Donald Trump’s “trial balloon”
offer of a three-year DACA and TPS extension began deflating even before its release
because no one (except Ann Coulter and others on the mindless-right) is fooled
by its purpose: to get what he wants without really giving anything all. Besides
just kicking the can down the road with the inevitable result of it being used
again as blackmail by Republicans, an “extension” won’t protect Dreamers from a
Supreme Court challenge, only a law passed by Congress and signed by the
president will.
That wasn’t the only thing going
on. We have a rehash of the Women’s March in Washington DC and elsewhere, and
as opposed to the “millions” that supposedly showed up in its initial
incarnation, this time it was more like “thousands.” This year’s march in DC faced
questions of credibility and breaches in morality when it was learned that some
of its sponsors had ties to Louis Farrakhan, whose Nation of Islam has been
accused of anti-Semitic and just plain anti-white demagoguery. But even those
white women who showed up for whom this was no concern could not claim to
represent all women, in fact they could only claim to represent those who saw
the march more as a social event to get out and be seen—maybe even get yourself
in a picture in a media report. I mean, what else did you think you “accomplished”?
Especially after two years of Trump? Nothing.
What we have seen is many video
clips in the past two years in “surprising” numbers is white women engaging in
deliberate acts of racist confrontation with Hispanics and blacks in otherwise
commonplace situations. Elizabeth Gillespie McCrae's recent book Mothers of Massive Resistance chronicles the sad truth that white women have often been the "foot soldiers" in the war against integration and in support of active discrimination. Even “educated” white women were guilty of racist
paranoia; a recent story tells of a blond female sorority sister at the
University of Oklahoma making a blackface video of herself. We’ve seen white
female teachers being disciplined or fired for posting racist commentary on
social media. We saw two white women drive off a cliff in California with their
“adopted” black children in an apparent murder-suicide. Yet these incidents are
treated as just oddities, not evidence of that not all women share the same “nature.” In personal political and social ideology we don’t need to watch Fox News and it collection of Blond Barbie Bigots before seeing the saliva drooling out of Jeanine Pirro’s
mouth every time she goes off on one of her lunatic rants to know that women are not a "monolithic" block of voters.
Women are always prepared to give
themselves the benefit of the doubt
or a second chance to “prove” themselves. I admit that after I read director
James Gunn’s comments that got him fired by Disney, it was clear that the
studio really didn’t have any choice.
And there are certainly different ways for a person’s views to “evolve”;
Trump went from accusing Pat Buchanan of being “Hitler” in 1999 to embracing
his xenophobic and white nationalist views today. However, claiming that one’s
views have “evolved” can simply be a matter of cynical opportunism. NBC made
that mistake of believing in the “monolithic” nature of women in believing that
Megyn Kelly was capable of “evolving” when they hired her from Fox News. Her defense
of whites doing the “blackface” as not racist proved that she hadn’t really “evolved”
at all.
But it could be worse, especially
when those doing the “evolving” are presidential wannabes. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard made
anti-gay remarks in the past, but now she says her views have “evolved.” But
she is unapologetic about meetings with Syria’s dictator, and she is hinting
that she agrees with Trump’s border stand. Jake Tapper on CNN questioned another
presidential hopeful, Sen. Kirsten
Gillibrand, about why her border views—similar
to Trump’s back in 2006—could not also be labeled as racist. Gillibrand
hypocritically claimed that her views have “evolved.” Funny, but she didn’t
allow Al Franken to “evolve” from a few incidents of high school-level sexual pranks,
the kind that were staples on 80s teen comedies that didn’t cause “outrage”
back then. And then you have Elizabeth Warren, hypocritically claiming to be “part”
Native American, attempting to hijack the “native” part without having had to
experience the racism part. So far, these are our “evolving” choices.
Trying to run on a gender
politics agenda, or being seen as doing so, will be a huge mistake in 2020 if
the half-dozen or so women expected be on the campaign trail choose to go that
path, and they might be tempted to given a recent Harris poll that shows that
41 percent of Democratic women think it is important to have at least on woman
on the ticket. But that won’t prevent the kind of disaster we saw in 2016.
Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistake in 2016 was not learning anything from the
primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, and deliberately alienating that segment
of the electorate that most supported him. Clinton refused to recognize that
both Sanders and Trump were different sides of the same coin, and most white
working class voters (particularly men) were receptive to their message—and most
stupidly, she didn’t realize that many of those voters would have preferred to
vote for a ticket either with Sanders or someone very much like him rather than
Trump as a matter of conscious (or guilt). Instead of choosing a running mate
who spoke to the concerns of that segment of the electorate, she chose the (no
offense) vanilla Tim Kaine, who was certainly no populist orator, which is what
Clinton needed to keep white working class voters in the Rust Belt states in
line. Why did she do this? Because her egotism and gender “entitlement” was so
great that she could not tolerate anyone casting even a tiny shadow over her megalomania.
If these Democratic female
presidential wannabes make the same mistakes as Clinton did, or go out of their
way to alienate white working class male voters as Clinton did (rather the opposite
of what she attempted in 2008, when she employed racist code language to entice
these same voters against Barack Obama) we may very well see the same result. The
belief that women—or more specifically, white women—are as “monolithic” a group
as the black voting block is evidence of self-obsession and a complete loss of
reality. Let’s not forget one pertinent
fact: 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016; despite all the
assumptions of a great “shift,” in the 2018 midterms the needle barely moved,
with 50 percent of white women voting Republican. That tiny shift just might be
enough in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania which Democrats
cannot afford to lose again, but then again it might be within the “margin of
error” and not signify a shift at all. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, that
person has to speak to the concerns of working class people and prevent them
from being conned again by someone who has never worked an honest day in his life.
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