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Today’s Hillary News & Views begins with an exploration of what is often derisively called “identity politics,” a characterization that minimizes and dismisses the radicalism of our country’s leader having an identity beyond “white male.”
Rebecca Traister at New York magazine has written a powerful piece that connects the violence surrounding this election to the transformative nature of both our current and our next president.
Our first black president sits in the White House, entering his eighth and final year; in his party, a woman who would become the first female commander-in-chief is building a substantial lead. Meanwhile, the dominant front-runner of the opposing party plays untroubled host to white-power revivalist meetings, suggests that “deportation forces” should “round up” immigrants, and proposes identification badges for Muslims. Donald Trump’s competitors for the Republican nomination — men who agree with him that women who have been raped or suffered incest should be forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term — somehow look rational and moderate by comparison. But Ted Cruz is no moderate: He touts his endorsement by Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, who has advocated for the execution of "convicted" abortionists and defended activists who have in fact killed abortion doctors. “We need leaders like Troy Newman in this country,” Ted Cruz, who might be the Republican nominee for president in 2016, has said.
Whatever their flaws, their political shortcomings, their progressive dings and dents, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton mean a lot. They represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead. It is not coincidence that after seven years of a black president people are calling for lynchings at Republican rallies. It’s not some random quirk that eight years after a woman almost became the Democratic nominee, Republican candidates are crowing about their commitment to making pregnancy compulsory and accepting the endorsements of those who support violence against abortion providers.
This moment, this election, these years represent the death throes of exclusive white male power in the United States. That the snarling fury and violence are contemporary does not make them less real than the terrors of previous periods; it makes them more real, at least to those of us living through them. And the presidential-primary contest, while absurdist and theatrical, is reflecting very real fury and violence in the non-electoral world: the burning of crosses and black churches, the execution of black men by police, the resistance of male soldiers to women in elite combat positions, a white man with a history of rape and violence against women himself a “warrior for the babies” after killing people at an abortion clinic, and a younger white man killing nine black churchgoers with the explanation “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country.”
Clinton, like Obama before her, isn’t carrying just her own baggage, but will stand in as the symbolic target for those whose fury at increased female autonomy has been building. In a nation where women who were not permitted to cast votes still live and breathe, her campaign, as Ms. Clinton has herself declared in other contexts, is living history. If she wins, she — and we — will be forced to do battle with this rising, chilling, ever more open threat from those who feel enraged that their country is no longer their own. I fear that there’s a lot more terror ahead of us.
As if to illustrate Traister’s point, Correct the Record, a Super PAC aligned with Clinton’s campaign, has put out a stark video documenting the violence of this campaign season:
x YouTube Video