Would anybody at vox be as concerned right now about what went down in the election had Hillary won?
I have my doubts, because a Clinton win would have given the appearance of victory over misogyny. Suck it trolls, Hillary came out on top.
I’ve put this on other posts on bb regarding the election, it may be a broken record. I live in southwestern pa, where Trump won by a paper thin margin. I emphasize paper thin. I am well aware of the unfair misogyny used against Clinton, I’ve heard it all my life. I have a tape in my head of relatives, neighbor’s and everyone in between playing back 25 years on how their views of Hillary Clinton evolved, including the misogyny. I know it and get it.
And despite all that, she only barely lost. The problem with the quoted article is how it ends. What are we supposed to do? It basically leaves the reader off at a hopeless destination where the only action moving forward is sharing the reality of an unfair system with others.
But that isn’t the only option. Next time an election happens people that don’t live in a swing state can get in a car and drive their ass to one and help go door to door for the cause. Because the three of us that actually showed up to do it could have used some damn help on the ground and a little less internet patronizing.
I apologize if I sound bitter. I am, a little anyway
Actually I’m not sure I disagree with that either. What I’m saying is misogyny is a fact. There’s no sense whingeing about it. What’s needed for a woman candidate to win the presidency is that she has to be inspiring enough and have a campaigning style effective enough to transcend it. HRC had neither.
The only thing similar to “settling on one determining factor at the expense of others” i see happening here is in the words of those who are claiming that misogyny wasn’t a significant factor. I’ve seen no-one arguing that it is the sole factor, or even that it is the only significant factor. I can’t even imagine how it is possible to learn the actual truth of what was “the determining factor” in a situation like this*. Those you are arguing against may not be arguing the (to me, obvious) statement that misogyny played a non-null role (i.e., had some effect) in this election and may be arguing a less-obvious position**, but they’re not the ones i’ve seen arguing that they know the singular or definitive cause of this particular situation.
* Seriously. I’ve been thinking about this and the best you could do is something like the mathematical study of voting. You would have certain factors (A, B, C, …) whose presence or absence could change the outcome and you would have to look at all the possible combinations of what factors were present, while keeping everything else stable (e.g., rerun the election (including rewinding people’s memories) with everything the same except change Hillary Clinton so that she’s male but otherwise the same, or so that she’s running against Romney instead of Trump, or both) and see which way the out comes.
In weighted voting theory we talk about a voter having power if there are voting coalitions in which this voter changing their vote changes the result of the election. For example, in the Futurama episode wherein a fellow defrostee takes over Planet Express in true 1980’s “dazzling veneer” style there is a vote on who should be the new chairman and a little old lady with one share of stock and a change-eating cat. This little old lady has voting power (although not much) in this episode because the voting coalition present is one of the few (hence the “not much”) in which her one share was enough to depose that cat-hater Professor Hubert Farnsworth.
** Let it be known that i don’t think they are wrong, however.
You’re not the only one! Again, I’m bitter about people continuing to dismiss this issue as unimportant, when it’s often a daily life issue for some of us. So I feel ya and understand that.
Honestly, I don’t think it needs to have a ready made solution for us. Our solution is the hard work of changing attitudes, opinions, and the primary way to do that is the change the political reality. It doesn’t have a pithy, quick answer, because we already know that the answer is the hard gritty work of changing reality from the ground up. That’s what many feminists in the 70s did. That’s what the gay rights movement did. that’s what the classical civil rights movement did. They moved mountains by chipping away at it, a little at a time, and physical moving them. I think we can talk about issues and not have to also at the same time have ready made answers for them.
The multiple causes is the key. If there where 10 causes for a ship sinking, the lessons I want to learn the most are about the easiest failures of the 10 that I could have done something about. The low hanging fruit.
I’m simply trying to be the optimist in stating that, coming from a place where Clinton barely lost, there was a bunch of low hanging fruit that was left on the tree. A big symbolic victory against misogyny would have occurred had many of us bothered to pick it.
Understanding that it exists is important. But if we’re going to look to elections for vindication of progress in social values, we should also want to figure out how to deliver a better result, right?
I am not convinced that it is.If we saw a huge swing of voters towards Trump, of people nobody’s predicted just showing up all of a sudden and overwhelmingly voting for him, then yeah, we would need to explain this populist swing and ‘rabid misogynist’ might be the ticket: people who normally wouldn’t vote for some arcane reason having to do with the overuse of the word ‘cuck’ suddenly do because they can’t abide a woman president.
But that’s not what we see. Trump didn’t win. Hilary lost. And she lost because people that normally vote democrat didn’t vote for her. Now you might say that those didn’t vote because of misogyny, but firstly, the misogyny cluster of personal failings generally speaking skews GOP, and secondly, by far the most popular protest vote in the group was Jill Stein. It is… unlikely, that rabid woman-haters went and voted for her.
And lastly, I’m sure that some people not believing that women should lead had some impact on the choice they made in the voting booth but I suspect this was not a large influence[1] and that it was countermanded by all the people who were only enthused about Hilary because at least she’d shatter the ultimate glass ceiling.
[1] Everywhere else in the world rich and poor alike elected female heads of state and government without much fuss. A woman is prime minister of the UK and nobody so much as noticed. I don’t think the culture is so different that what’s ho-hum in Europe is critical in America.
Part of it is also that she and all her people had been assuming that she was going to be president for years leading up to the election. That attitude showed through, to some extent.
I don’t think we have consensus on that and I don’t think we’re going to get consensus on it. If people believed things about Hillary that they wouldn’t have if she was a man … I count that as misogyny keeping them from voting for Hillary.
Hillary lost on the basis of the electoral college and, in some of the determining states, on margins thin enough that she might have won if not for what boils down to misogyny.
