Gimmie a break.
Her "nuanced" piece opens with John Legend attacking Bernie Sanders supporters for their "nastiness". There's neither a political disagreement raised nor any example of the alleged nastiness. When you have hegemonic power over mass culture as elite liberals do, it's easy to convince yourself you are the only legitimate arbiter of acceptable discourse. But your opponents also have opinions, and guess what, we think you're nasty too. We just don't have 100 television channels to broadcast our views.
This piece is a mild example, but still contains many of the gross fingerprints which can be readily found in grosser forms elsewhere.
Examples include:
- Equating left wing movement politics with borderline fascist white nationalism
- Weaponizing identity politics to avoid serious political discourse
- Selective calls for "unity" against the GOP
The real donut brain part of this piece is right in the center:
Virtually no Bernie Sanders supporter believes this. It's foundational to a leftist that women can and should be successful in politics. I have personally volunteered for 3 female candidates for political office. It's liberals who I frequently hear doubting that a woman can win. Liberals want to believe US politics is hopelessly racist and sexist because they refuse to question any other aspects of their politics. They don't have a good answer for why the country which recently elected its first black president is 8 years later circling the drain of Nazism. They're unwilling to see the material conditions in which working people live and connect it to their own corporate-friendly policies (and those of the GOP). In a word, Liberals are unable to question capitalism. It doesn't help that many of them (in places of power) are rich assholes who only talk to other rich assholes.
Where Schultz goes from merely disingenuous to actually evil is right here:
Is there any doubt what she's talking about? My reading is that she is equating the Warren camp waiting weeks before the Iowa caucus to launch this attack with women such as Christine Blasey Ford waiting years to report their sexual assault. It's hard to imagine a more disgusting comparison. But Schultz is not the first to do it. The first instance I saw was from Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden:
I shouldn't have to explain what is wrong with this. "Believe women" is a progressive maxim with regard to many instances of oppression faced by women where the (*cough* bourgeois) legal system constantly fails. Sexual harassment in the workplace, sexual assault virtually anywhere, etc. The law rarely holds men accountable for their sexist crimes, so the least we can do is believe women who come forward with their story. It doesn't mean that women are above lying in all aspects of life. This is an essentialist perspective, which would be analytically problematic if it wasn't so transparently cynical. Misusing progressive slogans like this risks souring broad swaths of the public, jeopardizing significant social progress which has been achieved, most recently by the MeToo movement. To have it misused for cheap political expediency is appalling.
"This is not a good look, and it's a tired rerun from 2016." - indeed
Possibly the best post I've seen in this thread. Thanks for your insight.
