One of the things that tends to characterize the way Americans think about progress is
that we think of it as a kind of straight line, you know.
We have like the X-axis and the Y-axis and the kind of line going diagonally upward and
that is American progress.
As time goes here we get better.
And that’s actually a false narrative.
That’s not an accurate way of looking at the way the country has progressed.
In this country progress has more often looked like kind of like an EKG where we have these
moments and then we have these values and then we have these moments.
And that may slope upward over time.
But it certainly has the kind of peak and valley effect to it.
And with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign we’ve actually seen almost kind
of overlapping things where we’re seeing peaks and valleys simultaneously.
So it represents a form of progress that an American woman could be nominated for the
presidency of a major political party and is not coincidental that that nomination coincides
with the most egregiously breathtakingly vulgar expressions of sexism and misogyny that we’ve
seen in American politics.
We quite simply don’t have a frame of reference for this but both of those things happen at
the same time.
Now because I’m an optimist I tend to believe that the graph that measures kind of upward
trajectory will supersede the one that – the peaks will eventually outweigh the valleys.
But I don’t think that we should ever be nonchalant or kind of look at history as a
series of inevitable victories for the righteous, certainly not American history.
When we look at any of these movements that have better life in this country they have
the potential to fail at any moment.
And the ones that succeeded that we think of as succeeding did so precisely because
of ones that preceded it that actually did not achieve those objectives.
And so if we’re talking about civil rights in the 1960’s, well we’d have to say that
the kind of first thrust of that was in the nineteenth century after the end of slavery
and the kind of dawning of segregation and those sorts of practices.
So it’s possible for movements that are morally right to actually not achieve their
goals.
And in that regard Hillary Clinton’s nomination represents a particular kind of progress around
gender and sex and inclusion in this country.
And it also highlights the intransigent and entrenched means by which people want to retain
the status quo.
It’s embarrassing to see that men are still more likely to vote for the republican nominee
whose name I think has been said enough.
I try not to say it.
But I think we’re talking about a kind of entrenched reflex about patriarchy, a very
masculinist idea that people have been waiting I think feeling like they had to suppress
and now they get to express it.
I was talking to a cab driver a couple of weeks ago who was an immigrant and he said
that he just doesn’t understand how the country could think that a woman is up to
the task of being the president despite the fact that there are these dozens of countries
that you can point to where women have had presidencies and the countries still exist.
They didn’t kind of collapse and go out of existence.
And so these dynamics I think are very real and in a way that we had not anticipated in
a way that I don’t think we even thought was possible the current presidential cycle
has brought those to the surface.
And I don’t think that it’s also – I don’t think this ends.
Should Hillary Clinton be elected these dynamics will be present and they may be more vitriolic
and they may feel more entitled and more victimized.
And I think that has something to do with the way in which we’ve taught men to understand
themselves in this society.
And I also think in some ways if you can kind of take the silver lining approach to this
in some ways it’s better that you have this wound being lanced right now so all of it
has come up.
The disbelief around issues of sexual assault has now become part of the presidential election.
It’s not simply a question that people ask during a debate or someone can give a canned
answer.
We are actually processing this.
Like we are actually figuring out what it looks like when someone says that I’ve been
sexually assaulted and people don’t believe them because that person is a woman.
And that is happening now.
And I think that it’s also we’re looking at the biases that people have in the presidential
debates where Clinton would say something and her opponent would speak over her and
kind of dismiss her perspectives.
All these things have become an object lesson in it in a way that I think might not have
happened.
These things would still have been present but they’ve have been submerged.
But now it’s all come to the surface and all the messiness is there and we have no
choice but to confront it.
There’s a lot that we could talk about with this election but more than one notable things
about this is I think the overt fascistic overtones of what has happened over the past
year in American society, in American politics are notable.
We typically think of societies that have suffered some great trauma or national humiliation
as being susceptible to the appeals of fascism.
Kind of hyper nationalism.
The authoritarian figure who says I will protect you.
These appeals to order and what people perceive to have been a disordered society.
And we think that when people have experience a national trauma that they are more susceptible
to this.
Except in the United States this is not coming on the heels of losing a war or having been
humiliated in the kind of court of public opinion internationally.
This turn toward a movement that has these overtones of fascism has come on the heels
of the first black presidency which has been largely successful.
And so we’re looking at people who feel that the prospect of African Americans no
longer being in the subordinate position is as traumatizing to them as other societies
that have lost wars and have been embarrassed and these other kinds of ways and felt the
need to reassert their masculinity in movements that were fascist.
And so that’s very disturbing to me and we’ve also seen a kind of return to McCarthyism
of a certain variety.
One of the things that he did was game the media in particular ways.
So he would know that under the kind of idea of objective journalism if he said something
that was untrue newspapers were going to report it.
They might report an opposing opinion but they weren’t going to come down on the side
and say that one of these is more true than the other.
It is the one side says the Earth is round, one side says the Earth is flat and this is
where we end the story.
And so by doing this he could get lots of misinformation out into the public that was
self-serving.
And he also did this as a means of ginning up the level of fear in society which worked
well.
Demagogues kind of bread and butter is working on the fears of population.
And so even when newspapers would fact check McCarthy by the time they kind of dispelled
one lie he had told three more.
And by the time they got to those three it was now up to nine or ten others.
So there was this exponential kind of mendacity.
And we’ve seen that dynamic in this election as well even with people in the press, you
know, some instances saying that they did not believe that it was their job to fact
check a presidential candidate.
Chris Wallace of Fox News made that point about the presidential debates.
And even then implicit in McCarthy’s time there was a kind of conflict of interest the
media had because while McCarthy was a demagogue and a disreputable person he was also a person
who sold newspapers.
If you put him on the cover of your newspaper on the front page people were going to pick
it up and buy it and read it.
The same dynamic happens now, especially in cable media in 2016 where the implicit conflict
of interests involves a person who is saying things that are absolutely untrue but whose
name garners ratings.
And so which in turn generate revenue.
And so these are the dynamics that we’ve seen, you know, 60 years after McCarthy.
We still are not any more adept at dealing with the dynamics that allowed McCarthy to
rise and I think that’s something that should give all of us pause.
It’s something we should all be concerned about.