On Sarah Palin
Posted by Chris Clarke on October 8, 2008
You know, I get being angry at so-called progressives who descended into the depths of misogyny to color their opposition to Clinton. Used to be I had a reputation online, deserved or not, for defending even the most odious of women from attacks based on their gender. I’ve also taken some heat, and imperiled a friendship or three, for calling out racism when I see it rearing its Putin-shaped head in progressive blogular airspace. The lack of internet access out here, and some of the changes I’ve been going through in my life, have kept me from spending a lot of time in blogospheric trenches the past few months. That’s a good thing for me and my blood pressure, because what with the complete uprooting in my life, still in progress, it’d be all too easy to blow a gasket at some cynical 22-year-old calling Clinton premenstrual, or at presumably somewhat older Clinton partisans calling Obama shiftless, lazy and/or untrustworthy. And how constructive would that be?
Some of the former have gone on to hurl sexist crap at Sarah Palin, which is a shame because there’s so goddamn much to criticize her over legitimately. As for the latter, their target of choice has not shifted. People who strain to debunk the apparently oversimplified rape kit issue, for instance, will completely overlook the similar, if far more profound, fact-tweaking necessary to support their position that Clinton had more votes than Obama. (Paul Loeb, one of the most thoughtful and anti-sexist progressive male writers in the US, takes that one apart authoritatively.) Based on that flawed narrative some unrepentant Clintonistas refer to Obama as having “stolen the nomination,” a stunning bit of coded language. One wonders, pace Katrina, whether a white male candidate would have been referred to as merely having “found” the nomination.
Last night a Nevada busboy, seeing me read from Obama’s iPhone app, informed me that Obama’s mantra “change” stood for “Come Help A N______ Get Elected.” At least one prominent and avowedly progressive feminist blogger now refers to Obama as “Opossum.” You tell me there’s a difference there involving more than subtlety of phrasing.
And if anything, the sexism directed against Clinton and Palin has been significantly more blatant, and significantly more widespread on the left side of the aisle. The Clintonistas were right to say that blatant sexism is much more socially acceptable than blatant racism. (Which doesn’t mean racism is fixed, or less of a problem. It just means that anti-racist activists have succeeded in moving the bar of acceptable discourse, so that genteel, educated racists usually say things like “Opossum” instead of using the more declassé slur.)
It’s all about who you’re willing to throw under the bus to get ahead. insulting all women because you oppose an individual woman’s politics is throwing women under the bus. Using clear racist dogwhistles because you oppose an individual candidate of color is throwing people of color under the bus.
And speaking out in support of Sarah “Drill Baby Drill” Palin in particular, just because of her gender, is throwing a whole lot more under the bus.
(Hat tip: Tmorph.)
Now that, my friends, is worth blowing a few gaskets over.
It may be that your political goals put a higher priority on tweaking the gender balance of the reactionary conservative cabal in power than on actually defending the planet. You’re welcome to that stance. But you make yourself an opponent of the environment by taking that stance. And Obama, for whom I will vote with significant reservations, isn’t perfect on the environment either. The oxymoronic “clean coal” and “safe nuclear” issues, which I will be posting on before long, themselves have a profound racist taint from an environmental justice perspective and I’m not sure that anything Obama can do will prevent that taint from being extended if he expands coal and nukes.
But the primary tenet of feminism is that women are ethically, intellectually, and politically the equals of men. To refrain from criticizing Palin’s ecocidal policies (among so many other things) based on her gender is an insult to the more than one hundred million women in the US who manage not to be power-mad Christofascist thugs. And failing to call her out on it just because she’s accepted the label “feminist” as part of the dissembling context of the most ridiculous Presidential campaign in recent US history not involving Lyndon LaRouche is, to my mind, to debase the work of millions of other feminists.
