Breaking new ground
Fifty years ago, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Harvard, the dean of the law school would meet with female students once a year. After shaking hands he would ask them to justify their presence at the institution, especially since it had meant the displacement of a male candidate. With little option but to hold her tongue, Ginsburg chose instead to fight for equal rights in the courts. She was so successful at doing so that she went on to become one of the great US Supreme Court justices of the twentieth century. In a recent documentary she can be seen chatting with her granddaughter who is attending Harvard Law, but now as part of the first class to achieve gender parity in the 380 years since the university was established. (In Ginsburg’s day female enrollment was effectively capped at 5 percent.)
America’s long history of discrimination is hardly limited to such elite institutions, but the tenacity with which these bastions of privilege have resisted diversity says a great deal about the wider society. Ninety-nine years ago, Fritz Pollard became the first black American to be the head coach of a professional football team. The National Football League then waited more than 40 years before appointing its next nonwhite coach, and more than 60 years before it chose another African American head coach. When it comes to diversity in American life, therefore, further progress should never be taken for granted.
America’s visible minorities understand the politics of diversity in ways that many outsiders cannot. In this context, the new Congress truly is a landmark achievement on several fronts. With 102 women — a new record — including the first Native Americans, the first Muslims, the first black women from Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the first Hispanic women from Texas, the new Congress also contains the rising star of the party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who is also the youngest female Congresswoman in history. Shortly after Nancy Pelosi – the only female Speaker in US history – swore them, the Native Americans Deb Haaland from New Mexico and Sharice Davids from Kansas tearfully hugged on the floor of the House in a suitably iconic moment.
Apart from the symbolic significance of the new appointments, these changes will alter Congress in fundamental ways. Cognitive diversity, will bring it closer to the country’s demographic realities and offer chances to move beyond hyperpartisan gridlock. The major obstacle to such progress is, of course, the Republican party which has become even less diverse since the rise of Donald Trump. In
magazine, Caterina Bulgarella warns
that “the shrunken set of values and beliefs [that] the GOP is currently representing may trigger more stringent loyalty tests on party members, unleashing a downward spiral of further polarization and homogenization.” Equally dangerous, though less discussed, is the danger that conventional Democrats will ignore the radicals in their ranks and continue ceding power to old style Washington insiders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
One temptation for establishment Democrats will be opportunistic flirtations with a more radical agenda rather than serious attempts to engage with or understand it. This tends to expose the ideological chasm between the two camps. When, for instance, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand recently tweeted: “Our future is:/Female/ Intersectional / Powered by our belief in one another./And we’re just getting started.” – the statement was quickly derided by commentators who pointed to Gillibrand’s previously hawkish stance on immigration and her unusually favourable ratings from the NRA.
This incident is suggestive of the many ways in which the newcomers do mesh neatly with conventional Democrats. That is another reason to welcome them. For, as the near-miss candidacy of Bernie Sanders showed in 2016 there is considerable discontent within party ranks, and a felt need for a more radical goals such as universal healthcare and stricter gun control. In other words, at a time when many have despaired about the future of US democracy, its new Congress offers hope that the system is still capable of responding to the Republic’s political crises with new faces and ideas.