The Women’s March in Washington DC, January 2018
Written for America Unfiltered, the joint project of EA WorldView and The Clinton Institute:
Is it possible to put the Humpty Dumpty pieces of the old Democrat party alliances back together? Or, at least, hold it together long enough to get the numbers of people willing to hold their noses and vote for Joe Biden?
What form of left politics will defeat Donald Trump?
Learning from Mrs. America
A commonplace of American political history is that the 1970s seeded the new configurations that have led to our current moment. The decade’s economic crisis eventually loosened its grip. Looking backwards this was the moment when the long postwar boom began to end.
Today many see this time as the decisive turn away from the Keynesian New Deal and towards neo-liberalism, an outlook far more comfortable with the creation of economic inequality even if it meant ultimately dismantling the astonishingly successful construction of a broad American middle class.
Mrs. America, the 2020 prestige television series, uses the failed campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to tell a tale and warning about the political transformations within the 1970s.
As the series portrays the story, the recipe for the New Right was baked in by Midwestern Catholic Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett), who first saw the possibilities of a GOP alliance that would embrace white Southern evangelicals. The fusion of Bible Belt social prejudice with Goldwater-style xenophobia would eventually topple the Republican center-right’s equipoise. The party of Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford would be vanquished in favor of one shaped in Donald Trump’s form.
Mrs. America seeks to mollify its assumed liberal feminist audience by eventually suggesting that winners lose. While Schlafly’s political insight helped stop ERA, it did not lead to her personal reward. Viewers know where the large story goes, though, and are left with a gritted admiration for Schlafly’s vision on how one can build a winning coalition for rule by a neo-conservative state.
The women’s rights leaders – Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Jill Ruckelshaus – are presented as throwing away their initial advantage of popular and party support for ERA’s passage. Gifted with the roots of the Democrat Party’s coalition of liberal WASPs, ethnic groups, and Black Americans, the pro-ERA leaders are shown as not seeing the strengths of diversity within American women.
Mrs. America culminates with an episode on the 1977 Houston National Women’s Conference. An anti-ERA lieutenant to Schlafly, a non-historical figure played by Sarah Paulson, wanders in a drunk and accidentally drugged state through a wide spectrum of women’s meetings, ranging from martial arts training to consciousness-raising sessions. Paulson’s character sees what the national women’s leader did not — the continued strength of a liberal politics of coalition-building.
Cross-Front or Intersectional Politics?
The challenge of making a machine that, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie, can beat Trump has led to a basic question for progressive politics in the US and elsewhere: cross-front or intersectional Left?
The German Green Left politician and sociologist Jutta Ditfurth has criticized the rise of “cross-front” (Querfront) politics: the idea that in order to win elections, the Left should incorporate right-wing views. A cross-front movement seeks to avoid notions of being seen as “politically correct”, lest the left be seen as either elitist or exclusionary to a perceived white, working-class “silent majority” constituency.
This position might consider Hilary Clinton’s comment on the “deplorables” as a main cause for the Democrat party’s defeat. We see this tendency in UK’s post-mortem on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s thumping loss in the recent election. Roger Hallam, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, sought to mould the group as “beyond politics” and willing to be “hypocritical” by taking donor money, initially gained in anti-environmental profiteering and open to those with racist and homophobic views.
An alternative to cross-front positions is intersectional politics. “Intersectionality” was initially raised in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective and coined as a term in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw to mean the multiple identities an individual might carry, for instance, Black and Female. Today, younger activists use the word in a more collective sense, closer to the idea of a rainbow movement, a coalition of different groups who are willing to share and promote each other’s interests.
An intersectional left politics believes in confidently speaking truth (to power) and that there is a larger electoral base out there, larger than the right-wing media will admit, that does not want triangulated or throttled claims. The intersectional left position, today exemplified by Bernie Saunders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, feels that America is ready for real change, and the Democrat National Committee’s cross-frontism is a cookbook for generational defeat.
