Author Archives: Sheila

Redefining Sexism

The GOP is playing identity politics with stunning incompetence.

Think about it. Had McCain chosen a male running-mate with Sarah Palin’s resume, the choice would have been laughed off the national stage, dismissed as absolutely unserious. Tim Pawlenty, the equally socially conservative Minnesota governor who was on the McCain short list, was widely dismissed for being too insubstantial, for having qualifications too likely to be dwarfed by Joe Biden’s greater experience and gravitas. And Pawlenty looks like a seasoned elder statesman compared to Palin.

What, then, did this brunette version of Ann Coulter bring to the table, other than her gender and an impressive mean streak?

Here’s the calculus as McCain’s folks apparently analyzed it: 1) a lot of women voted for Hillary; 2) social conservatives in the GOP base still don’t trust McCain. With Palin, we can energize the base, and as a  bonus, we can pick up disappointed Hillary voters because she’s a woman. Women just want to see someone who looks like them in office, bless their pretty little heads.  Plus, we can dismiss the inevitable criticism as sexist.

It seems genuinely never to have occurred to the McCain camp that for women voters to believe that a candidate “looks like them” might require more than shared secondary sexual characteristics. (It isn’t only women, of course. Remember when the right wing thought Alan Keyes would appeal to African-American voters?)

Is misogyny real? Of course it is. Sexists—and racists—operate under a double standard; they demand higher performance, better qualifications, and harder work from members of disfavored groups than they demand from members of their own. (And yes, women and blacks can be sexists and racists under that definition.) Genuine advocates of civic equality don’t want preferential treatment; we want—duh—equal treatment.

What most feminists want is a truly level playing field. We want to be evaluated on our merits. We want to compete on the basis of our competence to do the job at hand. We don’t want either success or failure to be based upon our gender.

Hillary Clinton did face substantial sexism, as her supporters have alleged, but her defeat in the primary was primarily the result of a poorly-run campaign. She lost for many of the same reasons that John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd lost. The men and women who supported her never tried to argue that her bona fides or positions should not be scrutinized—they supported her because they genuinely believed she would be the best for the job, not because she had ovaries.

There may be voters who believe that Governor Palin is the most qualified person to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Others will welcome her selection as evidence of John McCain’s total capitulation to the far right fringes of the Republican party. The rest of us will wonder what the selection says about John McCain’s judgment—and what it tells us about his promise to “put America first.” And we aren’t all sexists.    

 

           

 

 

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The 2008 Election & The Culture War

The American economy has been strained to the breaking point by eight years of reckless fiscal policies. Our international stature has been compromised and diminished by arrogant and unilateral foreign policies. Our government has helped create a global energy crisis, and has done nothing about climate change. You could be forgiven for assuming that those issues are central to the upcoming elections, but I’m going to suggest that war and peace, economic prosperity and even national self-respect are in a very real sense subsidiary to what is truly at stake on November 4th. 

This election is a contest between the past and the future; its outcome will determine whether Enlightenment rationalism or religious fundamentalism prevails. In short, this is the election that will determine who wins the “culture wars.”

There are some arenas where the culture clash is front and center; even James Dobson has said that losing the referendum on same-sex marriage in California would mean that the Christian Right has unambiguously lost the culture war. But the conflict is more consequential than the future of same-sex marriage and gay rights, important as that is. This election will determine who gets to control what America will look like in the 21st century. It is a fight between absolutely incompatible worldviews.

I’d been convinced for some time that this election would be a fateful battle between culture warriors, but the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate confirmed my thesis.  I don’t say this simply because Palin represents everything that is wrong with social conservatives’ ideology, although she does. (She’s anti-choice even in cases of rape or incest, she opposes stem-cell research, she’s anti-gay, and she’s really anti-science—she’s an advocate of teaching creationism in the schools who does not believe that human activities contribute to global warming).

I also don’t say this simply because her social conservatism was more important to John McCain than her absolute lack of any qualification to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

I say this because her selection was part and parcel of the way in which culture warriors really see the issue of gender—and by extension, how they see every other issue of diversity, including but certainly not limited to gays and lesbians.

Think about it. Had McCain chosen a male running-mate with Sarah Palin’s resume, the choice would have been laughed off the national stage, dismissed as absolutely unserious. Tim Pawlenty, the equally socially conservative Minnesota governor who was on the McCain short list, was widely criticized for being too insubstantial, for having qualifications too likely to be dwarfed by Biden’s greater experience and gravitas. And Pawlenty looks like a seasoned elder statesman compared to Palen. What, then, did she bring to the table, other than (excuse me) a vagina? And just how cynical—and revealing—does that make this selection?

Here’s the calculus as I see McCain’s folks analyzing it: 1) a lot of women voted for Hillary; 2) social conservatives in the GOP base still aren’t excited by McCain. We can energize the base by choosing one of their own, and as a  bonus, we can pick up disappointed Hillary voters because she’s a woman, and women are interchangeable. Women just want to see someone who looks like them in office, bless their pretty little heads.  It seems genuinely never to have occurred to the McCain camp that for women voters to believe that a candidate “looks like them” might require more than shared secondary sexual characteristics.  At the very least, it means sharing a particular worldview, being a particular kind of woman.

The Christian Right approaches issues of gay equality the same way, by constructing a monolithic “gay agenda” that everyone in the gay community is assumed to share. It is also the way they see African-Americans—and in fact, as one friend of mine remarked, the choice of Palin is based on precisely the same worldview that put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. He’s black, so the black folks should be happy. So what if everything Thomas stands for is in stark contrast to what the vast majority of African-Americans believe? So what if Sarah Palin’s positions are profoundly anti-woman? She’s female. Surely that’s all Hillary’s supporters—and by extension, other women—care about.

It is ironic that, as the Democratic party has moved past tokenism toward genuinely pluralist politics, the Republicans have bought into the worst kind of identity politics. Those differences between contemporary Republican and Democratic worldviews are consequential for all of us.

  • The emerging Democratic philosophy requires that we look at individuals—gay, straight, Christian, Jewish, black or white—and evaluate those individuals on their merits, their talents, their characters. It isn’t that race or religion or gender or orientation becomes irrelevant;  it’s just that those markers of identity aren’t material—they’re just one aspect of this particular human being, and we are grading this human being on the basis of everything he or she brings to the table. Everybody gets to compete on a level playing field, where being gay, female or purple is neither an asset nor a liability. It’s simply a description.
  • The worldview of the right-wingers who control today’s GOP, on the other hand, is paternalistic. It begins by assigning people to categories, by dividing the world into “us versus them.” Members of the group labeled “us” are the elect, the rightful rulers of the universe. Political considerations do, however, require some concessions to the fact that “they” have the right to vote, and so some tokenism is required. (It never seems to occur to those holding this worldview that tokenism is as insulting as outright bigotry. Tokenism assumes that members of those “other” groups are interchangeable, that unlike white Protestant straight males, they are not entitled to be accepted or rejected on the basis of their individual merits.) When you view the political landscape through this lens, you believe every debate must have winners and losers. There is no “win-win.” There is no “live and let live,” because allowing people to live their lives in accordance with any rules other than your own is—by definition—defeat.

At its base, this election is a choice between those two worldviews. It’s a choice between the past—where the color of your skin, the denomination of your church, your gender and/or your sexual orientation determined your place in the social order—and a future where behavior, and not identity, determines how far a person can go.

 

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What Government Should Do

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Mayor Greg Ballard. Not just because he’s being hit with criticism from all sides, but because he was so clearly unprepared for the realities he faces.

The most basic question of politics—the question every mayor must confront—is “what is government’s job?” The answers fall into a spectrum between “you’re on your own” and “we’re all in this together.” It should be noted that these aren’t partisan categories; Steve Goldsmith and Bill Hudnut, both Republicans, had very different visions of government’s responsibilities. (I used to describe the differences between them by suggesting that, if a poll showed lack of public support for transportation planning, Hudnut would explain to people why such planning was essential, while Goldsmith would stop planning.)

Most of us agree in the abstract that government should do only those things that must be done collectively, and should leave other tasks to the private sector. The problem comes when we try to apply that principle to specific tasks. Let’s take garbage collection as an example. There are private scavenger companies that will pick up your garbage for a fee—why not leave that responsibility with homeowners? The short answer is that some people will be irresponsible or unable to pay for the service, and uncollected garbage is a threat to the health of all of us.

We don’t hire private security firms to provide public policing, not just because we have made a collective judgment that the use of force should be controlled by those who are accountable to the public, but also because we have learned that providing public safety is a broader, more complex task than policing alone.

We support transportation planning because failure to do so creates traffic nightmares and costs a fortune when gridlock forces us to add more concrete to our already bloated highways. (We are paying dearly today for prior mayors’ decisions to “save” money by cutting back on planning.)

We support the arts, public parks and public transportation (however inadequately) because we have learned that successful economic development depends upon the quality of life in a community—and economic development is critical if we are to maintain a tax base that allows us to collect garbage, pay police and pave streets.

It’s impossible to construct a city budget without first deciding what it is that government must do. People of good will can differ on the answer to that question, but those differences must be based upon an appreciation of how cities actually work. Money saved by refusing to pick up garbage will eventually be offset by increased costs of public health. Money saved by selling off parks will add to the costs of public safety and make it much more difficult to attract new employers.

Greg Ballard seems like a very nice man, but it is increasingly clear that he is in over his head. And while he’s learning that running a city is complicated, all of us are paying his tuition.

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What Government Should Do

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Mayor Greg Ballard. Not just because he’s being hit with criticism from all sides, but because he was so clearly unprepared for the realities he faces.

The most basic question of politics—the question every mayor must confront—is “what is government’s job?” The answers fall into a spectrum between “you’re on your own” and “we’re all in this together.” It should be noted that these aren’t partisan categories; Steve Goldsmith and Bill Hudnut, both Republicans, had very different visions of government’s responsibilities. (I used to describe the differences between them by suggesting that, if a poll showed lack of public support for transportation planning, Hudnut would explain to people why such planning was essential, while Goldsmith would stop planning.)

Most of us agree in the abstract that government should do only those things that must be done collectively, and should leave other tasks to the private sector. The problem comes when we try to apply that principle to specific tasks.

Let’s take garbage collection as an example. There are private scavenger companies that will pick up your garbage for a fee—why not leave that responsibility with homeowners? The short answer is that some people will be irresponsible or unable to pay for the service, and uncollected garbage is a threat to the health of all of us.

We don’t hire private security firms to provide public policing, not just because we have made a collective judgment that the use of force should be controlled by those who are accountable to the public, but also because we have learned that providing public safety is a broader, more complex task than policing alone.

We support transportation planning because failure to do so creates traffic nightmares and costs a fortune when gridlock forces us to add more concrete to our already bloated highways. (We are paying dearly today for prior mayors’ decisions to “save” money by cutting back on planning.)

We support the arts, public parks and public transportation (however inadequately) because we have learned that successful economic development depends upon the quality of life in a community—and economic development is critical if we are to maintain a tax base that allows us to collect garbage, pay police and pave streets.

It’s impossible to construct a city budget without first deciding what it is that government must do. People of good will can differ on the answer to that question, but those differences must be based upon an appreciation of how cities actually work. Money saved by refusing to pick up garbage will eventually be offset by increased costs of public health. Money saved by selling off parks will add to the costs of public safety and make it much more difficult to attract new employers.

Greg Ballard seems like a very nice man, but it is increasingly clear that he is in over his head. And while he’s learning that running a city is complicated, all of us are paying his tuition.

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