I don’t think the Democrats have realized the various social hierarchies that they have tried to get the conservatives to live with as equals. The big one since the Civil War was race, but since the industrialism of WW I there has also been gender. The conservative attempt to oppress Blacks has been clear, but the similar demands to keep women out of the ruling hierarchy has flown under the radar.
In 2008 my daughter and I both had a real difficulty between voting for Obama or Clinton in the Texas Primary. Since we were running a voting precinct, we both voted early. As we left the early voting precinct, we discussed our choices.
Neither of us had decided before walking in to vote if we would vote for Obama or Clinton, but walking out, we agreed. Both of us voted for Obama.
That Democratic primary election in 2008 was the most contested election we had run since we started working elections in 1999. Both candidates were super-qualified, and each could easily do the job. What mattered, as I now realize, was the symbolism. Texas is “The South” and had not yet recovered from Nixon’s Southern Strategy. (It still hasn’t.) That primary election was the most contested election that either of us have administered. My daughter and I were voting against Southern Texas Racism.
The next eight years were confusing, but they could be accounted for by recognizing the severe racism that Obama faced. But I just reread Jamelle Bouie’s excellent 2016 article in slate <a href=”www.slate.com/...”><u>How Trump Happened.</u></a>. White voters hoped that Trump would restore the racial hierarchy upended by Barack Obama. It wasn’t just jobs and immigration.
But we all saw that, right? It was racism.
Except that it wasn’t JUST racism! There was another hierarchy under attack by the Democrats! Women. It was misogyny. The media never picked up on this. We were not prepared for the second threat — misogyny.
I rather vaguely remember the stories of Harry S. Truman racially integrating the military in 1948. As a Texan who graduated from segregated high schools in 1961 I preferred the integrated military. As a lieutenant, I wasn’t very good at dealing with African-Americans (Sorry, Specialist Mixon, but I was doing the best I could and still regret the way I dealt with you — that was what? 1968? And you were a known activist. But I tried. You appeared to be a threat to my mission. Someone sent you to my team without discussing it with me. But this is my personal failure, one that still irritates me.)
Back to the present politics. We have been inundated with race politics for the last 50 years. Misogyny has flown under the radar. I think that the 2008 Texas Democratic Primary put the two right up against each other, and the media never recognized that misogyny was in the game! Clinton had apparently defeated misogyny.
Trump disagreed and pulled it up and slapped us all with it.
Chattel Slavery was economically successful because the oppressed group could be identified by the color of their skin. Racism was created to take advantage of this. (Racism was created in the British East Coast colonies called Virginia in the 17th century in order to control the oppressed workers. It created the white and black races as Races, rather than as cultures. Blacks were slaves — property, not humans — and whites were allowed and required to have weapons and belong to the militia to regulate them. The working class was separated and could not overthrow the planters.
This had never been the case in human history previously.
The last twenty years of the study of the Human Genome has totally eliminated the idea of Race as a scientific concept. See <a href=”www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Everyone-Ever-Lived/dp/1780229070/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=08MFRR8H8C76WC8QMC2V”><u>A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes</u></a> starting on page 249.
So the Democrats came out of the 2008 election with two social hierarchies, not with one. The Racial hierarchy was well-recognized by the media and had been fought over since WW II. The social hierarchy of sex was flying under the radar, but it was as frightening to the conservatives as was the racial hierarchy.
It appears to me that Trump reacted to the efforts to oppress women and used that as well as racism to win the election. The media has been quite blind to this.
