The War(ren) on men
E LIZABETH Warren made the political calculation this week that she doesn’t need men to win the presidency. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” she told a rally in Washington Square Park Monday night.
“In fact, we’re not here because of men at all,” she said, emphasizing the “m” word like an expletive.
Great. Then she won’t mind if men don’t vote for her, nor women who like men.
It’s a losing strategy, taken straight out of the playbook of Hillary Clinton, from whom, reportedly and inexplicably, Warren has been taking advice.
Millions of American women showed in 2016 that they weren’t prepared to vote for Clinton just because she had a second X chromosome. White, noncollege-educated women in particular voted almost 2-to-1 for Donald Trump in 2016.
Most likely, they didn’t approve of the denigration of their menfolk as “deplorables” abusing “white male privilege” when the truth is that the males they love are doing their best, even if jobs are scarce and they’re dying of overdoses.
So when a Harvard law professor stands on a stage in New York and says “we’re not here” because of men, there’s a lot of ideological baggage attached. Warren’s supporters in the 10,000-strong crowd understood before the words were even out of her mouth, giving her the biggest applause of the evening.
Actually, if you have an ounce of humility, you’d have to admit we probably all are here because of men, famous or not. Men who fought wars, men who drilled for oil, men who built monuments, men who cured illness, or men like Christopher Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue, and whose statue will be removed from Central Park for the crime of being male, if certain city officials get their way.
It’s hard to imagine Warren herself would be “here” without a father providing his male DNA, although the modern Democratic Party will tell you that men are not essential to the fertilization process anymore.
The Founding Fathers had a little input to our being “here,” too. But, for Warren, one of these men, in whose eponymous square she chose to hold her rally, was a provocation that had to be called out Monday night.
Immediately before saying “we’re not here because of men,” she dissed George Washington and the beautiful Tuckahoe marble arch that bears his name.
“I wanted to give this speech right here and not because of the arch behind me or the president that this square is named for — nope.”
That majestic, 200-year-old arch, under which Warren had set up her podium, flag, microphone and campaign signage, celebrates George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States in 1789.
It is adorned with carvings of Fame, Valor, Wisdom and Justice, and an aspirational inscription reading: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”
Such sentiments are too noble and consequential for 2020’s Femocratic candidates, male and female, whose lifeblood is the dead hand of identity politics.
They malign the past as the squalid seed of the patriarchy; their woke revolution aims to erase history and replace it with a new America where none of us wants to live.
The problem for Warren is that, as Hillary Clinton discovered, most women don’t want any part of an identity politics that pitches them against men.
They don’t want men to be losers because they don’t want to marry losers, and they sure don’t want their sons to be losers.
Most women love men. They love their husbands, their sons, their fathers. They’ve had male mentors and male coaches and male teachers who’ve been good people.
Perhaps there’s something about having a bad experience with a man that propels some women into the public eye or attracts them to leftist politics.
Maybe the left has fashioned a culture in which the only way for a woman to get ahead is to ritually denounce men.
But it is perverse and goes against human nature.
In any case, if Warren really has been taking advice from Clinton, she’s a goner in 2020, regardless of poll numbers that have her biting at Joe Biden’s heels.
Even after losing the unlosable election to Donald Trump, Clinton didn’t have the grace or selfawareness to acknowledge that she was the problem.
Instead, America’s First Feminist blamed women. If they didn’t vote for her, it was because they were too weak and stupid to think for themselves. Women had been pressured by “fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl,’ ” she breezily told CBS News in the aftermath of the election.
That’s the new feminist take on democracy.
But don’t say Warren doesn’t do anything at all for men.
Her latest policy on reproductive rights ensures that all men have access to taxpayer-funded abortions.
What a relief.