US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  But the Black Lives Matter movement also shows the limitations of social movements that do not advance beyond exposing injustice. Knowledge alone of abuse, injustice, and oppression will not actually change those conditions. The issue is, how do we use that knowledge to draw in the thousands of people that are necessary for an effective mass movement? How do we create the entry points into struggle, the organizations necessary to coordinate struggles? We can only even begin to imagine a movement on that scale when individuals move beyond the specific issue that directly affects them to also seeing the relationship or connection between oppressions.

  While it can appear as if we are a long way from that kind of struggle, when individuals are demonstrating and confronting the political status quo, people are suddenly open to new ideas and approaches that they may not have considered at an earlier time, when organizing was more difficult or when an individual did not consider themselves political. In moments like the one we are living through, political consciousness can develop very quickly and people’s ideas and expectations can change rapidly.

  But more importantly, we have to stop constraining our own political imagination into what is deemed pragmatic and possible. No social movement has ever begun with the question of what is realistic. Black people in the South called what we now refer to as the “civil rights movement” the “freedom movement.” When that movement did not go far enough, Black organizers in the south and north engaged in what they called the “Black Liberation Movement.” Even though these struggles included all kinds of people who had different ideas of how to achieve these goals, the point was that we have to say what we want. This is especially true today when there are those who will insist that we quiet down and be reasonable. Yes, we have to fight battles in the here and now but we also have to fight for what we want. We must also build independent organizations and political parties that are not connected to the Democratic Party, that do not rise and fall with the electoral cycle. We have to build organizations that are democratic, multiracial, and militant with a foundation in solidarity—“solidarity” meaning that even if you don’t experience a specific oppression, you understand that as ordinary people our fates are tied together and that one group’s liberation is dependent on the liberation of all the oppressed and exploited.

  This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important political statements to come out of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s. I want to quote from it because, to me, it embodies the spirit of solidarity and the struggle that is necessary to get to the world we want to live in. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist collective and political organization of Black and brown women that formed in the early 1970s and emerged as a radical left wing of the women’s movement of the era. They were not content with talk of shattering glass ceilings; rather, they wanted to shatter a system built on the exploitation and oppression of Black people, and especially Black women:

  We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation.

  In other words, we must fight a system based on the exploitation and theft of labor and resources, but we must also have the struggle against oppression, in all its forms, at the center of the struggle—or indeed there will be no struggle at all.

  Another world is possible, but it is an altogether different world from the one we are living in today. A world free of racism, nationalism and borders, religious bigotry, sexism, homophobia is possible—but it is a world that must be organized and fought for.

  THE MISOGYNIST-IN-CHIEF

  The Stakes for Women’s Rights in the Trump Era

  Elizabeth Schulte

  Lying in my bed this morning, I began to cry, not for myself but for the future girls who would someday have this feeling. For the girls headed to college this time next year, who will be facing a culture of misogyny that has been excused by Trump’s campaign and now validated by his victory.

  —Anonymous

  This is how a sexual assault survivor described her feelings in the pages of Teen Vogue the day after Donald Trump won the election. People all over the country shared her shock and fear, as the reality sunk in that someone who bragged about sexual assault was about to become leader of the “world’s greatest democracy.”

  Just weeks before the election, a 2005 tape of Trump bragging about using his celebrity to “do anything” to women, including grabbing them “by the pussy,” was released.1 Trump laughed off the incident, claiming that it was being blown out of proportion, that this was just “locker room banter.” That, however, wasn’t everyone’s reaction to the leaked tape of Trump joking about sexual assault. In the days after the tape’s release, the call volume to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network hotline increased about 35 percent.2

  Trump’s misogyny and contempt for women is in keeping with the anti-women policies he intends to carry out. During his first hundred days in office, he hit the ground running on a series of attacks on women’s rights. In his first month, he nominated conservative “constitutionalist” judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and antiabortion Republican Georgia representative Tom Price as secretary of health and human services. In April, he announced he was discontinuing US funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which provides reproductive healthcare around the world.

  As part of the administration’s proposal to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act in March 2017, “Trumpcare” included a provision to defund Planned Parenthood, the women’s healthcare provider that is the target of Republican lawmakers because it offers abortion services. This would have an impact not only on women seeking abortion services but on the millions of people who rely on Planned Parenthood for contraception and other healthcare.

  On March 27, 2017, “Equal Pay Day,” Trump revoked the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, which was instituted in 2014 to ensure that federal contractors don’t discriminate against women employees. And he remains completely unrepentant on the issue of sexual assault, publicly defending Fox News “personality” Bill O’Reilly, who was forced to resign amid charges of sexual harassment.3

  The Trump administration’s attack on women is linked to the other facets of its multipronged assault on working people—like the victims of domestic abuse who dropped their cases because they were undocumented and afraid they would be spotted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at court and be deported;4 or the Muslim airline employee wearing a hijab who was harassed and kicked by a Trump supporter who told her “Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you”;5 or the fast-food workers protesting a pattern of sexual harassment in their workplaces who could have faced a Labor Department headed by Carl’s Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder.6 These are just a few of many fronts in Trump’s war on working people.

  Attacking Women’s Reproductive Rights

  Through the years, Trump’s personal opinions about abortion have been hard to pin down—for example, in 1999, he told NBC’s Tim Russert, “I’m very pro-choice”—but he made his stance clear during the presidential campaign. When MSNBC’s Chris Matthews pressed him on his actual position on abortion, Trump responded that he was “pro-life” and “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have illegal abortions.7

  Since Ronald Reagan, Republican candidates have relied on the support of the conservative religious right for votes, and that means candidates must oppose women’s right to choose. Trump isn’t the first to reverse his position on abortion—George H. W. Bush did the same when he ran for president, which only underscores the
fact that the Republicans’ anti-choice platform has less to do with “morality” or being “pro-life” and everything to do with cynical political calculations.

  But this isn’t the only reason. The antiabortion stance fits nicely with a larger worldview shared by Trump and rest of the right, who would like nothing better than to turn back the clock on the gains of the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and women’s reproductive rights in particular. One of Trump’s first acts was an executive order that bans federal money going to international groups that perform or provide information on abortions. The “global gag order” will have a terrible impact on poor women around the world who depend on these funds to obtain necessary healthcare.

  Trump’s win also gave the green light to congressional Republicans who immediately rolled out their plan to ban federal funds to Planned Parenthood, and, in the states, anti-choice lawmakers couldn’t wait to get started with dozens of new restrictions on abortion services and abortion providers. As of January 12, 2017, at least forty-six antiabortion bills had already been introduced or were pending in fourteen states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Fifteen of them were all in the state of Missouri alone.8 And many more are expected to come.

  In recent years, the anti-choice right’s focus has been on laws claiming to “protect” women, like those that impose burdensome regulations on abortion facilities and doctors, or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws. However, the anti-choice tactic may be changing, as the bills focus more on the “rights” of the fetus or the beginning of conception. “More legislation we’re seeing now is focusing on the fetus and really ignores the woman and her situation completely,” said Elizabeth Nash at the Guttmacher Institute in January 2017. She added that activists expected to see “several hundred more provisions” before the first three weeks of Trump’s presidency had passed.9

  These restrictions will have terrible and even deadly consequences for women, particularly working-class and poor women, who will have a harder time gaining access to abortion services. These restrictions on reproductive rights also attempt to reinforce the idea the women can’t be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies and scapegoats them in many ways, like the divide-and-conquer policies that target immigrants and Muslims. On top of this, anti-choice activists demonstrated new confidence after Trump’s election to take their anti-women message to the streets, when they organized a day of action on February 11, 2017, that targeted Planned Parenthood clinics to demand they be defunded.

  These attempts to restrict women’s control over their bodies go hand in hand with other attacks on working-class women. By almost any measure—wages, housing, access to healthcare, discrimination, and harassment on the job—women are a long way from achieving equality. Let’s take the example of women with children, a group conservatives must at least claim they care about. According to the National Women’s Law Center, mothers who work outside the home make 71 percent of every dollar a man makes, Black mothers are paid 51 percent, and Latina mothers make just 46 percent.10 Now consider the fact that women are the sole or primary source of income in 40 percent of households with children, according to the Pew Research Center.11

  Emboldening the Right Wing

  In a broader sense, Trump’s polices emboldens the right, like the protests against Planned Parenthood, and also contributes to a general atmosphere that denigrates women and doesn’t take their liberation seriously, minimizing the effects of sexism and discrimination. It contributes to the fear felt by people like the anonymous rape survivor writing in Teen Vogue that sexist behavior and violence against women could become more acceptable with an unapologetic misogynist like Trump in power.

  In fact, just weeks after Trump’s election, there were some sickening examples of this, including a Greenwich, Connecticut, Republican politician named Christopher von Keyserling who grabbed a woman by the genitals and pinched her after telling her, “I love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct.” The woman said von Keyserling—who was charged with fourth-degree sexual assault—told her, “It would be your word against mine, and nobody will believe you.”12

  Part of the fear is fed by the knowledge that millions of people actually voted for Trump and supported the sexist and racist ideas that he spouted during his campaign. While in the end Trump lost the popular vote by almost three million, he did win enough votes to make it a narrow race against Hillary Clinton, someone the Democratic Party leadership and the media and political pundits all thought couldn’t possibly lose against Trump. His campaign rhetoric aimed to appeal to people’s anger and frustration over the status quo in Washington and the enormous gap between the people in the halls of power and the majority of people they claim to serve.

  Hillary Clinton on the other hand represented the model establishment candidate—decades in service of the Democratic Party, the ultimate insider whose response to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was to claim that “America is already great.” For millions of people, Clinton’s slogan rang hollow and was a perfect example of how out of touch her campaign, and the Democratic Party establishment, were with working people, even those on whom the party ordinarily depends for votes. This was the Democratic Party leadership’s choice for candidate—she sat on the board of Walmart in the 1980s, backed the crime bill and welfare reform in the 1990s, and supported a coup in Honduras in the 2000s, along with the Iraq War and covert drone warfare.

  And while Trump used a phony outsider populist pose to try to appeal to an audience fed up with business as usual in Washington, he also tried to appeal to another layer of people by providing scapegoats to their problems, appealing to them on the basis of racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and sexist ideas. He let the sexist comments fly, and if anyone called him on this filth, he replied that they should stop taking this so seriously. Gross sexist attacks aimed at Clinton were a central part of Trump’s campaign. At Trump’s speaking events, some supporters wore sexist T-shirts and buttons directed at Clinton—like the one that read “Trump That Bitch.”

  For many people making a choice in the 2016 election, and not just Trump supporters but those who looked to other alternatives like Bernie Sanders or the Green Party’s Jill Stein, Clinton symbolized the political establishment that has presided in Washington, an elite enriching itself while the working class’s living standards stagnated or declined. When that critique of Clinton came from people on the left, it explained why so many people were dissatisfied with Clinton and the Democratic Party and were looking for an alternative to both major parties. But in the hands of Trump, who added women-hating rhetoric to the mix, the bitterness toward Clinton became a toxic brew of class anger diverted into sexism—with feminism being attacked as one of the root problems of society.

  As Trump attacked Clinton for “playing the woman card” or laughed off accusations of sexual harassment, he was also taking aim at feminism generally, especially the gains of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was responsible for many of the rights that women have today and completely transformed the way that women are viewed in society. In the eyes of Trump and his supporters, that movement went “too far,” but the daily realities of working class women show the opposite—they still have a very long way to go.

  One of the alarming outcomes of the 2016 election was that some women actually turned out to vote for Trump. According to polling data released just after the election by FiveThirtyEight, among white women voters, Clinton lost to Trump by 10 percentage points, and among white women voters without a college degree by 28 points.13 In an interview just before the election, historian Stephanie Coontz explained how women facing economic precariousness were often hostile to a woman like Clinton, whose fortunes were rising as theirs were falling. “When they hear feminists talk about the glass ceiling, they don’t see that as the main issue,” Coontz said.14

  Coontz situated Trump’s popularity in the deterioration of the living standards for the work
ing-class family since the 1950s and 1960s, alongside the increasing fortunes of those at the very top of American society. These conditions made some low-paid workers an audience for ideas about how immigrants or Blacks were taking away their jobs, as well as conservative ideas about the traditional family. “The fact remains that women who have the fewest opportunities to compete successfully in the labor market are the ones who are much more likely to support the policies and values that reward a traditional division of labor in the household,” Coontz said.

  The Trump administration is likely on a collision course with many of these supporters, who may have voted for Trump with the hope of some kind of change and will see more attacks on their living standards and rights. Already, Trump’s budget promises to slice and dice at programs that benefit working families, such as heating and food assistance.