Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America

248 Pages·2017·1.96 MB·English

by  Samhita Mukhopadhyay

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“I’M A WOMAN, VOTE FOR ME”
Why We Need Identity Politics
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
UNDERNEATH THE LARGEST GLASS CEILING in New York City, Hillary Clinton’s
campaign planned to celebrate victory at the Javits Center, on election night
2016. I gathered there along with thousands of others to witness Clinton make
history as the first female president of the United States.
In the lead-up to the election, polls had the former senator and secretary of
state leading reality-TV star Donald Trump by at least 4 to 6 percentage points.
The New York Times gave Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning. As an
editorial director at Mic, an online news and culture website for millennials, I
had also planned for a Clinton victory, assigning a dozen or so stories, and had
written and revised a two-thousand-word piece about this big, albeit fraught,
moment in feminist history.
We all know how this story goes. At around 10 p.m., CNN called Ohio for
Trump. The mood at Javits turned grim, but viewers held out hope. Idaho and
North Carolina followed, and then the tipping point: Florida. By now, small
groups of women were sitting on the ground crying; hundreds left the building in
droves. Amid the chaos, I realized I had to make my way back to the office. We
had to rewrite everything. Donald Trump was going to be president.
The intact glass ceiling at the Javits Center turned out to be a metaphor even
more apt than the Clinton campaign could have imagined.
The 2016 election wasn’t just a loss for Clinton, it was a loss for feminism.
Not only did the first female candidate from either major party lose, she lost to
an open misogynist—someone who called a former Latina beauty queen fat and
was caught on the record bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. Despite
that the election played out like a morality tale gone wrong, in which the smart
girl who had done her homework loses to the class clown who barely shows up
for school, in its wake progressives seemed to bristle at discussing the role
sexism and racism played in it. Instead, they openly debated whether the
campaign—and the left more generally—had focused too much on “identity
politics”: on Clinton being the first viable woman candidate for president and
catering to minorities and their concerns, instead of speaking to the economic
anxieties of the white working class.
Born of the civil and women’s-rights activism of the 1970s, identity politics
seeks to recognize and organize around the complex and interwoven ways race,
class, gender, immigration status, and sexuality, among other factors, impact
how life is lived in America—and who has access to the American dream. Both
a political and intellectual movement, identity politics offers a critique of
privilege and the ways it is meted out. It has been pilloried by critics on the right
and left who say its focus on difference is divisive. At the heart of the debate is
the fundamental question of how we conceive of ourselves as a country: Do we
recognize that different groups of people experience unique challenges based on
their identity and organize around and embrace those differences, or do we
ignore them in service of a more universal, uniform understanding of
Americanness?
Clinton’s campaign banked on the former, speaking directly to the interests of
women, people of color, sexual minorities, and the disabled. Her campaign’s
rallying cry—“I’m with her”—was a clear reminder that she was the first woman
presidential candidate for a major party. In what would come to be regarded as a
tactical faux pas, Clinton dared to refer to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”
for their regressive views on race and sexuality. In the third presidential debate,
she ardently supported the right to an abortion: “I will defend Planned
Parenthood. I will defend Roe v. Wade, and I will defend women’s rights to
make their own health care decisions,” she said. In a powerful ad, she juxtaposed
shots of women, people of color, and people with disabilities with footage of
Trump denigrating these groups. The campaign included women and people of
color in senior positions, and the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and
Eric Garner appeared at several campaign stops, after Clinton personally met
with the women and promised to advocate on their behalf.
This is not to say that Clinton had always done right by the communities she
courted during the election. When her husband was president, she supported the
passage of NAFTA, which some have argued exported well-paying American
jobs; the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act, which is credited with fueling the
mass incarceration epidemic that disproportionately impacts black men; and the
1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Bill
Clinton’s attempt at welfare reform, which is known for leading the way to
criminalizing and stigmatizing welfare recipients. Her own ties to Wall Street—
whose subprime lending practices caused the housing crisis, which
disproportionately impacted the black community and its decades of progress in
financial growth—dogged her as a candidate.1
After Clinton lost the election, criticism of her campaign’s approach came
swiftly. In a much discussed op-ed for The New York Times, Mark Lilla argued
that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial,
gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented
it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Lilla’s views were
reinforced by liberals also warning of the electoral consequences of following
Clinton’s strategy. In a Washington Post op-ed, John B. Judis wrote that the left
“overestimated the strength of a coalition based on identity politics.”
Echoing similar sentiments, Senator Bernie Sanders regularly criticized
Clinton for failing to focus on issues of class. “We need a Democratic Party that
is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country,”
Sanders said in March. “It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman!
Vote for me!’” he said at a rally in Boston after the election. “What we need is a
woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies,
to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”
Sanders is right in suggesting we need more than token references to identity
to galvanize authentic support from voters, but it is important to remember that
most identity politics are about class. And Clinton did talk about class during her
campaign—about equal pay for women, paid family leave, increasing the
minimum wage, a fair tax system, and revitalizing American manufacturing. She
proposed a $10 billion investment fund to encourage companies to produce
goods in America as well as tax credits to help revitalize areas devastated by
deindustrialization. “Manufacturing is coming back,” she said during the
campaign. “My job as your president will be to do everything I can to create
more good-paying jobs, to get wages rising again for American workers and
families.”
Exit polls also failed to substantiate the claim that Clinton’s campaign didn’t
speak to economic anxieties in the electorate. Black women—the poorest
demographic in the country—voted for Clinton at a rate of 94 percent.
According to an analysis of exit polls by The New York Times, 53 percent of
Americans making less than $30,000 per year voted for Clinton versus 41
percent for Trump. In those same exit polls, 52 percent of voters who listed the
economy as their top political issue of concern voted for Clinton (as opposed to
42 percent who voted for Trump).
To suggest that progressives move away from identity politics, in the service
of a broader “American” narrative, is also to suggest that we ignore the heavy-
handed role that sexism played in Clinton’s loss. In both her 2008 and 2016
presidential campaigns, people critiqued her voice, her demeanor, and her
appearance. She was considered “untrustworthy,” while her opponent, who
wouldn’t release his tax returns—the first candidate ever to refuse to do so—was
supposedly a straight-talking, no-bull breath of fresh air. The press and the
public became fascinated with Clinton’s private server and leaked emails, both
used to bolster the argument that she played by her own rules. Meanwhile,
Trump was caught on the record repeatedly lying about everything from the
unemployment rate, to his own tax plan to ultimately refusing to disclose his
own tax documents. But Clinton’s critics persisted—they just didn’t like her.
Lost in the hubbub of debate on the left over identity politics was that Trump,
too, ran a campaign based on identity, but it was white identity and white fears.
During the election cycle, he deflected criticism of racialized language as
unnecessary “political correctness”—a derisive term used to describe liberals’
attempts to express sensitivity toward minorities. An outgrowth of identity
politics, political correctness has become an obsession of thinkers on the right
and left who are focused on the impact of “PC culture”—or rather, on students
running amok on college campuses demanding gender-appropriate terminology
who have simply hamstrung the progressive movement. Left-leaning writers like
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have caricatured, prior to the 2016 election,
“safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” as evidence that today’s college students
are intellectually coddled. New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait called