I was watching the Clinton/Sanders New Hampshire debate with an old friend when she suggested my antipathy toward Clinton betrayed a hint of misogyny. She said it in a teasing way, but she was at least half-serious. It brought to mind the Jewish couple who accused me of anti-Semitism for denouncing Israel’s atrocities, and the black man who called me a racist for (rightly) getting pissed off at him — and of course, it brought to mind this convenient idea that’s been floating around the ether that says if you’re a man and you can’t stand Hillary Clinton, your misogyny is showing.
America has its share of misogynists, no question, and you can be sure they all hate Hillary Clinton. But to pretend there are no legitimate reasons to find candidate Clinton both unworthy and contemptible is motivated reasoning — and I think a lot of what’s perceived as misogyny among Sanders supporters might be something else entirely.
My own antipathy has a couple of sources. First, there’s my congenital idealism, which comes with an intractable honest streak — an affliction for which liars have made me pay more times than I care to admit. So I have a well-earned aversion to those with a slippery grip on the truth. But liars in positions of power scare me in particular, because there are so many so willing to credit the lies they tell. Even a dumb shit like George W. Bush, who didn’t even try to lie convincingly (that hint of a smirk always mocking America’s gullibility), had little difficulty leading an ostensibly literate nation of 300-million into catastrophe with just a few shaky lies, poorly told.
And Hillary Clinton is a much better liar than George W. Bush — and, judging by her record, every bit as comfortable with mass murder and mayhem, and the “profit opportunities” they yield.
But my biggest problem with Clinton is the obvious fact that she’s running against Bernie Sanders — exactly the kind of pivotal figure who could actually help set this country (and by virtue of its power and influence, the world), on a more sane, sensible path. This is not a small thing for me; in forty years time, my son will be an old man, beset with all the vulnerabilities that come with age, and I’d like to think his latter years will be free of suffering, that he’ll have adequate healthcare, that the planet will still be a habitable place with civilized societies. But though the odds of his growing old in such a world grow longer with every passing year, they would certainly improve if Sanders succeeds in what he’s trying to accomplish.
And what Sanders is trying to accomplish is to facilitate the revolution that’s been kicking and thrashing and trying to birth itself since Occupy — and not a minute too soon, in my estimation. The runaway wealth concentration of a dying economy coupled with the runaway greenhouse condition of a dying Age makes it difficult not to see the coming decades in increasingly dystopian terms unless an urgently needed societal course correction can be set in motion. Fortunately, we have in Sanders a genuine agent of change whose “radical” message is that the economy should work for everyone, the government should serve the needs of the people, and the biosphere should be strenuously protected from the greed and stupidity of the fossil fuel industry.
So from my point of view, everything Clinton does to undermine Sanders and sabotage his campaign — in service to nothing nobler than her own vanity and ambition — is messing with my kid’s future. And given that time is short, and a candidate like Sanders rare, that does make me a little crazy.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of what’s termed “misogyny” among Bernie’s excitable Millennial supporters — who’d surely despaired of ever seeing anything like a real live New Dealer running for president — is at least partly an expression of an underlying anxiety. They see their futures turning to shit before their eyes, and I imagine they get just a little bent when a corrupt establishmentarian tries to cheat them out of a unique opportunity to stage a political intervention and disrupt the status quo.
The establishment line is that Bernie’s “unrealistic” vision only appeals to younger voters because they haven’t yet outgrown their youthful idealism. But while age no doubt corrupts many an idealist, the underlying reality is that idealism itself evolved for a reason — possibly because in times of great change and upheaval, idealists become essential: they provide the framework of ideas for a new order.
I think we’re living at one of those pivotal moments — when triangulating “realists” like Secretary Clinton can’t see the real world for what it is, and fighting idealists like Bernie Sanders are the most realistic guys in the room.