Back in the halcyon days of 2016, I spent (way too much) time on Twitter. Typically the bulk of my energy would be devoted to the various failures of the Washington football team on any given week, wasting time I could have spent with my then-fiancee/now-wife “breaking down film” in attempt to prove to anyone an everyone how great/shit the team was. But I also waded into political Twitter as well. I tried several times to make my own Twitter thread rantings a thing. They were never a thing. They couldn’t be a thing.
I made no bones about the fact that I was supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016. She wasn’t simply “a” choice; she was the only choice. Standing opposite her was a man who had no business running a small town’s eighth best Arby’s, much less an entire country. He was openly racist, even more openly stupid, and incredibly sexist. Donald Trump had (and still doesn’t have) any redeeming qualities. His Presidency represented a threat that would be felt for actual, literal decades after he was elected. There was a vacant Supreme Court seat on the line and Obama-era policies that were almost sure to get stripped. I wasn’t enthusiastic about Hillary, but at the very least she seemed competent. She seemed like she knew what the job was. She seemed to actually like the idea of being President. That wasn’t true of Trump.
It was also the beginning of my long held annoyance with Bernie Sanders and his overzealous supporters. While I don’t think everyone who supports Sanders is a “Bernie Bro”, there was a predominately white, predominately straight mass that very much wanted him to win, and very much did not want to back Clinton. And me being me, thinking I could launch some sort of social media career based off my HOT POLITICAL TAKES feuded with those guys constantly.
Most of what I said has been lost to time; I deleted my Twitter account in 2018 and I have no intention of going back and dredging up. But what I can remember clearly, was the amount of sexism leveled not just at Clinton, but at Clinton’s base (black women) as well.
We stand today in the fiery ashes of 2016. Trump has been President for what feels like a fucking eternity. This year was supposed to be a referendum on Trump’s presidency, a thorough rebuking of his policies. The left would rally around candidates that had Progressive ideas to move forward, and would turn to *checks notes*…Joe Biden?
Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee for a reason, and little of it has to do with his actual political ideology, which is basically “more stuff Obama did”. From the jump, a media culture surrounded and fixated on the two oldest, whitest men of the lot, and framed them as the only real candidates with a shot. Despite losing the white male vote in every election since the Civil Rights Act passed, we still were made to think we had to acquiesce to some long last Democrat who has spent the last twenty or so years voting Republican.
At several moments, it seemed like a woman would be considered the frontrunner. Remember when Kamala Harris straight up bodied Joe Biden in the first debate? Harris did so by referencing, in depth, Biden’s history of rolling back civil rights advances and praising known segregationist. In a fair and just world, Harris chokeslamming Joe Biden through the core of the Earth with his very real history would have condemned Biden to another distant loss as a candidate.
Instead, by the next debate, much of Harris’ momentum had halted. In an effort to appeal more to (white) Centrists, she walked back her support of Medicare-for-All. Her history as a prosecutor in California was bought up, including her support of a anti-truancy program. “Kamala Harris is a cop” something that was willed into existence, explicitly directed as black people, especially young black men. A random former flame of Harris just decided to announce that the two of them had once dated, presumably to get out in front of an accusation that no one had yet made. Just as quickly as it started, the Kamala Harris moment had gone.
The same happened to Elizabeth Warren. Warren came into this as the more practical portion of the Progressive ticket. If you wanted someone who had a plan for everything, she could answer it. She made substantive outreaches to black women.
But she was also inexplicably tied to Clinton. This was weird, as Clinton and Warren are about as far apart ideologically as two people in the same party could be. Her (admittedly dubious) claim to be part Native American was repeatedly picked apart. Noted blowhard Chris Matthews repeatedly harranged her on how she would pay for Medicare-for-All and questioned why she believed a woman who made allegations that former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg had told a woman to kill her baby. Dogged by questions about Medicare-for-All, Warren too had to adjust her platform to something more palatable to the Jimmys and Joes who have long since seen their states go red. Meanwhile, those same Bernie Bros were seemingly annoyed at the very idea that there was another progressive in the race at all. They bristled at suggestions that Warren was more electable than Bernie. When Biden began to overtake Sanders after Super Tuesday, they demanded that she immediately exit the race and cede the floor to Sanders. Sanders didn’t help to bridge the divide when he refuted Warren’s claim that Sanders had told her personally that a woman couldn’t win in 2018.
There’s a reason that we have arrived at this moment of legitimately picking the lesser of two evils. Joe Biden never had a strong debate performance. He’s never once been able to articulate anything that approximates a vision of the future. Even before the sexual assault allegations for Tara Reade, Biden had a knack for inappropriately touching women. He failed to protect Anita Hill, and didn’t apologize until he was running for President for the third time. (Even then, he apologized for what “she had endured”, not for his own failures.) He had a large hand in removing black fathers from their households. He’s assured rich people that nothing significant will change for them. Even in the harsh light of new sexual assault allegations, Biden hasn’t seen his momentum slowed, with one in three people polled saying that they would still vote for Biden even though they believe Reade’s accusations.
The Democratic party put forward the most diverse group of candidates in United States history, and still managed to find the most average white straight male they could. While there are certainly vocal pockets who still seem largely unwilling to rally behind Biden, most people of the left have chosen to stand behind him.
I know I have.
Meanwhile, take Clinton, a woman who was tasked for making up for many of the President’s numerous failures. Remember the claim that Hillary Clinton had slaves? Remember the constant drudging up of the 1994 Crime Bill, a law that, while she certainly had a hand in promoting, was actually written by Joe Biden, voted on by Biden and Sanders, and signed into law by her husband? Hillary’s decision to defend Bill Clinton against his various accusers and victims has been used to demean her character and hurt her standing among other women, while Bill Clinton still is remembered fondly as the charismatic President who could play the saxophone and explain policy.
Hillary Clinton cultivated a personality that made her into Karen in HR precisely because of the sexism and expectations placed on her when she was first lady of Arkansas. I think we got precious few glimpses at “the real Hillary”, because of how thoroughly raked over the coals “the real Hillary” had gotten. If you got the vibe that Hillary Clinton was overrehearsed and stilted, it was only because she has spent decades trying to make herself as palatable and inoffensive to America, and to men in America, as humanly possible. None of this is to excuse anything wrong Hillary has done; it’s only to draw a comparison between the way she has been treated while the various dealings of her male contemporaries get glossed over and waved aside.
And she still lost. And there are still people who are gleeful with her losing, even if we ended up with the worst President ever. In the meantime, people have repeatedly demanded that she not say anything about anyone ever and recede from public life, never to be heard from again.
That sexism extends even to her daughter Chelsea Clinton, who has spent the better part of her parents’ political career as a punching bag and lame Jay Leno punchline. On a near constant basis, people scream at Chelsea to never run for an public office ever, even as Clinton has repeatedly said that she has no plans at the moment to ever run for anything. It’s hard to imagine a male Clinton getting the same amount of shit simply for existing.
That we now have to choose between an alleged rapist of at least one woman and a confessed rapist of far more women is a failure of the left’s own doing. We are far more willing to overlook the flaws of men to make a moral choice than the flaws of women. Many have become resigned to voting for Joe Biden, including survivors of the very kind of assault Tara Reade says she experienced. Even the saner corners of Bernie’s fandom of coalesced around the idea of voting for Biden, just to get Trump out.
But it didn’t have to be like this at all. We had a chance to make sure Trump was never a thing in 2016. In the alternate timeline I refer to as “The Bernstein Bears Universe”, Clinton wins the election, Trump fucks off and starts working of his next business failure, and we’re here in 2020 with, at the very literally least, a functional human adult who knows the government works up for re-election. In 2020, we had a dozen women throw their hats in the ring to try and win the nomination, and no one showed up and showed out for them.
That’s not just the failure of the establishment, or the DNC. It’s a collective failure of anyone who would call themselves a liberal. We built this fucked up system. Everyone seemed to like Warren; at least anecdotally, everyone was impressed with her policies, her ability to explain her vision, her unwillingness to take any shit from Donald Trump. But just as often I heard from people that they weren’t willing to vote for her not because they disagreed with any of her positions, but because they just didn’t believe that a woman could win the nomination, and even if they did, she wouldn’t beat Trump.
Sexism begets sexism. Saying it’s impossible for a woman to win because America is sexist is no different than saying black people will never have reparations because America is racist; by accepting a negative outcome as an inevitability, we have become complicit in perpetuating a system in which mediocre white men can keep bumbling to the most important office in the world, regardless of their lack of qualifications.
Until we fix that problem — hell, until we even admit it’s a problem — then we can’t move forward. Shit will never change. Our country will always be run through the eyes of men, and it will always judge women more harshly for their trespasses. It’s garbage, and it sucks, but it’s the unfortunate truth that no one wants to contend with.
When it comes to 2020, we collectively made the choice to go with Joe Biden, and we have to live with it. Here’s hoping the next time we make that choice, we make a better one.
But Clinton did in fact have slaves. It’s not her doing, but she did in fact benefit from carceral slavery.
The biggest problem Clinton had was that the vast right wing conspiracy had spent 30 years training people to hate her, and she never figured out how to deal with that. It’s not honest or fair, but that’s life.
Ugh…the reason I hate the “she had slaves” talk is because it isn’t typically isn’t coming from the right place.
There is an ethical argument — the Clintons used prison labor around the governor’s mansion and that shit is not and can not be cool — but also an argument that is meant to say that Hillary *owned* slaves, which is an entirely different can of worms.
When people say she “had slaves”, they are usually speaking in the latter context and not the former. And I think it minimized both the actual ramifications of using prison labor in that context AND chattel slavery.
Basically, by repeating that claim over and over, people aren’t trying to bring light to systemic abuse of prisoners but are trying to position Hillary as a plantation owner beating slaves for not picking cotton. It’s mentioning the right thing for all the wrong fucking reasons.
Didn’t the whole “Clinton had slaves” thing really enter the public consciousness because she brought it up in her book as a positive thing without delving into the slavery aspects?
“Basically, by repeating that claim over and over, people aren’t trying to bring light to systemic abuse of prisoners but are trying to position Hillary as a plantation owner beating slaves for not picking cotton. It’s mentioning the right thing for all the wrong fucking reasons.”
Exactly. The intent matters. When you are using an oppressed people as a cudgel in an argument, unless you are fighting for said people, it means you, too, are using slave labor.
Obama gave that commencement speech the other day, and the moderates appear to have all glommed onto one particular line as a swipe against Trump…
“Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy, that’s how little kids think,” Obama said. “Unfortunately a lot of so-called grownups, including some with fancy titles, important jobs, still think that way, which is why things are so screwed up.”
But more, many more, are guilty of that. Selecting Biden was easy and convenient. “He’s electable and the Obama era felt good.” Ignoring the seven women who say he acted inappropriately was easy and convenient. It’s easy and convenient to kick the can another four, eight years.
Maybe one day one party will no longer take the easy and convenient route…
Yeah basically all the polling they did of the primary was like, people exhausted thinking Biden was most likely to just make this nightmare end.
Thank you for this one in particular. It sums up some feelings I’ve been having pretty well. It’s never been about these women being flawless, but how they’re held to a consistently higher standard than the men we’re told are acceptable. And it’s not just men perpetuating this, internalized misogyny of self proclaimed leftist feminists is very much a thing.
These women who could have been frontrunners saw their polling plummet after pummeling one of the “legitimate” candidates. Correlation doesn’t mean correlation but that doesn’t mean it’s not a familiar look. Because she is a black woman, people thought Kamala was being nasty and mean to Joe. Because Warren is a woman, people assumed she was making up shit at Bernie.
If it was about ideology, the two candidates who emerged at the end would have been ideologically very different from these women. But they weren’t.
“Despite losing the white male vote in every election since the Civil Rights Act passed, we still were made to think we had to acquiesce to some long last Democrat who has spent the last twenty or so years voting Republican.”
I don’t remember where, but I got into an argument with someone on one of the Kinja sites when I said “white males are a minority of the Democratic voter base.” No matter what statistics and exit polling I presented, they said I was reading it wrong because there was never one thtat specificall said that. When you have total numbers of voters by race and gender, and you have percentages of those going to either candidate, you can see that white men are not the majority of the Democratic voting base. They are not the ones that should be getting pandered to. Yet, they are. Every time.
I think the resistance to that statistic is that people cannot wrap their minds around the idea that white men aren’t the majority of voters, period, in any select group.
The only are the majority in Republican populations.
I also could never understand the singular focus on white women voting for Trump – something that horrifies me as much as anyone – while giving the men a pass. Always the conversation about white women, which is fair in that they are voting away their own rights, lets white men continue to vote away the rights of everyone else.
It is extremely valid to not like Clinton and consider her flawed or whatever; it was extremely sexist for otherwise reasonable people to hold her up against Trump and decide she was at best the same as him. It was sexist for them to glomb on to the butterymails arguments, or to join in on the Clinton Foundation attacks, or the speculation about her health.
The annoying thing about the focus on white women voting for Trump is that white women were literally the only demographic group to shift in the right direction for that election. Every other group got worse, except for black women who stayed about the same.
Fact of the matter is that if white men couldn’t vote the country would be better off in essentially every election we’ve ever had.
The squalling and fussing, though…can you imagine? It would be worth it just to see the reaction.
If Pete Buttigieg was caught on tape saying “I love to grab cis men by the junk” and was accused of several sexual assaults against men, would 53% of white males have voted for him? I doubt it. This is why we continue to call out Karen and Backy for their 2016 vote.
I’d bet you a box of donuts that it was probably on Splinter.
I think that people are disinclined to go after white men for voting for Trump because…well, I think people like us already *know* they’re a loss cause and blame them for the vast majority of bullshit elections on them, and I also think white women do occasionally get a pass as well.
In the wake of 2016, I think the “53% of white women voted for Trump” thing was in response to people criticizing African-Americans and people of color for not showing up to bail everyone out of the election (again). I can’t speak for everyone, but I think it was mostly a “hey, look, most of us did what we were supposed to do, most of y’all couldn’t be bothered to.”
Yeah absolutely – the criticism of white women in the correct context and coming from the right direction is totally warranted. I just love how many white liberals and progressive men liked to point out how white women screwed us all over. Perhaps if Splinter was still alive, I’d still get to have those conversations, or maybe they have quit that shit. ::facepalm::
The United States of America has a sexism problem. And a racism problem. There is no presumption among those who are not white males that progressivism equates with gender equity.
And we should never forget that Hillary Clinton won the election in 2016, but was denied the presidency by voter suppression, gerrymandering, Russian interference, and irregularities in the vote counting that have yet to be investigated.