Hillary Clinton’s feminism problem
SOME FEMINISTS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO SHAME YOUNG WOMEN INTO VOTING HILLARY, SOLELY BECAUSE SHE SHARES THEIR GENDER
A paradox has emerged in the gender wars. Polling shows that Americans overwhelmingly support the notion that men and women are — and should be — equal. Yet only a minority are willing to call themselves feminists.
Much of this confusion seems to hinge on competing notions of feminism and what it represents or, rather, who represents it. In short, the second-wave stalwarts who fought so hard throughout the 1960s and 1970s can note a kind of victory without glory, here. The basic ideals they had hoped to implement are now established, even taken for granted.
But if one were seeking a concrete example of why so many now find establishment feminism off-putting, she would need to look no further than the few pillars who have attempted to shame young women into voting for Hillary Clinton, solely because she shares their gender.
The most vile of these attempts came from Gloria Steinem who, while attempting the equivalent of a Woodstock II cultural comeback tour, appeared on Bill Maher’s television show to scold female supporters of Clinton’s main rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders. “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ ” she said.
Then there was former secretary of state Madeleine Albright who demanded sisterhood solidarity at a Clinton rally: “We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it’s been done … It’s not done. And you have to help. Hillary Clinton will always be there for you and just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other,” Albright said, as Clinton broke into an openmouthed grin.
The word that comes to mind is “patronizing,” ironically. Imagine, for a moment, the relevance of a feminist icon so disconnected from modern mores she thinks it appropriate to dismiss female political activists as simply seeking male attention. Even Maher, hardly tepid himself, seemed to recoil.
Steinem and Albright appear so out of touch with the cares and struggles of the women they are trying to entice, it’s as if some brilliant Bletchley Park codebreaker had stepped out of a room of mechanical widgets to find herself confronted by a Bluetooth speaker; as if a cultural moment of great significance had passed them by, unnoticed. On Tuesday, another Clinton supporter suggested they be distanced from the campaign.
Clinton attended Wellesley College (as did Albright) in the late 1960s, in an era of social upheaval. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, The New York Times reported, Clinton screamed, “I can’t take it any more,” and cried before storming off to her dorm and contacting the head of the school’s black student union. She later donned a black arm band and helped organize a two-day strike on campus, not entirely unlike the protests that have broken out across much of the Ivy League of late.
Her history suggests she should find an instinctive sympathy with a youth culture marked by brittle racial and sexual politics.
Instead, she seems to offer its antithesis: a status quo and the bland debate-night maxim — “A progressive is someone who makes progress” — to a generation that hungers for a radicalism it can’t name.
So then there’s Sanders, who has little to offer beyond dogmatic consistency. An old-school socialist, he calls for free tuition, better education and universal health care, Congress be damned. He only recently joined the Democratic party after proudly identifying himself as an independent in previous campaigns.
The important thing to note is his voters don’t sort by gender. Sanders enjoys broad support, but he appeals to the young especially. There is no demographic split more glaring in the Democratic party than the one that divides voters over the age of 29 from those who are younger.
This campaign is not a story about a woman hitting the glass ceiling; it’s about an entire generation rising high enough to hear it crack. Sanders’ voters came of age during the Great Recession, during an era of bank failures and bailouts, of stratifying socio-economic status, high student debt and increasing pessimism about their own futures. And he speaks to those problems, even though he can’t fix them and might bankrupt the treasury if he tried.
By comparison, from her untouchable CV, to her Wall Street funders and anodyne policy prescriptions, Clinton has made a career of ingratiating herself to a political power structure that seems impossibly stacked against the young. So who cares if she’s a woman? What sisterhood has got our back? What did her supporters expect to happen when that very establishment re-appeared solely to scold young women for refusing to bow to a fading generation’s dreams?
It’s tempting to focus solely on these narrow traits, but Clinton’s loss in New Hampshire Tuesday was decisive and nearly universal. She was trounced by a septuagenarian crank. Clinton is just not very likable. She is a relentless, calculating, brilliant machine boss who keeps on getting undermined, embarrassed or surpassed by “progressive” men who are unequal to her. Young women might have related to that reality. But the robotic smile and bipartisan Granny Hill shtick doesn’t jibe with a cohort ready to pitch tents and set fire to the White House lawn.