Ten million people could march on Washington dressed as Che Guevara, and the Democrats would interpret it to mean that Americans want the party to move right

A little over a year ago, Americans elected Barack Obama by a landslide. They elected him because they wanted an end to Republican government. They elected him because they wanted to see a genuinely progressive agenda enacted. True, they had absolutely no reason to expect that Obama would do those things, but still: that’s what they thought they were getting. Remember? There would be an end to war and torture, an end to government spying and stupidity, and everybody would have gay marriage and single-payer health care and feminism.

Have Americans suddenly gone rightwing in the past year? No, of course not. What’s happened is that Obama has turned out to be all hope and no change. None of what people thought they were voting for came true. We still have torture and war — more war, even — and corporate bailouts and homophobia and crapping on women — even more of that, too! — and a healthcare bill that looks like it was designed by Aetna and Focus on the Family. Obama is a fucking disaster. When Saturday Night Live is joking about what a wipeout Obama has been, when 20-year-olds interviewed in newspapers are saying stuff like I totally fell for it, I totally believed in Obama, but man, I’ll never fall for another politician again, when feminist groups are mobilizing against the Administration because its healthcare bill is so fucking heinous — then the problem is not that America has suddenly turned right. The problem is that America elected what they thought was a leftist, and instead got Bush III.

So the Obama voters sit home and stew. And fume. And crack their teeth. And plot third-party rebellions. And some of them go to the polls and vote for people like Scott Brown just to show how furious and disgusted they are.

Meanwhile, Republicans — now joyously untethered from any sense of reality at all — erupt into freaktastic waves of delirium, shrieking about abortion and evil foreigners and socialism and a bunch of other crap fed to them by their propaganda masters. And then they, too, go to the polls and vote for people like Scott Brown.

If Obama were the kind of Democrat people thought they were electing, this wouldn’t be happening. If he had followed through on any of the stuff people were hoping for, this wouldn’t be happening. But he isn’t and he didn’t.

And if Democrats were a real political party instead of a group of goddamn hand puppets, they would understand that. But they’re not and they don’t. Listen to Evan Bayh, hand puppet extraordinaire:

“There’s going to be a tendency on the part of our people to be in denial about all this,” Bayh told ABC News, but “if you lose Massachusetts and that’s not a wake-up call, there’s no hope of waking up.”

What is the lesson of Massachusetts – where Democrats face the prospects of losing a Senate seat they’ve held since 1952? For Senator Bayh the lesson is that the party pushed an agenda that is too far to the left, alienating moderate and independent voters.

Evan Bayh is a conservative, but he’s also, as Ezra Klein once noted, a human weathervane. The winds of beltway opinion blow through Evan’s hair. I guarantee it: the dominant narrative of this clusterfuck is going to be that Obama tried to do too much too soon, and Americans just aren’t ready for all that Marxist healthcare and stuff. (Secondary narrative: that Coakley is an incompetent old woman who never should have been allowed to run for Senate unsupervised.)

I know some progressives will say this is all to the good, that cracks in the edifice are just what we need to grow a third-party movement, etc.; and there is some truth in that. But I’m saying that it won’t be easy. The overwhelming shit train of nonsense that will emerge from this will not be in our favor.

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UPDATE: Someday I really ought to see Downfall instead of just these re-dubbed bunker clips. It looks like a good movie. But anyway, this is one re-dub that is fricking hilarious (via The Confluence):

Dreaming of Diocletian

Friday, November 27, 2009 — ATTENTION: Wingnut/twit visitors. Read this. Thank you. (P.S. Not sure if you’re a wingnut or a twit? You probably are. Go read the link.)

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When the Roman Empire was broken, Diocletian fixed it. He completely revamped the imperial government, discarding centuries of tradition in favor of a new organizational structure designed to meet the challenges of the day. You can do stuff like that when you’re an emperor. It was sort of a one-man Constitutional Convention.

I think of Diocletian whenever I contemplate the political mess in this country. We are broken and busted and in desperate need of change. And no, I don’t mean “change we can believe in,” which is obviously change we can’t believe in. If representative democracy is ever going to work again, I think we need to find a way around the existing two major parties. That’s what we were talking about in this thread, and it’s why I decided to put up this post.

The original impetus for this discussion was the Stupak amendment, which brought with it the realization (or confirmation, for some of us) that the Democrats really, really aren’t the party of women’s rights.

But women aren’t the only constituency that’s been abandoned or exploited by the Democrats. Working folks and genuine progressives are howling in the wilderness, too. Everywhere on the left, people are talking about third parties and revolts and what have you. So, what I’m going to do here is try and put everything on the table and see what we’ve got. And see if we can figure out how to proceed.

Consider these working notes, and let’s use the comment thread to hash this all out.

*****

A. Underserved/restive constituencies:

1. Women
2. Social progressives
3. Working people/economic populists

Obviously, women are nowhere with the Democrats and less than nowhere with Republicans. But the same is true of social progressives, by which I mean people who would like torture to stop and gay marriage to be legal and that kind of thing.

As for the third category, see Economic Populism, non-existence of (here and here); and Healthcare Reform, complete screw-up of (here).

The extent to which these constituencies overlap is something we need to talk through.

*****

B. Potential third parties:

1. National Women’s Party
2. Green Party
3. Inside/Outside Party?
4. Other (there are tons of third parties)

People have been talking about re-forming the NWP since last year. I’ve lost track of how many people have suggested this, and whenever we get hit with another setback (like Stupak) it comes up again. I actually think one of the NOW state presidents may be hatching something right now, but I need to get some more info on that. We need to think through whether the NWP is the way to go, whether it would have voter appeal, what the platform would be, strategy, etc.

As for the Greens, they have the great advantage of already existing. Third-party politics are hamstrung in this country by electoral laws designed to keep power in the hands of the two major parties, and the Greens (after years and years of work) have at least achieved enough recognition to get on the ballot in several states. Also, the Greens are already in favor of all the same things we’re talking about: Green Party of the United States.

Another possibility, and one I’m proposing for consideration here, is a new third party designed to co-opt the Democratic Party from within. Since the two-party system has an entrenched death grip on our government, attacking it purely from the outside is a Sisyphean task. Why not tackle it from the outside and the inside? Create a third party that has an external independent existence and a matching bloc within the Democratic caucus. In the past, strong blocs have been able to function almost as rogue parties: the Copperheads, the Radical Republicans. The Copperheads (a notorious example, I realize) even had associated societies and booster clubs in the states.

For example, let’s say we created a third party called the Ponies (not really, but just as an example). We would also work on developing a Pony bloc within the Democratic Party, comprised of politicians who espouse the Pony message and vote Pony on every issue. Kind of an insider mole version of the formal Pony party. Meanwhile, the Pony party proper could work on ballot access, electoral fusion, etc.; nominate its own candidates where possible; and endorse Pony Democrats when appropriate. We would also need to develop a media presence, or at least a blogular presence, firmly identified as Pony.

Of course, this inside-outside strategy could be applied to any third party, including the NWP. Edited to add, from my comment in the thread below: If we did this with the Greens, we could have the Green Party on the outside and Green Dogs on the inside. Green Democrats = Green Dogs.

*****

C. Notes on women’s issues/feminism specifically:

1. If we’re going to consider joining forces across constituencies, the number one caveat is that women’s issues must be prioritized. We must write it in blood or carve it in stone that women’s rights are fundamental. Women have joined with every progressive movement since the French Revolution, only to have their own liberation sacrificed every time for “the greater good.” After two hundred years of this stuff, I think we need to learn the lesson. This is obviously one reason to consider going with a National Women’s Party or something equivalently woman-centered.
2. Should we work on getting the ERA ratified? MadamaB, I know, believes that this is a key goal and could unite women.
3. Should we be working towards the 30% solution? Or how about the 50% solution? Or gender parity across the board?
4. I think we need to say to hell with Roe v. Wade. By which I mean, we need to take the abortion fight to a different front instead of being blackmailed into voting Democrat so that the next SC justice will be pro-choice etc., etc., etc. As long as we’re locked into that paradigm, our hands are tied politically. I think we need to put abortion on a legislative footing; perhaps the ERA could accomplish that. Simultaneously, women need to build an Underground Railroad of abortion providers and patient transportation (working with Planned Parenthood, for example) so we’re not just at the mercy of the goddamn Democrats. Enough with the blackmail!
5. We need to be prepared to accept the risk of Democrats losing an election. This is just basic politics, folks. The only way to swing the game is if you mean business. All we’re doing now is enabling the country and the Democratic Party to move further and further right. Think about it: the Democratic administration we have now would have been the nightmare Republican bogeyman scenario a couple of decades ago.
6. We need to remember that feminism isn’t just about abortion. And being pro-choice doesn’t get you an automatic Feminist Credential Card. (Nor, I would add, should an anti-abortion stance necessarily be an automatic mark of the beast, since a person might have useful feminist sympathies in other respects and be willing to support other women’s issues.)
7. Political feminism must always be compassionate and pro-woman. See the early history of NOW, when protests at bridal shows were misinterpreted by the brides as personal attacks on them rather than on patriarchy. See everything I’ve written about feminists and Sarah Palin.
8. Feminists must work on building networks and political alliances among women. Patriarchy discourages this kind of thing, needless to say; we’re supposed to be divided and conquered at all times. So while we’re doing feminism in theory and advocacy, we also need to be doing it in practice, in terms of our behavior with each other.

*****

D. Notes on the intersection between feminism and economic populism:

1. Economic issues are women’s issues, seeing as how we’re half the human race and everything. The question here is one of focus and priority. If the priority becomes economic issues — say, in alliance with other progressives — then women’s rights will be short-shrifted unless some kind of oath is taken in blood to prevent that from happening (see above).
2. Some feminists might want to explicitly avoid an intersection of these issues, particularly if they are themselves economically conservative. They might want an NWP to focus on choice and gender parity, for example, and leave the socialism out.
3. Personally, if I were crafting a political message of feminist economic populism, I might borrow from the Corn Mother model (though not explicitly, because that would be cultural appropriation and offensive). But the world of the Corn Mother is, I think, similar emotionally to what many average American women yearn for: a strong community, healthy children, female power and respect for women, a decent home, enough to eat, a regard for the earth and for animals, a fair allocation of resources, a balanced and sustainable way of life.
4. Advocating for a full range of needed, appealing policies would give people lots of reasons to support us, and more controversial agenda items like choice would be swept along as part of the package. Women and men will vote for the good stuff — stuff they need — even if they’ve got a personal quarrel with one or two issues. All women nowadays want a fair shake and equal pay and freedom from violence, and a Happy Healthy Community type platform would attract everyone. The key, of course, it to never do what the Democrats have done, which is throw out the specifically feminist stuff (such as choice — added to be clear). Idiots.
5. Single payer, single payer, single payer. Single payer.

*****

E. Notes on strategy:

1. The institutional barriers to third-party politics are formidable, to say the least. Electoral fusion, for example, is a powerful tool, but it’s against the law in most states. A third party might want to run local campaigns only in states where fusion is permitted, and work on changing the laws in states where it isn’t.
2. A strategy I think we should consider is what you might call fusion or coalition by appointment. That’s because the one place where there are no legal or institutional barriers to a third party is in the federal executive branch. There is absolutely no barrier to a President appointing Greens or Socialists or Ponies to his or her Cabinet or to any federal agency. This could also be pursued on a state level, with gubernatorial appointments.
3. I think a third party needs a powerful figure for people to rally around. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but our politics are extremely people-oriented. People voted for Ross Perot, not the Reform Party. And the Greens only became visible in American politics when they ran Ralph Nader on their ticket. Even within the major parties, people rally around magnetic figures: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin.
4. For the record, my ideal presidential candidate in terms of identity politics would be a Native woman, someone like Winona LaDuke.

*****

F. A few notes on long term considerations:

1. Peak oil is coming, if it’s not already here, and the world is going to get even uglier than it is now. Shit’s gonna hit the fan.
2. Forty years ago, who would have believed that working-class white people would vote Republican in droves? Things can change.
3. Things can even change fast: Barack Obama took over the Democratic party in one year. All it took was a billion dollars.

A year later, world suddenly gets what PUMAs were talking about

So it turns out that the Democratic-sponsored health care reform bill will officially treat women as unpersons: freakish beings whose bizarre, non-human needs cannot possibly be considered part of basic health care. Perhaps we’re extra-terrestrials:

None of the bills emerging from the House and Senate require insurers to cover all the elements of a standard gynecological “well visit,” leaving essential care such as pelvic exams, domestic violence screening, counseling about sexually transmitted diseases, and, perhaps most startlingly, the provision of birth control off the list of basic benefits all insurers must cover. Nor are these services protected from “cost sharing,” which means that, depending on what’s in the bill that emerges from the Senate, and, later, the contents of a final bill, women could wind up having to pay for some of these services out of their own pockets.

As for abortion, no fucking way, Jose:

The bill also prevents affordability credits from being used to pay for abortion coverage; the credits would help middle-class and working-class Americans purchase insurance coverage on the private market. Eighty-seven percent of existing private insurance plans cover abortion, which is significantly cheaper and less medically risky than pregnancy and childbirth. After reform, if insurers want to continue to provide such care, the House bill would require them to segregate all government funding from the co-pays individuals pay into the plans. Abortions could only be paid for out of the “private” side of the ledger.

Feminist and progressive bloggers are tearing their hair out in appropriately angst-size chunks:

• From Corrente: Dems HR3962 throws women under the bus on exams, birth control, abortion
• From OpenLeft: No Rescue From Democratic Misogyny
• And best of all, this excellent post from Melissa at Shakesville: How Could a Feminist Even CONSIDER Not Voting Democratic?!

But what, you ask, does this have to do with PUMAs?

Everything. This is what PUMA was all about. As I said in June 2008:

A Democratic party that has lost the women’s vote will be a Democratic party bending over backwards to win it back.

I wrote that when the PUMA movement was only a few days old. PUMA was about women asserting their power as voters, refusing to be taken for granted anymore. It was about women pushing back against a Democratic Party that exploited our votes, our money, and our time, while blackmailing us with Roe v. Wade. It was about women putting the fear of God into the Democrats so they would have to earn our support for a change.

Don’t believe me? Fine: get in the time machine and read this post from June 2008, where I laid it all out — no really, don’t just skip down; stop and read the fucking post: Archimedes’ Lever.

“But Violet!” you say. “PUMAs weren’t feminists! PUMAs were just hysterical bitches/batshit crazy racists/secret Republicans! The Obama supporters said so!”

Ah, no.

Look: whenever women start getting feministy and making demands, the patriarchy’s number one line of defense is to undermine their credibility. That’s what Rush Limbaugh was doing when he said feminism was just ugly women’s sour grapes. That’s what Sir Almroth Wright was doing when he argued that suffragists were mentally ill. That’s what the Republicans in the 70s were doing when they claimed feminism was a front for communism; and it’s what the communists were doing in the 20s when they claimed feminism was a front for bourgeois capitalism.

The object, in all cases, is to dismiss women’s real grievances as non-existent or absurd, and to paint the women themselves as deranged enemies of the good. Those silly suffragists weren’t chaining themselves to the gates because they actually wanted the right to vote — what normal woman would want or need such a thing? — but because they were bitter spinsters driven mad with sexual frustration.

And that, precisely, was the rhetorical strategy adopted by the anti-PUMA contingent last year. Remember? PUMAs were bitter, PUMAs were hysterical, PUMAs were racists, PUMAs were really a front for the GOP. (Though not, I think, a front for the communists this time; I believe the Republicans — the real Republicans — had already reserved that one for the Obama camp. So difficult to keep all the propaganda straight.) No attention was paid to what the women were actually saying; no credence was given to their very real frustration with the Democratic Party. All that was simply ignored.

The charge that PUMAs were “really” just racists was particularly interesting, since it capitalized on one of the woman-belittling themes already at work: that the only real issue in the race last year was race. According to this reckoning, Barack Obama’s campaign was historic and dramatic, but Hillary Clinton’s was just some boring-ass politics-as-usual by a “conventional candidate” (or, as an Obama supporter put it, “some dude’s wife”). All those millions of women who experienced Hillary’s run for president as a huge, even life-changing event? Actually, they were just racists who were scared to death of having a black man in the White House. The millions of women who were appalled by the sexism that derailed Hillary’s candidacy, the millions who were stunned to realize that the Democratic Party was playing them for fools? Actually, here again: just racists who hated Obama. Crazy hysterical bitter bitches.

See how it’s done?

The PUMA movement alarmed the Democrats (briefly) because it threatened to disrupt the party’s blackmail-hold on women’s votes. You know the deal: the Democrats pretend to be pro-choice, and in exchange women let them get away with anything. The problem, obviously, is that the Democrats really aren’t pro-choice anymore, not in any reliable, consistent way. Any woman who votes Democrat “because they’re pro-choice” is basically running on muscle memory. It’s more like a rumor now, or a legend from the past.

But the blackmail still works, amazingly enough. Last year: apocalyptic warnings that if John McCain were elected, then Sarah Palin — his vice-president — would magically assume dictatorial powers over all the nation’s uteruses. Only Obama could save us! ‘Cause, you know, the Democrats are pro-choice. So Obama gets elected, and what does he do? Appoints the pro-life Palinesque Tim Kaine as head of the DNC. Appoints another pro-life Palin clone to Health & Human Services. Cuts women’s reproductive health from the stimulus bill. Retains the Hyde Amendment. Promises that health care reform won’t cover abortion. Psych!

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Addendum, November 5, 2009: The comment thread appended to this post developed into a rather interesting discussion of what happened to the PUMA movement after the initial Summer of Love. Kind of a Paul Harvey, Page Two thing. And now, for the rest of the story…

Fifty years of black helicopters

One of the things that annoys me about the healthcare circus is the claim by the White House that conservative opposition is based in racism. Yes, that is a White House claim, carefully and covertly fed to friendly media outlets: hence the spate of articles and blog posts simultaneously sounding the same note.

It bothers me, first of all, because it’s wrong. I don’t like wrong things. They chafe. Opposition to healthcare reform is as old as the concept of healthcare reform, and unless Harry Truman was a black man, it has nothing to do with racism. It’s part of the rightwing proletarian fear of government — a fear that is cynically stoked by rightwing elites who rely on control of that same government for their own power and profit. (Caveat: no doubt there are some racists involved in the town hall disturbances, just as there are racists everywhere in America. But to claim that racism is the driving factor behind these demonstrations is absurd.)

Rick Perlstein’s essay in the Washington Post, In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition, recaps the last 50 years of rightwing panic. Read it; it will give you a better perspective on what’s going on right now than a thousand hysterical blog posts from the Obama noise machine.

Which brings me to the other reason the racist meme bothers me. Last year the Obama team used false accusations of racism to discredit Hillary supporters and Hillary herself (and Bill). From “fairy tale” to the doctored Mickey Kantor tape to the RFK smear, it was perhaps the ugliest aspect of the campaign — well, apart from the sexism and the caucus fraud. And it was one the Obama camp reached for again and again. How many people, even now, believe that Hillary Clinton engaged in race-baiting? How many believe that PUMAs were motivated not by feminist or democratic indignation, but by racism? Probably at least as many as believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11 and Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet. If you want a lie to become the truth, just repeat it a million times.

Now the racist accusation is being trotted out again. It worked against Hillary Clinton; will it work against the town hall protestors? And if it does, should we be glad about that? “We,” of course, being those of us who are passionately on the side of healthcare reform.

You can guess what my answer is.

Ezra Klein said the other day that what’s really at stake in the healthcare debate is our democracy. He’s correct that the rightwing agitators are awash in propaganda and madness, but if he’s implying that the Obama camp represents rational political discourse, I beg to differ. Anybody who went through 2008 with their eyes open should know better. Klein may be mourning American democracy now, but that’s what I was doing a year ago. My mantra throughout much of 2008 was that if we elected Obama, we’d have the equivalent of two GOPs. Different policies (sometimes), but identical tactics.

Black helicopters all around.

Feminists and the mystery of Sarah Palin

I don’t usually comment on other blogs; I have little enough time to keep my own gig in working order. But the other day I was over at I Blame The Patriarchy, where I was dismayed to find in the comment threads some of the same Palin-bashing that has become drearily familiar from the rest of the inner tubes. Now, IBTP is just about the best feminist blog going, with a genius proprietor and a thoughtful commentariat. Hence my dismay. Even here? I thought. Fortunately, some of the commenters there did try to set the record straight, though they got significant guff from others.

This is the comment I left, which I’m dragging back here to the smoking lounge for your perusal (the first bit in italics is a quote from Jill):

“Mang, when I wrote this post, I sure never expected it would result in blamer support for a skeevy antifeminist politician.”

It seems that some blamers know that the bullshit published about Palin (and unfortunately repeated here) was just that — bullshit. Palin considers herself a feminist, and except for the abortion thing, she’s more explicitly feminist than the average American. When a regular Jane with that kind of background proclaims her feminist sympathies, it doesn’t seem terribly productive to ridicule her or indulge in the misogynist slander put out by the political hacks running against her. I mean, sure, by the standards of pure feminism, she’s an enabling godbag. But so are most American women. On the other hand, by the standards of the Republican Party or evangelical Christianity, she’s Twisty Faster.

Pheenobarbidoll responded that abortion rights are a cornerstone too important to overlook, to which I replied:

Abortion rights are important. But it’s interesting that Hugo Schwyzer, a male “pro-life” feminist and former member of and financial contributor to Feminists For Life, is allowed into the feminist community. He even blogs at RH Reality Check, and has been befriended by Amanda Marcotte.

Schwyzer’s awkward pro-feminist/anti-abortion stance is the same as Sarah Palin’s, yet only Palin is reviled and ridiculed. How dare she call herself a feminist!

Someone else then loftily announced that Palin cannot be a feminist since she “believes in keeping children ignorant of the facts of their reproductive rights and responsibilities.” To which I replied:

She doesn’t believe that. She’s fully in favor of sex ed and contraception.

I imagine you consider yourself a feminist. What I’m wondering is why, if you’re a feminist, you don’t even give Palin the courtesy of finding out what she actually believes, rather than simply accepting the lies created by political hacks? This is bizarre to me. It’s really not difficult to google and discover that Sarah Palin is in favor of contraception and sex ed, that the whole “abstinence-only” thing is a smear spread by Obama supporters.

It’s a bit weird to drag all this back here to the lounge, but it’s the setup for the giant, rambling brain dump that’s about to follow. Sarah Palin’s surprise resignation has brought out the crazy again, and reading through the blogs I’m reminded of how much pure bullshit has been said and believed about her and continues to be said and believed. I’m reminded of how so many feminists seem possessed of a wholly irrational hatred for this woman.

Why?

This isn’t going to be the kind of post where I sketch out a pattern and then give you The Key To Understanding It All. This is going to be more like a stream-of-consciousness tiptoe through the violets of my reclusive thought processes. I’ve been puzzling over this stuff since last August. One reason I’ve written as many posts as I have about Palin is because I’m so baffled by the reaction to her. I can’t figure it out. It’s like quantum entanglement or dark energy: I make myself sick trying to understand it and worry that I’ll die before I get it sorted. (I know: Xanax.)

Of course, the first answer you’ll get if you ask feminists why they hate Sarah Palin is that “it’s because she ____” — and then fill in the blank with the lie of choice: made rape victims pay for their own kits, is against contraception or sex ed, believes in abstinence-only, thinks the dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago, doesn’t believe in global warming, doesn’t believe in evolution, is stupid and can’t read, etc., etc., etc., etc.

But none of those things is true. None of them.

Which brings me to my first puzzlement: why don’t people bother to find out what Sarah Palin really believes? I don’t mean people as in the usual sexist freaks; I mean feminists.

Sarah Palin is only the second woman in the history of this country to run on a major party’s presidential ticket. That alone makes her, to me, a fascinating figure worthy of serious investigation. When McCain announced Palin as his choice for VP, I immediately tried to find out as much about her as I could. I wanted to know who she was, what she believed, what her politics were. It never occurred to me that this interest would make me in any way unusual among feminists, but apparently it did. Apparently most feminists — at least the ones online — are content to just take the word of the frat boys at DailyKos or the psycho-sexists at Huffington Post. That amazes me. Aren’t you even interested in who she really is? I want to ask. She’s only the second woman on a presidential ticket in our whole fricking history!

But even weirder is what happens when you try to replace the myths with the truth. If you explain, “no, she didn’t charge rape victims,” your feminist interlocutor will come back with something else: “she’s abstinence-only!” No, you say, she’s not; and then the person comes back with, “she’s a creationist!” and so on. “She’s an uneducated moron!” Actually, Sarah Palin is not dumb at all, and based on her interviews and comments, I’d say she has a greater knowledge of evolution, global warming, and the Wisconsin glaciation in Alaska than the average citizen.

But after you’ve had a few of these myth-dispelling conversations, you start to realize that it doesn’t matter. These people don’t hate Palin because of the lies; the lies exist to justify the hate. That’s why they keep reaching and reaching for something else, until they finally get to “she winked on TV!” (And by the way: I’ve been winked at my whole life by my grandmother, aunts, and great-aunts. Who knew it was such a despicable act?)

Read the rest of this entry »

The truth about the NOW election

I want to talk about the future of NOW, and that’s going to be my next post. But first, it’s time to dispel some of the nonsense about the election:

#1: The real issue at the NOW election was that the organization is broke and going nowhere fast. Membership has nose-dived and so has revenue (which is primarily based on membership dues):

During the two year period from 2005 to 2007, total revenue declined $1,189,644 or almost 40%. For the past three years, NOW’s expenditures have exceeded income, and NOW Inc. has been forced to borrow money from The NOW Foundation to stay solvent…

During the last election cycle (2005-2009), NOW’s membership declined approximately 10% per year and current membership figures are probably around 60,000…

The current Membership VP (Latifa Lyles) and her five-member team are directly responsible for a catastrophic 40% decline in membership and corresponding decline in revenues that imperils the continued operation of NOW.

In addition, something like 28% of NOW’s membership revenue goes just to pay the salaries of the four people at the top (the president and three VPs).

#2: Latifa Lyles has been the Membership VP during this period of catastrophic decline. She was running for president on a record of under-achievement, to put it mildly. Terry O’Neill, on the other hand, maintained overall membership levels during her tenure as Membership VP a few years ago, enhancing outreach efforts and bringing in new members each year.

#3: Latifa Lyles was not the candidate of change; she was the hand-picked successor of Kim Gandy and Ellie Smeal (who is the power behind the throne, as it were). Latifa’s election would have meant a continuation of Ellie Smeal’s control and a continuation of the inside-the-beltway strategy NOW has pursued in recent years.

#4: Terry O’Neill ran on a platform of change: shaking up the organization, re-invigorating the grassroots, re-establishing vendor relations, restoring financial integrity, and re-building membership.

#5: Terry was supported by prominent NOW members, such as Patricia Ireland (past president of NOW and a board member), Olga Vives (the current Vice President of NOW under Kim Gandy), Carol Moseley Braun (former U.S. senator, former Ambassador to New Zealand, 2004 presidential candidate), and Susan Faludi (Backlash, Stiffed, The Terror Dream). She was also supported by many chapter presidents and state presidents: Endorsements and Testimonials.

#6: Terry’s team is every bit as young and diversified as the Lyles slate, with two women under 30 and a woman of color.

#7: Talk about not wanting to relinquish power: the NOW establishment (Kim Gandy and Ellie Smeal) was very intent on blocking any opposition to Latifa Lyles. Some of their tactics at the conference included:

• Refusing to seat delegations on made-up technicalities
• Refusing to credential members in good standing who supported O’Neill
• Confiscating materials from the opposition
• Refusing to recognize questioners
• Cutting the mike while members of the opposition were speaking
• Accusing the opposition of being “enemies” and “infiltrators”

#8: The NOW establishment (Kim Gandy and Ellie Smeal) flew in a bunch of non-voting attendees, attired in campaign colors, to run around shouting and cheerleading in an apparent attempt to give the impression of overwhelming advantage. Of the 575 attendees at the conference, only 406 were eligible to vote.

#9: NOW has not been “infiltrated by pro-lifers.” This is an absurd rumor. First of all, I don’t think there are any pro-lifers (or rather anti-choicers) in NOW. It’s a thoroughly pro-choice organization. Secondly, it’s not possible to infiltrate a NOW election. To vote at the conference, you have to be a delegate from your chapter. And to be a delegate, you have to have been a NOW member for at least three months, and you have to be selected as a delegate by your chapter president. There are a limited number of delegate slots for each chapter.

Furthermore, credentialing at the conference is strict: you have to show picture IDs, present your membership papers, get signed-off by a chapter president, and so forth. Kind of like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but more so.

The people identified at the conference as “Palin supporters” are not pro-lifers. In fact, they’re not even Palin supporters, as I’ll get to next.

#10: It was Kim Gandy who started the rumor that the financial data about NOW (see #1 above) was misinformation being spread by “Palin supporters.” This false accusation, repeated and amplified by Latifa Lyles, led to much of the fireworks at the conference. Patricia Ireland and Terry O’Neill publicly endorsed the financial data as accurate (which it is), thus forcing Gandy to back down. Other supporters and members of Terry’s campaign team, such as Carol Moseley Braun, reacted strongly to Gandy’s smear.

#11: The so-called “Palin supporters” are not followers of Sarah Palin, not Republicans, not pro-lifers, not any of that. They’re just O’Neill supporters who were vocal about questioning Gandy and Lyles. Many of them supported Hillary Clinton last year, so if there’s a common thread other than wanting new NOW leadership, it’s that.

I don’t know what most of them even think about Sarah Palin. It’s not a topic. (One of the women at the conference did go from supporting Hillary to endorsing Palin last year, and she did so for explicitly feminist reasons. She’s a lifelong Democrat, feminist, and pro-choice activist.)

At any rate, there is no Palinist cabal in NOW, nor was there any Palinist group at the conference. Nor any pro-lifers. This is all just nonsense.

#12: It’s perhaps worth stepping back and asking why Sarah Palin is such a reviled figure that the phrase “Palin supporter” is the mark of Cain. NOW itself, under the leadership of Kim Gandy, is part of the reason. NOW cooperated with the Obama campaign last year in spreading lies about Palin designed to make her seem crazily right-wing. Most of the things Palin is reviled for — the rape kit smear, the abstinence-only smear, the anti-contraception smear — are simply not true. Ironically, NOW justifies its vilification of Palin with lies that the organization itself helped spread.

NOW conference infiltrated by NOW members

The fallout from the NOW election is proving very amusing. Over at Viva La Feminista, Roni writes breathlessly:

There have been comments flying in the blogosphere and Twitter that the Palin people were a rumor. I took pics of at least one of them.

She took a picture! Of “at least one of them”! I’m giggling here like Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade, and I haven’t even started in on tonight’s Mexican Mudslide.

This is a slightly cropped version of Roni’s photo, snapped no doubt from a moving Land Rover as Jim Fowler readied the tranquilizer dart:

Now look: I like Roni, and the few dealings I’ve had with her have been entirely friendly. I don’t mean to get on her case at all. Nothing personal. But this whole episode is like a moving diorama of How Younger Feminists Have Lost Touch With Their Roots.

The label Roni put on the photo reads: “Palin supporter disrupting #NOW09 plenary.” The woman in the picture is actually Dr. Lynette Long, a good friend of mine who is a lifelong feminist activist, prominent Democrat, long-term NOW member, and a delegate to this year’s national conference. I’ll let Lynette summarize her feminist credentials in her own words:

“I have worked an entire lifetime to further feminist causes. My first professional job was teaching remedial high school math to girls. I started a web-based business called Color Math Pink to promote math achievement for girls and I was selected by the American Girl company to write Mathsmarts, a math strategy book for girls. If I am anything, I am a feminist.

“I have researched sex-role stereotyping and gender issues and published dozens of articles in trade and professional journals including Working Mother, Essence, and Ms. If I am anything, I am a feminist.

“I have fought for the rights of women every single day of my life. I point out the dearth of photos of women in the New York Times to the lucky person who sits next to me on an airplane, the lack of pictures of women on money to the wait staff at a diner, and I have been in a decade-long fight with the United States Post Office to put more pictures of women on postage stamps. If I am anything, I am a feminist.

“I coined the term ‘latchkey children’ and defended the rights of women to work on the national level. I have assisted numerous projects to improve the quality of childcare so that mothers could work and not worry about the safety of their children. If I am anything, I am a feminist.

“I am passionately pro-choice but I also think that it is not always a psychologically free choice. I have written a play which deals with the psychological complexities of abortion entitled, One in Two, which has been performed in New York, New Jersey, and Washington DC. If I am anything, I am a feminist.

“I have spent decades coaching women on how to achieve more power in their personal relationships and in the workplace. If I am anything, I am a feminist.”

Lynette isn’t normally in the habit of reciting her resume, but the context for that little bit of credential-waving was the campaign last fall, when she decided to support Sarah Palin’s bid for VP. That’s right: Lynette really did support Palin. Cue head-explosions.

Why would such an adamant, devoted, thoroughly pro-choice feminist support Sarah Palin?

Well, two reasons: one negative, one positive. The negative reason is that Lynette, like me and like a lot of other people, was immensely disturbed by the way Obama and his allies in the DNC treated Hillary Clinton last year. Lynette also spent the late spring and summer of 2008 investigating the reports of caucus fraud by the Obama campaign. What she found turned her against Obama completely. (I worked with her on the caucus stuff, and it had a similar effect on me. I went from planning to vote for Obama while holding my nose, to vowing I would cut off my hand before voting for that crook.)

But Lynette also had a positive reason for supporting Palin: because she understands the importance of role-modeling. Lynette is a psychologist and an educator who specializes in empowering girls. In her essay The X Factor, she wrote:

Yes, policy is important but who decides and delivers that policy is even more important. As Marshall McLuhan profoundly noted, “The medium is the message.” Children incorporate many of their perceptions about gender by age five. Little girls won’t understand if Sarah Palin is pro-life or pro-choice, believes in gun control or is a member of the NRA, but they will know the Vice-President of the United States of America is a girl and that alone will alter their perceptions of themselves.

What she’s talking about here is representation. The power of role-modeling. The importance of seeing women and people of color in positions of power and prestige.

Now, the funny thing is, Third Wave feminists — and I’m talking now about the Third Wavers who are virulently anti-Palin and consider the words “Palin supporter” tantamount to the mark of the beast — understand the importance of representation very well when it comes to voting for, say, Barack Obama. (We all got the message loud and clear last year that no matter what Obama did or didn’t do, simply the fact of the man, in all his biracial glory, was enough.) They understand it very well when it comes to advocating for, say, Latifa Lyles as president of NOW; as one woman said, “I want to see the face of a young woman of color” representing feminism.

The only time Third Wave feminists don’t understand representation, it seems, is when the proposed representative is someone they personally don’t like. Then it becomes a ridiculous argument that only stupid old dried-up battle-axes make and jeez, could we hurry up with the ice floes already?

The fact is, there were good feminist reasons last year for voting for Obama or Palin or McKinney-Clemente. Many of my friends voted for Obama, and I completely understand why. I supported the Green ticket, myself — an exercise in futility, I know, but it fit my conscience. And quite a few genuine, hardcore, lifelong feminists voted for McCain-Palin, either because they were eyeing the glass ceiling or protesting the Democrats or both. As I wrote at the time:

Politics isn’t an exercise in purity.

Many women right now are feeling that the best thing they can do to advance women’s status in this country is to elect a woman to the highest office possible, even though — paradoxically — that woman doesn’t share one of the key planks of American feminism. (Though she does share most of the others, an extremely important fact that should not be overlooked. It makes a difference that she explicitly espouses a belief in gender equality.) These women feel that the symbolic value of shattering the glass ceiling is worth it.

For my part, I’m aware that there are many different ways to advance women’s status. Policies are one. Representation is another. They both matter. Neither is sufficient alone.

You may not agree with that calculus, but you should at least understand that different feminists may come to different conclusions when assessing the best way to advance feminist goals. Especially in a year when the two most prominent women in American politics were reduced, respectively, to a nutcracker and an inflatable doll.

Why is that so hard to understand?

Forgive me for saying that I think part of the issue with some Third Wavers is just youth. The older women get, the deeper and broader their understanding of how this whole patriarchy thingamajig works. Older women have lived through countless betrayals by male fellow-travelers who proved to be less interested in equality than we thought. They’ve discovered that conservative women can sometimes be invaluable allies in the fight for women’s rights. (Sandra Day O’Connor is a Republican, and a pretty conservative one, but she held the line when it mattered.) And they’ve realized the crucial importance of having role models and path-breakers to ease the trail.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that a woman with Lynette Long’s life experience might make a different calculus about the 2008 election than a 25-year-old female Barack Obama fan. Feminism is a broad path.

Which brings me to another thing: Third Wavers also talk a lot about inclusiveness, about having a movement that includes many different ways of doing feminism. Really? Really?

Okay. So start. Start by not demonizing feminists like Lynette Long.

The Women’s Revolution

CNN has a good piece up about the feminist factor in the Iran situation:

(CNN) — Like thousands of other Iranian women, Parisa took to Tehran’s streets this week, her heart brimming with hope. “Change,” said the placards around her.

The young Iranian woman eyed the crowd and pondered the possibility that the rest of her life might be different from her mother’s. She could see glimmers of a future free from discrimination — and all the symbols of it, including the head-covering the government requires her to wear every day.

Women, regarded as second-class citizens under Iranian law, have been noticeably front and center of the massive demonstrations that have unfolded since the presidential election a week ago. Iranians are protesting what they consider a fraudulent vote count favoring hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but for many women like Parisa, the demonstrations are just as much about taking Iran one step closer to democracy.

“Women have become primary agents of change in Iran,” said Nayereh Tohidi, chairwoman of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at California State University, Northridge.

The remarkable images show women with uncovered heads who are unafraid to speak their minds and crowds that are not segregated — both the opposite of the norm in Iran, Tohidi said.

She said a long-brewing women’s movement may finally be manifesting itself on the streets and empowering women like Parisa.

Actually, Iran’s feminist movement has manifested itself before, only to be crushed in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. Read this interview in Forbes with Iranian-American journalist Roya Hakakian, who explains the historical background shadowing the current protests:

Forbes: Is this a moment of change for women?

Roya Hakakian: Yes. The feminist movement, which has been ongoing in Iran, has now joined the broader public movement against the regime. This happened in Iran in the late 1970s too, but it had actually a terrible effect on the women’s movement in Iran. Women were somehow “hoodwinked” to think that the veil wasn’t such an important issue, that it was more important to sacrifice for the greater good. So the Shah went and the veil stayed.

Emphasis mine. That hoodwinking thing isn’t just confined to Iran, of course; everywhere and forever, women are enjoined to put aside their own liberation for the “greater good” — said greater good invariably involving whatever is harshing the dudes and, equally invariably, never involving the liberation of women from the oldest oppression on the planet.

But that’s not really the point I wanted to make. Nor did I want to dwell on how the Iranian situation highlights the absurdity of Obama’s pandering on hijab — and by the way, I’m still wondering if Jon Favreau is the one who wrote that speech. Back when Hillary Clinton was the First Lady and not a cardboard cutout at Jon Favreau’s beer-soaked house party, she used her public platform to deliver one of the landmark speeches in the global struggle for women’s rights, asserting memorably that “women’s rights are human rights.” Obama/Favreau, given an even more prominent platform, used it to defend the right of women to wear veils and full-body slipcovers in accordance with the teachings of misogynistic godbags. Thanks, guys.

The point I wanted to make was…well, I forget. Really. This isn’t literary posturing; I really can’t remember what I was going to say. Something about Iran, I guess. Okay, well, never mind.

Feminists Against Women strike again

Unfuckingbelievable. Those lying twits at Feministing are doing it again: they’re actually repeating the rape kit smear.

The bogus story about Sarah Palin and the rape kits was one of the ugliest smears I’ve ever seen in politics. It was orchestrated by the Obama campaign, fueled with conference calls to reporters and stories planted in the blogosphere, and spread with the complicity of hypocritical feminists who were willing to say or do anything to slander Palin. Like Jessica Valenti, who actually included it in her hit job on Palin for the Guardian. And now Feministing is repeating it again.

No shame. No shame at all.

You know, I would really like to just ignore these woman-hating hypocritical Third Wave “feminists” who made such a goddamn mess last year. I never want to mention them or deal with them at all. I’m glad they want to be feminists, and hey, maybe someday they’ll realize what complete and total fuck-ups they are. Power to ‘em. But jesus fucking christ, when they start in again with rape kit thing, helping to perpetuate one of the most cynical of smears (from a campaign that was chock-fucking-full of cynical smears), it’s too goddamn much.

Stop the lies

Here’s Sarah Palin on contraception and sex ed:

“I’m pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues. So I am not anti-contraception. But, yeah, abstinence is another alternative that should be discussed with kids. I don’t have a problem with that. That doesn’t scare me, so it’s something I would support also.”

I put that right at the top of the post so you wouldn’t miss it.

The Letterman embroglio is giving the faux feminists another opportunity to spread lies about Sarah Palin. According to them, Palin is some kind of hypocritical purity queen, and as such, she and her family are fair game:

By dragging Willow into the dust-up, the Palins are again able to divert attention away from the real issues involving their oldest daughter. Bristol is an 18-year-old unmarried mother who is going through baby-daddy drama. As such, her life mocks the family values conservatives such as her mother preach.

First of all, Sarah Palin doesn’t preach anything. As for what she believes, look at the top of the post! See? See the words, “I’m pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues”?

Less clear is what she believes about premarital sex. She herself had sex before marriage, and she may or may not believe she made a mistake. I’ve never heard her say anything about it — which is kind of the point. The commonplace claim that Sarah Palin is some kind of godbag warrior who rails against premarital sex is simply false.

Bristol Palin, bless her heart, does seem to have decided after a few months of motherhood that abstinence is definitely the best policy. That isn’t hypocrisy, either; it’s obviously a response to her own experience.

Stop lying. Just stop it.

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For the record: Sarah Palin on feminist issues

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