The Left Still Has a Sexism Problem
Back in the good old days of 2016, before the Oval Office was occupied by a sociopathic adolescent trapped in the orange body of an adult man with gravitationally improbable hair, there was a wild and intractable debate on the American left: Was the opposition to Hillary Clinton, which seemed to come primarily from men (and among those men, from white men in particular) reflective of deep misogyny or rather some issue with Clinton herself, apart from her gender?
For the men on the right who have yet to perfect the art of subtlety, showing up to rallies with “Trump That Bitch” T-shirts was more telling than the words coming out of their mouths – usually some variation of “I love women and I would vote for Sarah Palin, but this one is a real See You Next Tuesday.” Men on the left, though, knew better than to call Hillary the B-word (or the C-word or whatever variation of shrill or strident or ambitious feminists had put off-limits). Instead, they raised issues — issues that hadn’t been issues for lefty men supporting Barack Obama or Joe Biden or John Kerry or even Bernie Sanders, but never mind. At least these issues were plausible reasons one might oppose a political candidate: She took too much money from Wall Street. She gave a paid speech at Goldman Sachs. She was too moderate after years of being too liberal. She had been in Washington for too long. Her husband had some bad policies in the ‘90s. Emails.
Nearly without fail, these same men would cap off their cri de coeur against Hillary with “It’s not about sexism. I would vote for Elizabeth Warren.”
What changed? Well, now that Clinton is out, there’s real energy around Warren to possibly run for president in 2020. And while she was a handy shield for Hillary-hating leftists to use as a defense of sexism, now she’s a woman who may actually be seeking power against a man, not a theoretical interloper against another woman. The truth is that many men, even enlightened liberal ones, are reflexively hostile to women who seem ambitious; women seeking power just seem off. Of course these men don’t say that out loud, and even in their own minds, there’s no thought bubble that reads, “I hate powerful women.” It’s deeper and subtler than that; most of these men, I would bet, consider themselves great friends to women and believe they don’t have a sexist bone in their body. Still, they’re hostile to women they perceive as too pushy, too loudmouthed, too power-hungry – too unfeminine.
As they did with the decades-long trashing of Hillary Clinton, the right is leading the way on Warren. She’s “loud” with “relentless ambition,” writes a veteran of the Bush and Reagan White Houses in the Washington Post. She is also strident and shrill (and strident again). For anyone who followed Warren’s Senate campaigns, this is not new — she was attacked then for being strident, for being too professorial and lacking charisma.
And as they did with the decades-long trashing of Hillary Clinton, some men on the left (and some women too) are now happy to walk down on the trail forged by the blatantly sexist far right. Warren, now potentially competing for power rather than serving as a rhetorical defense to accusations of sexism, is increasingly being cast out by men of a socialist bent. According to some prominent leftist columnists, Warren was beloved and trusted before Nov. 9, a fact that made discussions about sexism tainting the election largely irrelevant; now she’s just OK, and the love she gets from some lefties is confusing. Bernie, of course, remains “definitely pure” and a “political mastermind.”
To be fair, Warren made a bad call when she voted to move Ben Carson, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the department of Housing and Urban Development, out of committee, putting him one step closer to confirmation. But Bernie Sanders has also voted to confirm bad nominees — particularly one who could be a real threat to immigrants — and the response from the far left has been crickets. Which is, incidentally, the same sound coming from leftist men on Kirsten Gillibrand’s strong stand against nearly all of Trump’s nominees.
The left-of-left party line, it seems, is that only Bernie Sanders can save us. And maybe Tulsi Gabbard — because they aren’t sexist, you see.
These are, for now, mild (although certainly not marginal) far-left anti-Warren rumblings, muted compared to the ongoing cries of “Bernie would have won!” (despite the fact that he ran and couldn’t even win the primary). But pay attention: We saw how the worst right-wing accusations against Clinton were magnified by many on the far left; this pattern is primed to repeat itself. The election is almost four years away, but the very hint of a Warren run will mean preemptive strikes against her — and these strikes will be more about who she is (and who does she think she is?) rather than what she stands for or what she’s actually done. In the meantime, expect to see the most liberal men in Congress get a pass for where they’ve compromised or made imperfect choices.
For the rest of us who do want to see women in elected office — especially women whose politics we are 100 percent behind, but also women with the usual flaws of political animals — it’s crucial to be out front on this, pushing back on this subtle misogyny that elevates men while simultaneously raising the bar impossibly high for women in politics. There are no perfect politicians. But in large part because of quiet, hard-to-pin-down misogyny on the left and the right, there are far too few female ones.
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