All this Hillary-versus-Joe talk got me thinking: Misogyny knows no American political party — that is, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties within the American two-party system both have strands of misogyny, or what I call neotribalism.
The Biden-promoting or Joe-talking Democrats don’t acknowledge this, any more than the Democrats serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee realized during now-Justice Clarence Thomas’s nomination hearings that the former head of the EEOC being accused of sexual harassment was political dirt-digging gold for undermining his nomination. The GOP, after all, was shamelessly self-serving in putting Thomas up for Justice Thurgood Marshall’s seat. So is the GOP now.
What the Biden-talking Democrats are counting on is the inside-the-“progressive”-party misogyny in the American two-party legacy of neotribalism. That is to say, all those folks who vote in their self-interest — which is to say, the 5 percent who are NOT in protected identity categories (i.e. women, children, men and women between 18 and 21, LGBTQers, persons with different abilities or disabilities, as well as those older than 39 (age discrimination is for everyone 40 years old and older).
Hillary Clinton may be just as centrist as Joe, and Bernie is pushing her properly progressively leftwards (plus he’s being a good partisan by squashing all third-party rumors, unlike the Donald).
So this is how Hillary is harmed by talk of Joe running? This would be how her Ready for Hillary team could lose control?
Put differently, the 5 percent I’m addressing are SLAMs and SCAMS. Shouldn’t democracy — with a small D or a big D — protect 95 percent of the American populace? That’s my definition of small-d democracy, even if all those who are for Joe say it ain’t so.
Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”
