Opinion
Yes Naomi Wolf, feminists are attacked. But 'sucking it up' is not the answer.
I confronted Twitter abuse. Then I broke – because I'm human. Feminism has to take account of the fact that both women and men have emotional and psychological limitations
I led a campaign this year asking the Bank of England to keep a woman on its banknotes. Following its success, I was treated to a tour of the dark depths of Twitter, which unleashed a torrent of graphic and violent rape and death threats upon me.
In an interview, Naomi Wolf referred to this, implying that I had retreated to my "parlour" when things got "difficult". This irritated me because the one thing I didn't do was retreat. In fact, I did exactly what Wolf says I should have done. I did "lean in". I did adopt my warrior pose. And my God, did I shout back. I shouted, I screamed, I yelled, I bloody pushed. And then I broke, which is why I came off Twitter for most of September. I don't think having a breakdown was a good outcome.
The other day, I read a brilliant article in Wired by Laura Hudson, called Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of Breaking Bad. The name says it all really. To be a man in Breaking Bad you keep pushing, you keep providing, dominating, overpowering. Until you break. Until you die. And it's not just in Breaking Bad. Yes, the show takes it to extremes, but this is a masculinity we all recognise. And it's one that is celebrated. It's one that is contrasted with the pussydom of femininity.
And this is the problem with Wolf's comments – and comments like hers. They leave no room for humanity. Those words say that all the women who contacted me during those awful weeks, to say that they had suffered the same, to say that they had been silenced, that they had been driven underground by fear, those words say that those women were wrong. That they were weak. That they were letting the movement down. So Wolf's words aren't feminist.
Strong claim, I know. But to be fair to Wolf, it's an easy trap to fall into. It's the trap of a society that says to be a man you have to be inhuman. It's the trap of a society that places that inhuman masculinity on the highest pedestal we have. And it's a trap that feminists should be trying to avoid.
Wolf is right to say that feminists will come in for abuse. We always have, and until we live in an equal society, we always will. But she is wrong to imply that we should therefore just suck it up. She's wrong because it's defeatist: we should be outraged by abuse. We should flag it up, say it's wrong, challenge it, try to stop it. But more than this, she's wrong because sucking it up is part of that privileging of a masculinity that doesn't even serve men, let alone women.
As a society we need to grow up and get out of the playground. There is nothing inherently admirable about refusing to acknowledge emotion and psychological limitations. We all have them – to deny them, as Wolf's way of thinking does, is not only unhealthy, it's also unrealistic. And it's egotistical.
Part of the point of having a feminist movement rather than a feminist solo enterprise is that it's not just about one person's drive for success, glory and power. It's about all of us standing together and fighting. And you know what that means? It means that when one of us falls, when one of us needs a time-out, when one of us has led a battle and is under attack, the rest of us can step in and take over. We even have a word for it. It's called sisterhood.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Nothing's changed: Both political parties aim to protect and reinforce the capitalist system
Democrats like moderate Keynesianism. Republicans favor free markets unfettered. The crisis-ridden system is never challenged
The economic aim of both major US political parties is, in the end, the same: to protect and reinforce the capitalist system.
The Republican party does so chiefly by means of a systematic, unremitting demonization of the government. They blame it for whatever ails the capitalist economy. If unemployment grows, they point to government policies and actions, and attack particular politicians for what they did or did not do to stimulate the economy, directing criticism away from the employers who actually deprive workers of their jobs.
Republican solutions for capitalism's ills always involve reducing the government's demands on private capitalists – lower their taxes, deregulate their activities, and privatize government production of goods and services. Their program for the future is always: free the private capitalist system from government intervention, and you will get "prosperity" and growth.
The Democrats protect and reproduce the system by assigning to the government the task of minimizing the problems that beset capitalism. So, for example, they want the business cycles that are an inherent affliction of capitalism to be foreseen, planned for, minimized and overcome by government intervention. This is the underlying purpose of Keynesian economics and the monetary and fiscal policies it generates.
Beyond cycles, capitalism's more long-term problems, such as tendencies to produce great inequalities of income and accumulated wealth, lead Democrats to propose very modest government redistribution programs. Minimum wages, progressive tax structures, food, housing and other subsidies, and freely-distributed public services exemplify Democrats' Bandaids meant to protect capitalism from its own potentially self-destructive tendencies.
From the GOP, you will hear denials that such self-destructive tendencies even exist. Economic problems always reduce to pesky and unwarranted government tampering in the free market. The few Republicans who will admit that capitalism is responsible for its own ailments also see capitalism as a fully self-healing system. The best solution for capitalism's problems, they insist, is to let the system function and correct them. Anything else will just make matters worse.
Most Democrats will paint Republicans as slavish servants of short-sighted corporations and the few whom they make rich. These, say Democrats, threaten capitalism's survival by failing to utilize government solutions to problems that consequently become worse and increasingly dangerous, putting the whole global economy – and capitalism's reproduction – at systemic risk.
Republicans will disregard Democratic economic policy as steps toward what they call "socialism": socialism defined as government ownership and operation of what should be private enterprises.
Neither party, though, has figured out how to prevent capitalism's business cycles. Both consistently fail to make sure that cycles they failed to prevent would be shallow and short. So, today, Republicans blame the crisis since 2007 on government over-regulation and interventions in the housing and finance markets (and they blame Democrats for championing those policies). Democrats blame the crisis on too little regulation of those markets and insufficient redistribution (and – you guessed it – they blame Republicans for opposing those government policies). In short, crises, like everything else, are just opportunities to be explained and exploited politically to advance each party's characteristic policies and their electoral strategies.
In what were "normal times", US capitalism would reproduce itself with nice, calm oscillations between Republican and Democratic presidencies and congresses. For the minority of Americans who legitimately cared about which party was in or out, their interests focused on issues usually disconnected from any structural debate about the capitalist economic system. These included local and regional issues, foreign policy, social issues like sexuality, access to guns, flag-burning, draft protests, and so on. Capitalism rolled along, in part, because both parties functioned as alternative cheerleaders for it, treating it as beyond criticism.
Recent political gridlock, shutdowns, etc suggest a "new normal" has arrived. Political combat between the parties has become more intense and intractable, because capitalism has changed since the 1970s. By then, the post second world war boom in western Europe, north America and Japan – and also anxieties about the USSR, China, and their allies – had lofted real wages and government-funded social services far above their levels in capitalism's global hinterland, especially Asia, Africa and Latin America. Capitalists in western Europe, North America, and Japan were therefore eager to evade both the high wages and the taxes they faced.
Major technical breakthroughs at the time made evasion possible. The ubiquitous availability of jet travel made movement around the globe much easier, cheaper, and faster. Computer and telecommunications advances enabled enterprise headquarters to monitor, command and control production facilities anywhere on the planet. It suddenly became practical to move production and distribution sites from locations of high wages and taxes, to locations of poverty and weak government. Sharp competitors led the way as, first, manufacturing and then, service jobs were increasingly "exported" or "outsourced". Laggards suffered and so learned the importance of following their more nimble competitors.
Most Republicans and Democrats facilitated the process by endlessly promoting "free trade" and arguing that any constraints on free enterprises' relocations were unthinkable, inefficient and other synonyms for "really bad". As more and more jobs left the US, and formerly prosperous cities and states entered long-term declines, the two parties blamed their favorite targets: one another.
The idea that capitalism and capitalists were the problem was something neither Democrats or Republicans allow into their debates and talking-points. Yet, it was precisely capitalists' profit-driven, self-interested decisions to move that have caused our economic problems. And so they remain.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Race is central to the fear and angst of the US right
In the early 1980s veteran pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted a focus group in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb, of former Democrats who had switched allegiance to the Republican Ronald Reagan. After he read a statement by Robert Kennedy about racial inequality, one participant interjected: "No wonder they killed him."
"That stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats," wrote Greenberg in a recent report, Inside the GOP. "I realized that in trying to reach this group of people race is everything," he told me.
While conducting a focus group with Republicans over the summer he had a similar revelation, although it came not from a sole outburst but almost throwaway comments, often left on cards after the session. As one man left his handout he half-joked: "It's probably digital, so you can check it on the NSA files." Another asked: "Now you're going to guarantee that what we put down here, we won't be getting a call from the IRS about an audit or anything like that?" Alongside this sense of being spied upon was relief that, in these Republican-only groups, they had found kindred spirits. "I'm not alone in the way I view things for the most part," wrote one on a postcard. "Not by myself in thought process," confided another.
Those seeking to understand what drove the Republican party to shut down the government this month in a strategically disastrous move that laid bare its deep internal divisions – and ultimately led to humiliating defeat – could do worse than start here. The report reveals a sense of ideological, demographic and cultural siege, on the American right, from which there is no obvious escape. Unable to comprehend or process last year's election defeat, they feel the nation has become unmoored from its founding principles and is on a full-scale, unrelenting descent into chaos. Obama has been victorious in implementing socialism and the party they identify with has proved incapable of halting the decline, leaving them alienated not only from the country at large but one another. If it appears as though they are howling at the moon, it's because they feel all earthly options have been exhausted.
Describing Ireland's economic and cultural transformation in his book The Deportees, Roddy Doyle wrote: "I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one." Many Republicans have precisely the same feeling.
Central to this deep-seated sense of angst is race. In 2012, 92% of the Republican vote came from white people who, within 30 years, will no longer be in the majority. "They are acutely racially conscious," says Greenberg. "They are very aware that they are 'white' in a country that is becoming increasingly 'minority'." Growing increasingly dependent on an ever-shrinking base, they see their electoral fortunes waning but are resistant to adapting their message to broaden their appeal beyond their narrow racial confines. Race is less the explicit target of their anxiety (issues such as affirmative action and civil rights no longer dominate) than the primary (if not exclusive) prism through which their political consciousness is being filtered. "Race," writes Greenberg, "is central to their worldview."
There are three main ways in which this has been a factor in the recent government shutdown and Republican schisms. First is gerrymandering. Since race is one of the best predictors of voting behaviour, House congressional seats have been manipulated largely on racial grounds. Politicians at state level carve constituencies into odd and unlikely shapes, shuffling around various racial groups to protect incumbents. Both parties do this when they have the chance but Republicans, who run more state houses, have had more chance and have undertaken the task with much zeal and guile. As a result, in 2012 the Democrats won more votes nationally for Congress but still got fewer seats, giving the Republicans who shut down the government a fragile mandate. It also means incumbents need not fear losing their seats, leaving them able to act out.
Second is the perceived beneficiaries of government spending. Republicans are more likely to regard intervention as being to support minorities rather than to support the poor. This goes not only for food stamps and welfare but also for Obamacare – which was the issue that initially sparked the shutdown.
"Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters," writes Greenberg. Their despair is largely rooted in the assumption that by championing programs that disproportionately help minorities, Obama is effectively buying votes and securing a growing tranche of the electorate who will for evermore be dependent on government. One participant, echoing the views of many, said: "Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don't. It's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say happiness. You get to be alive and you get to be free. The rest of it's just a pursuit … you're not guaranteed happiness. You have to work for it."
Finally, there is Obama – the black son of an African immigrant and white mother – who stands as an emblem for all this unease, personifying, in their minds, not only their political impotence today but their demographic irrelevance tomorrow. The word they're most likely to use to describe him is "liar". But their hostility goes beyond his policies and pronouncements to a deeply rooted suspicion of his authenticity.
"[There] is a sense of him being foreign, non-Christian, Muslim – and they wonder what really are his motives for the changes he is advancing." As he moves into his second term, there is now an elision in the Republican mind between what they think he is (an immigrant, a fraudster, a non-American) and what they think he does (assist immigrants and fraudsters in contravention of American ideals).
Their inability to craft a credible strategic response to these insecurities only serves to reinforce them. "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president?" taunted Obama last week. "Go out there and win an election." The trouble is Republicans can't because their racially charged rhetoric alienates minorities, leaving them more electorally isolated, prompting defeat – which leaves them ever more divided. Meanwhile, their reckless obstruction in Congress, which nearly triggered a default, makes the nation's descent into chaos more likely. Unable to come to terms with the country in which they live, they are complicit in creating the very future they most fear.
Twitter: @garyyounge
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Sorry, conservatives: The global warming 'pause' doesn't mean what you think it means
Posted on 18 October 2013 by dana1981 In their study of media coverage of the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Media Matters for America found that nearly half of print media stories discussed that the warming of global…
[Planet Earth via Shutterstock]
Does global warming 'pause' mean what you think it means?
In their study of media coverage of the 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Media Matters for America found that nearly half of print media stories discussed that the warming of global…
How the Koch brothers' beer offensive against Obamacare fell flat
A Koch-funded front is using free beer to entice students away from health exchanges. But Obamacare is made of stronger stuff
What's a family values conservative to do when every effort to protect millions of Americans from the scourge of affordable healthcare fails?
Break out the beer, of course. The latest campaign to kill off Obamacare in its infancy is now playing out on college campuses where a conservative group known as Generation Opportunity (GO), who are funded in part by the billionaire Koch brothers, is using the lure of free beer and "opt out" beer koozies to persuade young students not to buy health insurance – or, at least, not to buy it from the Obamacare exchanges.
Traditionally, one might expect God-fearing conservatives to be warning youth about the dangers of alcohol consumption, rather than plying them with free liquor, but these are desperate times. The determined Koch brothers have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to derail the president's healthcare law. So far, though, despite their best efforts, Obamacare has proved as "invincible" as the young people it needs to enroll. While it's unlikely that the beer exchanges, shall we call them, will be the game-changer, the Kochs may well end up driving many of us to drink with their relentless and futile vendetta to undo the law – not just the college students.
Nearly every movement to "educate the public" about the "dangers" of Obamacare can be linked in some way to the Koch brothers, and this latest college campus effort is no different. Last month, Politico revealed that GO has received $5.04m from the Koch-funded entity known as Freedom Works. This "grassroots" movement is now about to embark on an "Opt Out" tour of 20 college towns across the country as part of its effort to steer young people away from the Obamacare exchanges. As GO's 29-year-old president, Evan Feinberg, put it:
What we're trying to communicate is, 'No, you're not actually required to buy health insurance' … you might have to pay a fine, but that's going to be cheaper for you, and better for you.
After coming under criticism for this statement, Feinberg (who previously worked at the Charles Koch Institute) has since clarified that GO is not trying to persuade young people to opt out of buying insurance altogether, just from buying it through the healthcare exchanges.
Maybe, I'm naive to think that most young Americans will not fall for this cynical ploy, no matter how much free beer they are plied with. It seems to me that any campaign that is based on a false premise – in this case, that young people could get cheaper insurance before Obamacare or since – seems destined for failure.
According to a report released in September by the Department of the Health and Human Services, 56% of the people who are applying for health insurance today will be able to get coverage through the health insurance marketplace for less than $100 a month. This means that a large percentage of the youth market that GO are targeting would be able to get comprehensive health coverage under Obamacare for a very low rate.
If Feinberg or any other GO employee genuinely knows about better insurance deals than that for students, it would be really helpful if they listed them on their Opt Out website. Surely, that would be a far better use of their Koch dollars than buying more crates of beer?
As it is, the Opt Out website contains no information beyond vague and unsubstantiated claims about Obamacare being a "bad deal", and two embarrassingly poorly made ads featuring a "Creepy Uncle Sam" character who pops up between a woman's legs as she undergoes a gynaecological exam and asks a young man to roll over while he pulls on a surgical glove. The message – that government should stay out of healthcare – is about as subtle as Miley Cyrus' recent sledgehammer licking antics.
Whether Creepy Uncle Sam and his creepier backers will succeed in bringing down the Affordable Care Act (ACA) remains to be seen, but the prognosis is not good. Since the ACA was signed into law in 2010, it has miraculously managed to withstand "Hitler death panel" comparisons, state by state efforts to block its implementation, a US supreme court challenge to its constitutionality and, most recently, a defunding effort that led to the federal government shutdown.
As the New York Times recently reported, the Koch brothers have been heavily involved in all of these separate efforts through their generous funding of groups like Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Heritage Action and, of course, Generation Opportunity. But so far, their efforts have been in vain. Not only is Obamacare still the law of the land, but the law has actually gained a major bump in support since the shutdown stand-off.
As it happens, even the Koch brothers have begun to realize that their attempts to stop the ACA are getting them nowhere. Last week, a representative of Koch Industries sent a letter to members of the Senate distancing the company from efforts to defund Obamacare, while still making it clear that Koch really does not like the law.
Does this mean the Koch brothers are done with their various and multifaceted efforts to bring it down? Probably not, but if they at least scale back their efforts to just distributing free beers, that might not be such a bad thing.
After what they have put us all through, we deserve one.
Don't rule out the Democrats winning back the House in 2014
I don't believe the Democrats will win back the House of Representatives in 2014. President Obama's low approval rating, combined with the usual midterm loss and normal movement away (pdf) from the White House party on the national House ballot, should keep Republicans in control. Yet, there's a difference between thinking whether the Democrats "will" win back the House or whether they "can" win it back.
Right now, the Democrats hold a lead of about 4-5pt per the HuffPollster and Real Clear Politics average. Many have concluded that this lead would not be enough to take back the House, if the election were held today. However, I believe that it quite likely would be enough.
How so? Let's address a bunch of reasons people expect that a 4-5pt Democratic lead on the national House ballot would result in Republicans still holding the House – and then show why I think those could be wrong.
1. A uniform shift of 4-5pt on all House seats would still leave Republicans winning a majority of seats
North Carolina Republican Congressman Robert Pittenger was the "median" representative in 2012. Half the races were decided by more than his 6.1pt margin and half were decided by less. Given that Democrats won the national House vote by 1.4pt, a uniform swing across all districts would imply that Democrats would need to win the national House vote by 7.5pt to take back the House.
Count me as one of the people who does not believe in uniform swings. It's not that the uniform swing is uninformative; it's that it is very inexact. There are many factors that go into House races, including challenger quality, money spent, and whether or not the incumbent is running for re-election. Most of those are unknown at this point for key races.
You only need to look at the 2006 election to get an idea. Back in 2004, Republicans won the national House vote by 2.6pt. They won the median district by a little over 10pt. In other words, there was that same 7.5pt pro-Republican bias between the national House vote and the median district in 2004 as there was last year.
When we examine 2006, we see the bias simply didn't hold. Democrats only won the national House vote by 8pt, which should have given them the thinnest of majorities per a uniform swing. Instead, they took 233, or 13 more, seats than a uniform swing implied.
The 218th seat won by the Democrats belonged to Leonard Boswell, who had actually taken the seat easily in 2004. He had health problems, which led to a closer than expected re-election campaign. Boswell, with a winning margin of 5.4pt, might have survived even if the national Democratic margin had been closer to 3pt.
My own math, taking into account redistricting in 2011, says a 3pt Democratic win in the national vote and a takeover of the House would not be nearly as likely as in 2006; but a 4 or 5pt victory would probably do the trick.
2. The experts say there are very few seats up for grabs
The indispensable Cook Political Report has only has 13 Democratic-held seats listed in the relatively competitive tossup or "lean" category. Of course, Democrats need to take 17 seats to win the House. The ratings reflect, among other things, a lack of strong challengers for the Democrats and lack of retirements by Republicans.
The thing is that expert ratings (like most polling) are not all that predictive a year out from an election. At this point in the 2006 cycle, there were 17 Republican seats in the lean or tossup categories (pdf). That's well short of the 30 seats that Democrats would ultimately take from Republicans. At this point in the 2010 cycle, there were 28 Democratic seats in the lean or tossup category. Republicans, of course, went onto gain 63 seats in 2010.
It's not until later in the cycle when individual seat rankings become quite useful. That's when potential challengers and incumbents read the national environment and decide to run or not. Chances are that if the 4-5pt Democratic lead holds, the individual seat rankings will reflect that edge. For now, individual seat ratings probably aren't all that helpful to understanding which way and how hard the wind is blowing.
3. The Abramowitz model says Democrats need something like a 13pt margin on the national House ballot
Alan Abramowitz's national House ballot to seats model seems to have unusual sway among some. The model is elegant in the sense that it does a good job of trying to map the midterm penalty and how much exposure the majority party has, in a minimalistic fashion. The problem is that some don't seem to quite understand how the model should work.
It's not a straight national vote-to-seat equation. It's built for early September of a midterm year. Abramowitz isn't saying that a 13pt Democratic margin in the national House ballot on election day is what Democrats need to take over the House. What he is saying is that a 13pt lead in September is likely to shrink because of the natural movement away from the White House party on the national House ballot during the course of the election year.
Moreover, the model is inexact. It would be within the margin of error of the model for Democrats to take back the House with a 2pt September lead on the national House ballot. In 2010, the model forecasted a Republican gain of 45 seats per my calculation. That was 18 seats off the final Republican gain of 63 seats.
Abramowitz's forecast is a good starting-point for understanding how uphill is the Democrats' task in taking back the House, but it is far from perfect.
4. The final national House ballot surveys are biased against Republicans
Charlie Cook has a rule that you subtract 2pt from the Democratic margin on the final national House ballot to know how the national House vote is actually going to pan out. That may have worked over five years ago, though it doesn't seem to work anymore. In 2008, 2010, and 2012, the Real Clear Politics average of the national House ballot underestimated the actual Democratic standing in the national House vote. So, there's no reason to think the final national House ballot will overstate the Democrats' standing in 2014.
Conclusion
There are plenty of reasons the Democrats won't win back the House. But it's not impossible that they will. If the same national environment that is producing a 4-5pt on the national House ballot still exists in a year's time, Democrats may very well win back the House.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Tea Party’s war memorial rally was another ‘Let him die!’ moment
On Sunday, several hundred – or perhaps a couple of thousand – tea party activists, led by such luminaries of the right as Sarah Palin, Rep. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), hijacked a march organized by a non-partisan veterans’ group…
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