The Myopia of Gender Nationalism
The Folly of Feminism
Let’s just come out and say it: The prospect of the vice president replacing Joe Biden on the 2024 ticket would be much easier if the vice president were a white guy.
Feminists have largely become objects of pity. So blinded by the myopia of gender nationalism, they become bewildered by actual events. Kamala Harris, so some say, should become the next Democratic nominee because she is a she, and a Black-Asian to boot. All the while, they complain against conservatives who brand Harris a “DEI candidate.”
Harris brings enormous symbolic value . . . the first Indian and Black American in the job, someone who is married to a Jewish American and part of a blended family.
Yet, the very “arguments,” which Blacks and feminists make regarding Harris, prove their political adversaries’ point.
Kamala Harris for President, LOL
Harris has never been the Governor of any state, nor a U.S. Senator of any note. She did not even serve full term as Senator. She emerges from a state, even a city, which is so far afield from the political center, that this fact, in of itself, alienates more voters than the typical Democrat offering. Barring the exceptionalism of the person, it is unlikely that anyone is electable as President who comes from either California or from Mississippi.
Declaiming Harris makes one liable to silly and supercilious aspersions of toxic masculinity or racism. Yet, Western nations have elected tough and competent female leaders of character, conviction, and substance, even if one may not agree with their policies. Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and possibly, Giorgia Meloni come to mind. Harris is unlike any of these. It is not even close.
As a rule of thumb, gleanable from the immigrant experience: the first persons, emerging from any minority not yet socially accepted, must be considerably superior than their counterparts. It constitutes the “is” of social realities everywhere.
Be it a fair comment that Harris was never going to succeed on the immigration / border file. That delegation to her was deliberately intentioned to offload any criticism from Biden personally. Yet, nothing has emerged from out of her mouth which indicates an exceptional mind, an innovative thinker, a person of conviction or courage. Vacuity is the term that normally and immediately comes to mind. Indeed, Biden’s White House has treated her as one who is vacuous.
Her mantras, some call “word salads,” sound like something that a stoned hippie from San Franscico in 1967 would say. Perhaps, she is qualified as an Oracle of Delphi, or a Tibetan. “To see what can be unburdened by what has been,” may be a nice sentiment. However, as a lifelong student of world history, it is nonsense. The past, if often insidiously, catches up with us. The follies and foibles the elderly haunt them to their end of days and, in like manner, mature, sclerotic, and decadent societies.
Can anyone seriously think that Kamala Harris can go toe-to-toe with the likes of Vladmir Putin or Xi Jinping? However monstrous that Americans think of these autocrats, they are far shrewder than any politico in America.
Hillary Clinton for President, LOL
Those of us who were sure Hillary Clinton would smoke Donald Trump may be uniquely ill-situated to evaluate Harris’ potential candidacy. . . I also thought he was the weakest, most beatable candidate the party had run in my lifetime.
Jill Filipovic was shocked and grieved by Clinton’s loss. I, as a foreigner, who promised myself in 2004 not to step foot onto American soil until they have had their little civil war, prognosticated the election result almost perfectly.
Contrary to the existentialist “wish as reality” analysis of the Versaillean soothsayers of the Potomac and Hudson, who have been consistent in their misreading of the entrails from the get-go of this election cycle; I suspect that most pieces of data point to very iffy outcome in either direction. There is reasonable chance that while Hillary Clinton may win the popular vote by up to 2%, Donald Trump may squeak through an Electoral College victory. There is even a plausible possibility of a tie, with all the partisan hell that that would entail and ensue.
I erred in thinking that Trump would gobble up New Hampshire and completely missed out on his victory in Wisconsin.
Why is it that this American was so deluded? It is not due to some exceptional genius. Michael Moore was clanging the cowbells concerning the Midwest. The first reason, I suggest, is the virtue of journalism as analysis of the “is,” rather than as advocacy of the “ought,” as one perceives it. Filipovic, born in Seattle and settling in New York City, is, like most ideological cosmopolitans who are utterly clueless and disdainful towards the sensibilities of Americans, sandwiched between the narrow strips of coast, cognitively incapable of proper analysis.
Like virtually all Americans, Filipovic’s historical illiteracy is ignorant of that reoccurring diachronic dynamic throughout all known history, almost a socioeconomic natural law. That is: extreme disparities of wealth, which invariably overflow into civic inequalities and two-tier justice, also result in the impoverished and demoralized commons seeking out tribunician demagogues to protect their remaining diminished interests and confront the aristocratic or plutocratic oligarchs.
Enter Donald Trump. But contrary to other catastrophic alarms, Trump will not be America’s “first genuinely autocratic (not to mention vindictive and deranged) president.” Trump lacks the necessary disposition to accomplish such a feat in a constitutional system so designed to inveigh against usurpations. As believed from the onset:
Trump himself is not the actual threat. He is but a Storm Trooper of political demagogues to come; a barometer to would-be tyrants of the venality and imbecility at the heart of American politics; a harbinger of the effectual end of free civic society, except for its forms, and individual liberty, rule of law and peace.
– August 24, 2015
After Trump won the Republican nomination, I thought, in contrast to Filipovic, that Trump would defeat Hillary, for she was such a terrible candidate in the political savvy sense. Her shrill, blunt, and uncompromising advocacies in the first two years of her husband’s Presidency crippled Bill’s legislative initiative following the 1994 election. Politics remains still the art of the possible, a matter of political tact and finesse. Lincoln did not immediately free the slaves at the start of the Civil War.
Hillary lacks political artfulness.
Hillary lost the 2016 election. Trump did not win it. One of her dumbest stunts was in having Madeleine Albright unartfully play the “woman card” in front of her. This, no doubt, alienated more male voters than attracted female voters. Unlike Obama, who soft-balled this meme, here is one clear instance of Hillary’s lack of political savvy.
But the hinge, which lost the election for Hillary, was her “basket of deplorables” speech at a San Francisco LGBTIA++++++ gala, a phrase which she practiced for an Israeli left-wing program days prior. I recall the careful speech and facial expression of the late Mark Shields on PBS, one of few honorable pundits this last decade, confirming my expectation of her self-defeat. For one cannot govern over a nation wherein one has utter contempt for half of it.
Hillary did not lose because was a woman. She lost because she is a fool, an unrepenting fool, incapable of mea culpa and change.