Protesters are making the same tired mistake

Established dogma: Trump was elected due to racism and misogyny. As someone who voted for Bernie Sanders every chance I could, I think it was neither racism nor misogyny that led to Trump. Rather, it was identity myopia. That is, the insistence that ever more race and gender identity fetishizing is the hill to die on, while progressives, who should be uniting the poor, the working poor and the working class into one constituency, fail and fail and fail to do so.

Trump, who exploited the alienation of poor and working class whites, in particular, executed his promise to overturn

Roe v. Wade when he appointed three anti-Roe judges. We see people marching in the streets. I see why they’re outraged; full access to reproductive medicine is under siege. But, what the marchers have yet to understand is that by making their cause a genderexclusive issue — that is, labeling it a “women’s issue ”— they make the same tired mistake.

The political medicine of the moment is not to label this a woman’s moment (especially not an insufferable, affluent white women’s moment), but to insist this is yet another moment when access to a resource, most needed by the poorest families (women, men, girls and boys), in some of our poorest states, will be denied. The call should be to working class families, welcoming back Hillary’s snubbed “deplorables”— most obviously working class white men and their households. For this to occur, feminist ideologues will have to relax that iron-grip grievance obsession.

— Patrick Newman, Chico