Author's note: This is rougher than normal. I didn't have the time to revise it fully, but wanted to get it up anyways. Thanks for reading as always.
As I write this the inauguration for
the 45th president of the United States is a day away, and
the Women's March on Washington to follow. I'm going on a three day
wilderness training in New Hampshire, so I'll be catching up with the
events late on Sunday.
This article was going to be about the
Women's March, then the president-elect, and finally President Obama.
Now it's a compound, toxic separately but refreshing
when combined, like water and its constituent parts.
The difficulty is in grappling with the
purpose for the march, considering how it connects to the legacy of President Obama, the failure of Hillary Clinton, and the impending
coronation of Donald Trump. The organizers chose the title “Women's
March - on Washington,” for a clear purpose, to refute the sexual
assault, abuse, and humiliation the president-elect espoused,
committed, and continues to vindicate.
But the title does not cover the entire purpose. While the four page manifesto, titled “Guiding
Vision and Definition of Principles” focuses on women, it
offers support for minorities and the LGBT community.
Political parties, of which I am not a
fan, are an amalgamation of factions, of interests. When President
Obama won in 2008 and 2012 pundits claimed the Democrats had built a
tent whose poles would never fall away. Donald Trump's success
proved this estimation incorrect, though his success was through Democrats failure to turn out the same coalition. Trump received the
same number of votes as Romney, while Clinton
lost five million of Obama's voters. How did this happen,
and how can Democrats seek to build a coalition to reclaim the White
House?
President Obama, for all his
transformative rhetoric, failed to reform the country in 2009. With
the multiple crises birthed during the Clinton and Bush administrations, he accepted the easy non-solution. He had the
opportunity, and a narrow margin in both houses of Congress, but he
did not seek to remake the parts of the country which had brought the United States to its 2008/2009 crisis. And here; the beginning of the Great
Recession, the overreach of the Intelligence agencies, the continuing
warmongering of the military complex, the corruption and recklessness
of the banking sector, and the avarice of the healthcare industry.
Instead of transforming each problem,
he resuscitated them with minor alterations. The financial
difficulties were barely softened by a lackluster stimulus plan. The
bank's malpractice was rewarded by bailouts, and papered over the by
the insufficient Dodd-Frank act. No one involved in the atrocities
in Iraq was punished, while drones illegally served death from the
sky. And the intelligence agencies were applauded for their hard
work, even while they lied to the American people. Only the
Affordable Care Act attempted reform, though it rewarded
Pharmaceutical companies, and its complexity has spawned problems.
Then Clinton began her second attempt
at the Presidency, and after fending off Sanders, had to deal with
one problem. The Democrats
during Obama's tenure appeared to have made advances in the culture war,
and this is mostly what Clinton campaigned on. So they abandoned or forgot, James
Carville's second bullet point, “The economy, stupid.”
The economy shouldn't be
the most important campaign issue. As a radical environmentalist I'm willing to sacrifice economic growth for ecological stability
(though I also think green energy is a job creator, a health issue, and
grants a technological edge). But voters saw Obama's record
on jobs, contrasted with his speeches about the improving economy, and realized
Clinton would be the same, if not worse. Her campaign neglected
how she would work for the economically neglected, in favor of taking
the fight to Trump over his comments about the socially neglected and
oppressed minorities.
We need to do more against racial
discrimination and sexual harassment. Trump's comments, and alleged
behavior are obscene. But the Democrats need to grow the tent.
Does the Women's March seek to gather a
successful coalition or does it fall short?
If it is only an expression of outrage,
of defiance, and resistance that's fine. But if it's a strategy, an
opening move, to recapture the White House, it looks like a failure.
Some people say the imperative of individuals in politics is to
act/vote ones interest. One commonly hears disparaging comments
directed at African Americans, women, or poor people who identify as Republican. “Don't they know that's now in their
interest,” a media personalty will say. It's a shallow concept, that
people should vote for their interest, and one citizens should
eschew. Politics is doing what's right, and most of the sixteen declarations by the Women's March do that. But while one
must first have a set of right principles, one must also have a
winning strategy, or its just spitting into the wind.
The Women's March, as a political
agency seems to have embraced Clinton's losing strategy. Of its
sixteen points, ten exclusively highlight the interests of women,
racial minorities, or the LGBT community. Two are used to express
the need for an expansion of unspecified civil liberties, and the
remaining four are singularly delivered on immigration, the environment, minimum
wage, and police brutality, almost as a minor concession or
afterthought.
The authors expressly avoided the use
of the word “man,” and white is used only once to compare white
women's superior social position to women of color. They don't even refer to black men, strangely trying to craft a point claiming African American women are a faster growing portion of the prison population, even though African American men significantly outnumber women as prisoners. The manifesto
has been called progressiveby Slate, and beautiful by Huffington Post, but it's (largely)
focuses on only a sliver of progressive political philosophy. The
article states, “We believe Gender Justice is Racial Justice is
Economic Justice. I'm not sure if the order was important, but if
they value all three equally (instead of just the first two) they
needed to emphasize it more in the bullet points.
It's not that I doubt their commitment or
disagree with their aims. Reading the speaker
list its clear people like Randi Weingarten and Michael Moore
who represent the economic progressive position. One worries though that
the platform of the Women's March is as politically tone deaf as the
words of one of the co-chairs, who said, “When you’re young,
you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.”
This revealing remark, was said in response to Sanders leading
Clinton in young women during the primary.
It's an excellent idea to rally in
support of the disadvantaged, the disparaged, and those who suffer
the worst in the United States. The president-elect's rhetoric has
some, fairly, assuming the worst. But organizers also need to see
how their actions: hosting a large march whose declaration offers
only lip-service to many crucial progressive positions, while failing
to address the loss of the presidential election could hinder future
political achievements. Combine this with the
Democrats refusal to abandon their corporate sponsors, and
primary voters insistence on choosing a
center-right candidate pretending to be progressive, and
advancement on progressive issues looks unlikely indeed.
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