This piece is 1.) NOT written by Hillary Clinton and 2.) FULL of swearing so don’t read it if you don’t find that sort of thing hilarious, but it is indeed hilarious and I think it’s the kind of open letter to America the real Hillary secretly wants to write. Bonus: It ends with the poem she quoted at her college commencement. (Keeping it classy!)
politics
Wednesday Long Read
Still talking politics, still fascinated by the role gender bias, conscious and unconscious, is playing in this election. This is a long piece from earlier in the primary about Hillary and “The Gap” between how she is perceived and how colleagues describe her: Understanding Hillary.
One way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker. In this case—the first time at the presidential level—the female leadership style won.
But that wasn’t how the primary was understood. Clinton’s endorsements left her excoriated as a tool of the establishment while Sanders’s speeches left people marveling at his political skills. Thus was her core political strength reframed as a weakness.
Political Wednesday!
I came across this long piece a few weeks ago and it’s become my go-to link to respond to Facebook friends complaining about Trump but bemoaning “Hillary is a liar”. She’s not. And it lays out a lot of background about how that charge came to be leveled against her and why the author thinks it sticks (hint: sexism).
What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” – physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits, however, are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. There is simply no question that Hillary has for years been on the business end of an unrelenting double standard. And her battle with societal sexism isn’t going to stop because of her success anymore than Obama’s battle with racism stopped once he was elected. These are generational issues, and we are who we are.
The whole thing is worth 5-10 minutes of your time. And definitely worth sharing with people.
I Can’t
Another day, another cycle of Trump saying something we all think is a new low…until he says something even lower the next day. What’d he do this time? Dog-whistled that maybe “Second Amendment people” would be able to do something about a Clinton presidency.*
I’m just going to let Dan Rather handle my outrage today (although the fact that we need someone to point out that this is bad, this isn’t normal is also pretty outrageous, but I’m out of words right now).
From Mr. Rather’s Facebook post [emphasis mine]:
No trying-to-be objective and fair journalist, no citizen who cares about the country and its future can ignore what Donald Trump said today. When he suggested that “The Second Amendment People” can stop Hillary Clinton he crossed a line with dangerous potential. By any objective analysis, this is a new low and unprecedented in the history of American presidential politics. This is no longer about policy, civility, decency or even temperament. This is a direct threat of violence against a political rival. It is not just against the norms of American politics, it raises a serious question of whether it is against the law. If any other citizen had said this about a Presidential candidate, would the Secret Service be investigating?
Candidate Trump will undoubtably issue an explanation; some of his surrogates are already engaged in trying to gloss it over, but once the words are out there they cannot be taken back. That is what inciting violence means.
To anyone who still pretends this is a normal election of Republican against Democrat, history is watching. And I suspect its verdict will be harsh. Many have tried to do a side-shuffle and issue statements saying they strongly disagree with his rhetoric but still support the candidate. That is becoming woefully insufficient. The rhetoric is the candidate.
This cannot be treated as just another outrageous moment in the campaign. We will see whether major newscasts explain how grave and unprecedented this is and whether the headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers do it justice. We will soon know whether anyone who has publicly supported Trump explains how they can continue to do.
We are a democratic republic governed by the rule of law. We are an honest, fair and decent people. In trying to come to terms with today’s discouraging development the best I can do is to summon our greatest political poet Abraham Lincoln for perspective:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Lincoln used these stirring words to end his First Inaugural Address. It was the eve of the Civil War and sadly his call for sanity, cohesion and peace was met with horrific violence that almost left our precious Union asunder. We cannot let that happen again.
*For more info about the recent “insurrectionist interpretation” of the Second Amendment and how the founders of the nation really meant it, read this good long piece by my friend Francis. As he put it on Facebook, “The threat of violence as a political tool has always been present in our republic but only recently has it been tied to the constitution. But the suggestion that we have a constitutional right to overturn our government through violence is definitely not what the founders had in mind when they created it.”
Will We Learn From History?
This is the video I watched a few weeks ago that scared me into being more vocal about politics:
I’m not saying Drumpf is promoting an actual Nazi agenda in this election. But just try switching the proper names in parts of the video voiceover and see what happens:
“It can not be stressed enough that these conspiracy theories were born out of fear, anger, and bigotry–not fact. Nonetheless, Hitler found success with them. When he joined a small, nationalist, political party, his manipulative public speaking launched him into its leadership and grew increasingly larger crowds.
Think the video voiceover was written with a hidden agenda by liberals? Ok, try the very first mention of Hitler in the New York Times, from 1922 (archive view here, text here). Again, just try switching the names:
“Hitler’s program is of less interest than his person and movement. His program consists chiefly of half a dozen negative ideas clothed in generalities. He is ‘against the Jews, Communists, Bolshevism, Marxian Socialism, Separatists, the high cost of living, existing conditions, the weak Berlin Government and the Versailles Treaty.’ Positively he stands only for ‘a strong united Germany under a strong Government.’
He is credibly credited with being actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism. He probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish. The keynote of his propaganda in speaking and writing is violent anti-Semitism.”
Does Drumpf have a literal Nazi agenda for America? No. Is he a man promoting extreme ideas based on hate, who has inexplicably risen to power? Yes. Has this happened before? YES. And we saw what happened last time. Let’s keep it from happening again.
(Donate to Hillary here. I have a t-shirt and campaign buttons coming, too!)
Historic
As of Tuesday, Hillary is the official Democratic nominee for president–the first woman in the 239 year history of this country to be such.
I’m fond of pointing out here that women haven’t even had the right to vote for 100 years. But to really put the progress we’ve made into perspective, read this article from last month, “The crushing sexism of young Hillary Clinton’s America.”
“Until 1975, rapists who happened to be married to their victims feared no legal repercussions; on the other hand, until 1977, a woman could be legally fired from her job for being pregnant (or for merely having the potential to become pregnant).
We could go on and on:
The first woman wasn’t appointed to the Supreme Court until 1981, nearly two centuries after the Court was established;
When Anita Hill came forward 10 years later and testified about a different Supreme Court nominee’s long history of sexual harassment, Congress dismissed her out of hand;
When Clinton ran for president in 2008, hecklers often called upon her to “iron my shirt.”
That last might seem trivial, but it’s not. Over the years that correspond to Clinton’s adult life, the nation she may well come to lead has only barely begun to move forward from what amounts to all of human history, when women were not considered human enough to get a say in whether they ironed a shirt, went to the library, or got raped. This is the backdrop to Clinton’s ‘long and tiring path,’ described by Paul Waldman. This is what we mean by ‘historic.’ “
Let’s keep making history in November.
Let’s Talk About Politics
Given the dumpster fire that is the current political climate, my long-standing plan of just ignoring it seems pretty smart. Until you see headlines like this or this (or a million others) and you see a presidential nominee whose biographer went on the record as saying, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization”— and you realize that you may just be ignoring the First Horseman of the Apocalypse trotting in.
I’ve been feeling really powerless and said to Doc this week, “What can I do other than vote? Share things on Facebook? What difference does that make?” but in the spirit of the Dalai Lama saying change starts a single person at a time, I’m gonna share the hell out of things.
So here we go.
I mean, come on America. We’re better than this, right? Please be better than this.
(Donate to Hillary here.)
Four More Years
It’s Inauguration Day and Civil Rights Day and a good day to reflect on our progress–over four years or fifty. Four years ago I was laid off right after the inauguration. Now I’m a homeowner. The general working environment for women isn’t like Mad Men any more (binders notwithstanding). More and more people are realizing that allowing people to marry whom they love won’t cause the end of civilization as we know it. You see? PROGRESS.
In spite of horrific news reports or stubborn, stupid debates (or denial), I do think we’re moving forward as a nation. Come on, humans. Yes we can.
Whew
It’s over. And I’m trying not to have too much schadenfreude about Romney backers threatening to move to Canada or Mexico, because that was the liberal reaction to Bush’s 2004 re-election, too.
I’m thrilled about more than just the president: Voters in Maine and Maryland approved a measure to make same-sex marriage legal in those states, the first time the issue was at the ballot and not in the legislature. And voters in Minnesota voted down a proposed amendment to make gay marriage illegal. Well done, people of M-states.
Plus, Todd “Legitimate Rape Doens’t Get You Pregnant” Akin and Richard “Rape Pregnancies Are A Gift From God!” Mourdock have not won re-election. Well done, every thinking human who realized what utter bullshit these two were spouting.
So yeah, I feel good. I feel that hate didn’t carry the day like I was afraid it would. And I feel really happy I don’t have to stockpile birth control between now and January. We may have a long way to go, but I’m proud of America right now.
Get Ready To Vote
I let early voting pass my by but I’ll be out tomorrow morning to participate. And I’ll keep this in mind, from The New Yorker’s endorsement of Obama (all emphasis mine):
Romney, despite his pose of chiselled equanimity, has pledged to ravage the safety net, oppose progress on marriage equality, ignore all warnings of ecological disaster, dismantle health-care reform, and appoint right-wing judges to the courts. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices are in their seventies; a Romney Administration may well have a chance to replace two of the more liberal incumbents…The rightward drift of a court led by Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito—a drift marked by appalling decisions like Citizens United—would only intensify during a Romney Presidency. The consolidation of a hard-right majority would be a mortal threat to the ability of women to make their own decisions about contraception and pregnancy, the ability of institutions to alleviate the baneful legacies of past oppression and present prejudice, and the ability of American democracy to insulate itself from the corrupt domination of unlimited, anonymous money. Romney has pronounced himself “severely conservative.” There is every reason to believe him.
And I’m also going to have this ready to read Tuesday if I need it.