by Lance Selfa
While the Clinton campaign emphasized breaking the glass ceiling and voting for the first woman president, it had nothing to offer working women. By and large, the problem wasn’t how popular Trump was but how deeply unpopular Clinton and the party she represents turned out to be.
Clinton and the Democratic Party Strategy
It’s impossible to explain the result of the election without taking into account how, among a layer of people, support for Trump coincided with a rejection of Clinton and the politics she represented. While women who voted by and large chose Clinton over Trump—including 94 percent of Black women and 68 percent of Latina women—Clinton failed to turn them out in the numbers she needed to win.15
As The Democrats: A Critical History author Lance Selfa pointed out in an interview after the election, “Women composed about 52 percent of the electorate—about equal to their percentage of the voting-eligible population. In 2012, however, women made up 54 percent of the electorate—higher than their share of the voting-eligible electorate. So, women turned out to be one more group that Clinton couldn’t motivate to the polls in the numbers they did for Obama.”16
So, as Trump fed red meat to his supporters, Clinton didn’t lift a finger to invigorate supporters and, to quote Listen, Liberal! author Thomas Frank, played the role of the “complacency candidate,” sure that the promise of the status quo was enough to win the election.17 Instead of offering something positive for the left to vote for, Clinton offered more of the same, and because she was so sure that people would vote for her because she wasn’t Trump, the lesser-evil Clinton offered very little to working-class voters, including women.
The major middle-class women’s organizations, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthood, fell in line behind Clinton. More left-wing voters who dared to support Democrat Bernie Sanders were either condemned as “brocialists” who didn’t care about sexism or, worse, spoilers who would be responsible for Trump’s taking the White House. The reality, however, is that it wasn’t just white males who supported Sanders and his message. According to an April 2017 Harvard-Harris Poll, 73 percent of African Americans, 68 percent of Hispanics, 62 percent of Asian Americans, and 58 percent of women approved of Sanders.18
The Democratic Party establishment responded with what could be called “identity politics from above”—shaming people into voting for Clinton with the argument that only the most privileged could even consider not voting for the only candidate that could defeat Trump. The same threats applied to supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, because even though she was a woman, she wasn’t the woman, Hillary Clinton.
According to the Democratic Party, women had no choice but to vote for Clinton, because if they didn’t, women’s rights would be in peril. Relying on revulsion toward Trump and the fear of what his presidency would mean for women’s rights, Clinton refused to put forward demands that would actually have an impact on working-class women and, in fact, opposed these demands, including a federal fifteen-dollar minimum wage.
What the Clinton campaign failed to understand, or ignored, was that a growing number of people, including women, were repelled by Trump but also by the Democratic Party status quo that Clinton exemplified. They decided to sit out the election. Many voters, among them women, didn’t want to vote for a candidate with such a long history of enriching Corporate America at the expense of workers. They were also fed up with a party that manipulated supporters’ fear of what could happen to women’s rights if a Republican won, yet did nothing to actually fight for these rights itself.
Democratic Party leaders, however, drew their own conclusions from the election. Their takeaway from their pathetic failure to mobilize support for their candidate was not that they needed to find ways to appeal to their traditional liberal support, but, instead, to attract Trump supporters. Some have concluded that the party is too closely associated with hot-button social issues like abortion rights and should begin focusing on purely “economic” issues (as if having a child doesn’t have a profound economic effect on a woman).
As part of its “Come Together, Fight Back” tour in April, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) made a stop to lend support to anti-choice Democratic Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello. Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America pointed out that the DNC decision made this “fight back tour” look more like “a throwback tour for women and our rights…. If Democrats think the path forward following the 2016 election is to support candidates who substitute their own judgement and ideology for that of their female constituents, they have learned all the wrong lessons and are bound to lose. It’s not possible to have an authentic conversation about economic security for women that does not include our ability to decide when and how we have children.”19
The Resistance to Trump
This was the backdrop to Trump’s taking office in January. And while the Democratic Party politicians and the liberal organizations that support them fought fiercely to coerce people on the left into voting for Clinton, they didn’t have much fight in them once Trump was actually elected.
Hillary Clinton set the tone the day after the election when she told supporters, “I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, we must accept this result. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” More Democratic politicians followed her lead, as did several trade union leaders. Women’s organizations like NOW followed their lead and, despite their huge mailing lists, didn’t call a protest in response to Trump’s election in the immediate aftermath of the election.
But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a response. Within weeks, a Facebook invitation started by a grandmother in Hawaii grew into a much larger call for a march in Washington, DC, on inauguration weekend, involving experienced activists who saw the importance of putting the demands of women of color at the center of the march. The resulting statement of principles included decidedly progressive demands for equal pay; paid family leave; freedom from sexual violence; the “dismantling” of the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system; the expansion and protection of LGBTQ rights; and reproductive justice, including access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people.20
When January 21, 2017, came, some four million protesters took the streets in Washington, DC, and in local demonstrations around the United States. Described as the largest day of demonstrations in US history, and far outpacing anyone’s expectations, it revealed an important truth about Trump’s America—there are people who not only are angry about what Trump might do in the White House but also are ready to be counted in the streets. The messages of the homemade signs that protesters brought to the Women’s Marches showed not only their anger at the Trump administration but also their diverse concerns: “Women’s rights are human rights,” “No human is illegal,” “Black Lives Matter,” “No means no,” and “This is not normal.” Many of the signs reflected a thirst for solidarity and showed the potential to organize a fightback against Trump’s many-fronted war—from defending reproductive rights to ending deportations to defending Arabs and Muslims to fighting for LGBTQ rights.
Similar early signs of a willingness and eagerness to protest were demonstrated on February 11, 2017, when thousands of women turned out to counterprotest anti-choice forces demanding that the federal government defund Planned Parenthood. In most cases, the political wing of Planned Parenthood tried to stop the counter-protests from happening, but women still came out to defend their clinic. As one protester explained, “I’m tired of being told to write letters that never get read. I’m done with writing letters!”21 One could imagine what would have happened if Planned Parenthood had called demonstrations itself.
As women’s rights supporters look down the barrel of four years of Donald Trump and an emboldened right wing, there will be a lot of fights ahead. There are also a number of important debates about the best way to organize that struggle. For several decades, focusi
ng on electing Democrats to protect women’s rights has been the dominant strategy of liberal women’s organizing. In the process, these groups have echoed the positions of the Democratic Party.
So, for instance, as Democratic politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton changed the conversation away from the confident defense of women’s right to abortion that existed during the reproductive rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, so did liberal women’s organizations. In the 1990s, the Clintons’ refrain was that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare” and that Democrats should even seek “common ground” with those who opposed abortion. Instead of challenging this position, liberal women’s groups took up this message as their own. Instead of acting as groups that pressure the Democrats to do the right thing, they were the ones that were pressured—into doing the wrong thing.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has taken women’s votes for granted and done very little to earn them. During his 1992 campaign for president, Bill Clinton vowed to help enact the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would have codified Roe v. Wade in federal law. In the first year of his administration—and with Democratic control of both the Senate and House—the measure died without reaching the floor of either chamber. Barack Obama made the same promise to enact FOCA before he got into office; he also broke that promise.
There’s a potential to build a movement to take on Trump, and it’s a good time to start a conversation about what will make our movement stronger. With the sides in this fight so clear, there has been no better time in years for activists to make a confident defense of women’s rights, including the right to safe, legal, and affordable abortion. Activists can’t allow the Democratic Party to dictate our demands to suit the party’s electoral ambitions.
The Women’s Marches provided an important snapshot of what public opinion really looks like in the United States—a largely spontaneous outpouring of anger and resistance to Trump’s election. After decades of the mainstream women’s organizations prioritizing campaigning for Democrats over an unapologetic defense of women’s rights, you could see the potential for more grassroots organizing for women’s rights in the streets, expanding on recent campaigns like those of campus activists who demanded that their university administrations take sexual assault seriously or fast-food workers who shone a light on sexual harassment at work.
The Women’s Marches—as well as the many other protests that followed in the weeks and months after the inauguration, like the protests against Muslim bans at the airports and, in spring 2017, marches for science and for climate justice—also showed the widespread eagerness to express solidarity with those under attack. As the Trump administration continues, it will take careful and determined organizing to build the kind of networks and organizations that will be strong enough to stand up to Trump’s attack on our rights and create a political climate where sexists like Donald Trump are protested, not elected president. In the process, we can build the groundwork for a resistance, and a left, strong enough to start putting its own demands for equality and liberation on the table.
TRUMP, ISLAMOPHOBIA, AND US POLITICS
An Interview with Deepa Kumar
Donald Trump is no lone wolf. Islamophobia can be found across the political mainstream. In the first few months after Trump’s election, hate crimes against Muslims and those who “look Muslim” spiked.1
In the first week of the Trump administration, Trump issued an executive order banning the entry of all refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries into the United States. Spontaneous mass demonstrations and several court decisions blocked Trump’s “Muslim ban,” but the administration’s Islamophobic policies continued in other ways.
As Deepa Kumar, the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, reminds us, to dismiss Trump as a crank overlooks the pervasiveness of Islamophobia and how its conservative and liberal variants have reinforced one another. This interview, a version of which first appeared in Jacobin in December 2015,2 discusses how US politics came to this point.
Kumar refers to several incidents contemporary to the time of the interview: the coordinated attacks in Paris by gunmen claiming loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in November 2015, killing 130; a mass shooting of attendees at a public health department holiday party in San Bernardino, California, by a married couple of immigrants from Pakistan in December 2015; and an antiabortion extremist’s late November 2015 assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing three.
We’re seeing a toxic rise in Islamophobia that reaches its apex on the far right, but also extends to the center left. The same week that Donald Trump proposed halting all Muslim immigration in December 2015, for instance, the liberal writer Michael Tomasky effectively called on Muslims in the United States to prove that they’re good Americans. What do you make of the current climate? How worried should we be about the uptick in this sort of rhetoric?
We should worry for at least two reasons. First, we have seen an escalation of Islamophobia and the hate crimes that accompany it in the aftermath of San Bernardino and Paris. Glenn Greenwald has compiled a list of threats and attacks on Muslims over just a one-week period, and it is quite alarming. I know of friends who, for the first time since 9/11, are wearing hoodies over their hijabs because they are fearful of attacks by random strangers.
While racist and xenophobic attacks are not new, they have been intensifying. We have seen waves of this kind of backlash since 9/11, such as during the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy and the Boston Marathon bombing, to name just two, and with every new incident the rhetoric reaches new heights. This is the new reality of the “war on terror,” with Islamophobia integrated into the very fabric of US society because it serves to justify empire and the bloated national security state.
The second reason we should be concerned is the timing. First, the upsurge of anti-Muslim rhetoric comes on the heels of the Paris attacks, and the already polarized international climate that those attacks created. Second, it has been swept into election-year politics, with the Republicans jumping onto the Islamophobia bandwagon to score political points, as they have in previous election years.
The far right and the well-funded Islamophobic network have espoused blatantly racist ideas for some time now, but their rhetoric can spill over into the mainstream only when mainstream politicians and figures echo their talking points. What we have seen since the Paris attacks is that far-right ideas produced by a global Islamophobic network, or what has been called the “counterjihad movement,” have been echoed and amplified by various Republican presidential candidates, Trump being the most vitriolic of them.
A recent report from a UK-based group on the counterjihad movement documents the global scope of this movement and how their ideas have moved from the margins to the mainstream. People like Trump play an instrumental role in facilitating this process.
Now, many people have denounced Trump for his comment about halting Muslim immigration, including the other Republican candidates. The general consensus in the political establishment, and among pundits, is that he went too far and should be disqualified from running for the presidency.
Trump countered by saying that his plan is not unlike what President Roosevelt did in 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he signed an executive order authorizing the internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent (of which over 60 percent were American-born). Indeed, Trump is correct in pointing out that both Democrats and Republicans have made use of racist policing to help consolidate the national security state and promote US imperialism, from the era of the Cold War to the war on terror. In fact, one could make a strong case that the connection between the two phenomena dates to the very founding of the country itself.
But Trump need not have looked to 1942, or earlier, for a historical precedent. His internment proposal has already been in process, albeit in different forms, since 9/11, with tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants and citizens having passed
through the prison-industrial complex.
Immediately after 9/11, about twelve hundred Muslim citizens and noncitizens were summarily arrested and questioned by the FBI and various state and local law enforcement agencies. Despite the fact that not even one of these twelve hundred was found to have connections to 9/11 or terrorism, the pattern of detention and deportation has only grown since then. Mosques, community centers, and even children’s sports leagues have been subjected to surveillance, during both the Bush and the Obama presidencies.
When Trump called for a database to register all Muslims, Hillary Clinton tweeted that this was “shocking rhetoric.” Yet, she ignored similar processes that have been at work for over a decade, such as the 2002 National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which had its origins in her husband’s 1996 terrorism bill. The system requires that male immigrants aged sixteen and older from twenty-five different countries be photographed, fingerprinted, and interviewed, and their financial information declared. Already by fall 2003, more than eighty-three thousand immigrant residents were registered through this system.
So, we have to remember that we are in this situation today because both Democrats and Republicans have contributed to it. Donald Trump is playing today the kind of role that Enoch Powell once played in the United Kingdom with his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, which included racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric and made him a politically polarizing figure.
A. Sivanandan described Powell’s effect as follows: “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after.” We have seen a similar dynamic in the United States since the late 1970s, which is why the range of political discussion is so narrow in this country. This is why one cannot dismiss Trump as a crank or a lone wolf who will have little impact on the system.