out historically. A woman can also maintain momentum and get positive media hype, which is evident from last summer, as long as she stays on message and carves out her own lane.
@Perry
There’s also the factor of her being a hawk on foreign policy when most people want to withdraw from all the wars the US is stuck in, that whole disaster of her claiming Native American heritage long after she should have dropped that claim, and generally being a policy wonk when progressives need a demagogue instead.
@ anonymous
There’s a quote you might like in Shattered; the book analysing the Dems last election campaign: “We brought a wonk knife to a populist gunfight.”
Having said that, from across the Pond, a bit of political competence would have been very welcome, so I think it’s a real loss Warren dropped out. Hopefully she can use her clout to negotiate the VP role at least.
“Bernie Bros aren’t real. It’s a toxic meme, and the mere existence of it impugns the honor of both Sanders and his supporters. Let’s just ignore it and move on, okay?”
— Most Bernie supporters right now
“Even after dropping out, Warren is doing her best to throw the race to Biden! Because she’s evil and a woman and evil and eats poop!”
— A small minority of Bernie supporters right now
This is only barely an exaggeration.
@perry: while a woman did win the nomination in 2016, the fact that she lost has helped the notion that women are unelectable become even more entrenched. One woman’s high profile failure is always seen as a sign that women’s are riskier.
@Specialffrog
Yet the myriad examples modern and historical of men failing hard doesn’t make everyone declare men unelectable…
@Surplus – it was an amber alert. I don’t think anything else makes that noise. (Barring if the government managed to get the alert system working, I don’t think it worked very well last time they tried.)
For anyone in Ontario, here’s a link to the article about it.
I actually feel better that the people sending these alerts aren’t able to screen them to only go to people who aren’t at home, because that would mean that they know where ‘home’ is… :/
Just keep your eyes open for the truck. Hopefully someone knows something.
@ snowberry
that’s not quite fair. yes it’s an exaggeration to say warren is doing her best to throw the race to biden, but if you think misogyny is the only reason a bernie supporter could possibly have to loathe warren, you understand very little about how they see the world.
Love to see people denying misogyny right when a study just came out showing that 90% of people around the world are biased against women.
I wouldn’t think in an ostensibly feminist space one would find people denying that female candidates are held to different standards than male candidates, but here we are.
People really need to stop pretending that there’s a misogyny problem on the left too. It’s a problem everydamnwhere, including the left.
@Dust Bunny:
I’ve seen more reasons. They’re not much better.
1.) Warren broke her promise not to use SuperPacs, making her a hypocrite. This would be fair under normal circumstances, but Sanders made that same promise and broke it first, and yet I’m only seeing that one coming from Sanders fans.
2.) The fallout over the Native American thing was a mixed bag, not exactly handled the best but not horribly either, with some people (tribal or not) forgiving her and some not. Not entirely unfair, yet if she had been a man, people would have mostly forgotten it already. Sanders, Biden, and Buttigieg have all had moments of racial tone-deafness, just not towards Native Americans, and nobody brought those up very much and moved on.
3.) Warren is capitalist-friendly (unless you’re ultra-rich) while Sanders isn’t. And for all her plans, Warren hasn’t focused on ending US aggression overseas, while Sanders has long spoken against that (even if it didn’t come out much during his campaign, at least not that I’ve seen). That’s totally fair, but it’s also interesting that this describes every candidate except Sanders (and Biden and Buttigieg aren’t even unfriendly to the ultra-rich!) and yet I don’t recall seeing anyone except Warren being called out for that.
(I’m also seeing a few people saying things along the lines of “She used to be a Republican. Never stopped.” Which is not at all common even among Warren haters, but still, WTF?)
Talking about Warren is always going to be hard no matter what. There’s always going to be that background influence of sexism, but also that background influence of racism. She was a white woman running for president, which meant she had a disadvantage as a woman, but also meant she drew resentment as a white person staking a claim as a progressive hero. Sanders is “white” but also Jewish, which does matter in all of this.
A lot of people who support Sanders, or at least are willing to vote for him in the primaries, are in a desperate spot. They have been driven ideologically into what their fellow Americans would consider far left. Many don’t even believe in the American electoral system, if they believe in electoralism (as manifested in liberal democracies) or presidents at all. They saw Obama promise to close Guantanamo and not only fail to deliver on that, but double down on a lot of Bush-era imperialist projects. What does that say about a candidate who doesn’t even bother promising stuff like Medicare for All? I think that’s where the sentiment of “Bernie is the only candidate promising such-and-such things” is coming from. For this kind of person, “experience” means a lot less than being willing to think a little radically and represent something that could start chipping away at the project known as the United States.
It’s unfortunate that Warren had to drop out so early, because I think she and Sanders have been the closest to actual progressive candidates on offer. I also have a concern that maybe is the opposite of what most Sanders supporters feared from her sticking around: that a lot of Warren supporters actually would prefer Biden to Sanders. There are a lot of genuinely hostile Sanders supporters, so-called “Bernie Bros”, but I fear that that term is going to be weaponized and stretched beyond what it should mean going forward. Sanders is going to be characterized as just another white dude with a white dude mob who once again stole white liberal women’s dream of seeing a white liberal woman president. Not that seeing a woman be president is the exclusive tendency of white liberal women, but nonetheless there would be that narrative erasing the efforts of many supporters who are very much not white dudes.
@Snowberry
I run in some pretty edgy circles, and I’ve never once seen a Bernie supporter say or imply they hate Warren because she’s a woman. Most of us are genuinely disappointed she ended up not meeting our expectations policy-wise, because it would be great to have another woman leader in the movement for social democracy.
https://readsludge.com/2020/02/10/fact-check-does-bernie-sanders-get-support-from-big-money-super-pacs/
The assertion that Bernie is a hypocrite for using one SuperPac that’s a nurses union is reductionist to the extreme. It’s the equivalent to saying he’s a hypocrite for wanting to get money out of politics when he’s using small dollar donations from working class people. Pedantically true, but misses the point.
And really more to the point, most people I’ve seen are upset with her for the way she’s been attacking Bernie, often not based on his policy but for personal reasons and with misinformation like this. She’s spent the last couple months punching left. For us specifically, we don’t hold to to higher standards than the others because she’s a woman (we never had any expectations for Klobuchar), we do so because she spent almost a year billing herself as on our side before pivoting. She set those standards, and many people loved her for it, then she broke them.
Now obviously, someone with different politics might say that she’s totally justified in doing so, but regardless of the side you fall on, there are genuine policy- and politically-based reasons to criticize her that have nothing to do with gender.
@wierwoodtreehugger
That being said, I realize this is a really delicate line that I’m walking trying to explain myself. I’m absolutely not trying to deny the existence of misogyny in politics, or even that some people who support Bernie are some flavor of misogynistic. Being a leftist doesn’t automatically make you a good person, or for our purposes — an intersectional leftist.
All I’m saying is that are other, very important factors at play here as well. Not instead of, but as well. And for me and all of the feminist Bernie supporters I work and socialize with the implication that misogyny is the primary reason or even a reason at all we would have for disliking Warren as a candidate is totally unconscionable. There’s a difference between saying that sexism is a problem in leftist movement just like it is everywhere else, and implying/asserting that it is a feature of our particular movement.
The “a woman failed, therefore women will fail” thing is especially bad in Hollywood. Any time a female-led movie does poorly, studios declare it proof that audiences don’t want female-led films. Same thing with minority-led films, and so on. For some reason, no matter how many movies starring white men fail, they never interpret that as evidence that audiences don’t want movies led by white men.
Hell, it can be the same white man, such as the Most Generic White Man Alive Sam Worthington, that Hollywood kept putting in the lead of tentpole movies that kept doing poorly because surely he was the reason Cameron’s Avatar did so well, right?
::sigh::
Even if I finish it, my screenplay for a small-budget horror movie led by a queer black girl is never going to be made.
@Perry: do you honestly think if people don’t say or imply they dislike someone for being a woman that the fact she is a woman has no bearing on their opinion? Are you one of those people who thinks that someone can’t be racist unless they explicitly express dislike of minorities?