monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

But this is the way democracy is supposed to work — and the reason these men are getting so upset is that the force of female protest right now feels like it has the potential to shake our power structure to its core.

Twenty-seven years ago this fall, Anita Hill, came forward, not of her own volition, with claims that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas was confirmed to the Court nonetheless, but a wave of angry women ran for office in the wake of Hill’s treatment by the committee, and her story was crucial to establishing “sexual harassment” as a form of gender discrimination. The seeds sown during the Hill hearings have come into full flower in the past two years, as the #MeToo movement erupted following the election of a multiply accused sexual harasser, and angry women jumped into electoral contests around the country.

It’s those women who’ve been winning primaries, toppling men who’ve occupied seats of power since God was a boy. The partisan gender gap has become a chasm, a fault line splitting open under the pressure of so much rage. Based on polls going into the midterms, the gap has grown to 33 points, largely because white women — a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and have supported Republicans in all but two elections since 1952 — have shifted toward backing Democrats over Republicans, 52-38; among millennials, 55 points separates women who favor Democrats and men who prefer Republicans. It’s angry women who’ve staged teachers’ strikes, who’ve knocked powerful men off their perches at television networks and in the Senate; it’s often female elected officials who’ve linked arms with the angry masses. It was Kamala Harris, whose place on the Judiciary Committee, along with Cory Booker’s, opened up after the resignation of Al Franken and the loss of Roy Moore — both sidelined by the agitations of women — who first interrupted the Kavanaugh hearings and called for an adjournment.
Harris was told that she was “out of order.”

But the challenges deemed by ideological foes to be “out of order” may be so discomfiting in part because they suggest a yearning for a new order.

The idealized vision of what this country might be was born of the virtuous, and sometimes chaotic, fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it as patriotic catechism — give me liberty or give me death; live free or die; don’t tread on me. We carve our Founders’ anger into buildings, visit their broken bells, name contemporary political factions after the temper tantrums they threw, dressed in native garb, dumping tea in a harbor. We call these events a revolution.

This is the anger of white men, of course. Their anger is revered, respected as the stimulus for necessary political change. Because they’ve always been the rational norm, the intellectual ideal, their dissatisfactions are assumed to be grounded in reason — not the emotional muck of femininity.
(This isn’t just in the past. Think about how the anger of white men in the Rust Belt is often treated as politically diagnostic, as a guide to their understandable frustrations: the loss of jobs and stature, the shortage of affordable health care, the scourge of drugs. Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives, a response to police killings of African Americans initiated by women activists, is considered by the FBI to pose a threat of “retaliatory violence” and discussed as a “hate group” by Meghan McCain.)

As nobly enraged as the Founders were at being taxed and policed by a government in which they had no voice or vote, they failed, we know, to establish a true representative democracy. Their government was one in which a minority ruled. The few cleared the field of competition by subjugating the many — the enslaved, women — and then built their economic and political power on the labor of those they’d deprived of any say in civic or social life.

But to keep minority rule in place, order must be maintained, as the honorable senator from California was peremptorily instructed. It is order, after all, that throughout our history has worked to suppress the anger of women, to discourage us from speaking it or even feeling it. And when women have gotten mad, they’ve been ignored or marginalized, laughed or blanched at, their vehement objections treated as irrational theater, inconsequential to the important matter of governing the nation. This has always been an error. Look to the start, the germinating seeds, of nearly every major social and political movement that has shaped this nation — from abolition to suffrage to labor to civil rights and LGBTQ rights to, yes, feminism — and you will find near its start the passionate dissent of women.

Consider Mumbet, the enslaved Massachusetts woman who’d later be known as Elizabeth Freeman. Seething at the abuse she suffered at the hands of her owners — including being hit with a hot shovel by her “missis” (“I never covered the wound,” Mumbet reportedly said, and when people asked her what happened to her arm in front of her owner, “I only answered, ‘Ask Missis!’ ”) — Freeman applied the revolutionary rhetoric she heard around the home in which she worked to her own circumstances. She petitioned for her freedom, and her case was instrumental to Massachusetts’s abolition of slavery in 1783.

it is simultaneously true that the rage women felt at the way Anita Hill was treated by the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee inspired record numbers of them to run for office, and a record number of them to come to Washington in 1992, the same year that Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived in the White House. President Clinton’s own abuse of sexual power would derail the feminist conversation around harassment, and complicate his wife’s later campaigns for the presidency. But the rage over her 2016 loss to Trump would help set off the contemporary #MeToo campaign, reigniting an awareness of sexual harassment that returns us now to the spectacular injustice done to Hill, nearly three decades ago.

This work of perfecting our union is often circular, always daunting; these efforts take time; they require our resilience and determination. Rage helps drive them forward, through the bleakest periods.

“It is probably going to be years,” the young activist Emma González told reporters in 2018 about her battle against the gun lobby. “And at this point, I don’t know that I mind. Nothing that’s worth it is easy … We could very well die trying to do this. But we could very well die not trying to do this, too. So why not die for something rather than nothing?”

When there is such a huge and growing gulf between where our governing, globalist elites are on Islam and immigration – and where ordinary people are on Islam and immigration – how can there ever, possibly, be a happy ending?

cj: Anyone like to answer that?

Summer of Rage White men are the minority in the United States — no wonder they get uncomfortable when their power is challenged.

The handwringing over white men is what has kept newspapers publishing endless stories about Trump’s base and their unwavering devotion to him, all while ignoring the grassroots rage spreading through the majority: the young, often female, and often women of color candidates who’ve been streaming into American politics for the past year and a half, winning in special elections and Democratic primaries, sometimes — as on Tuesday, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Joe Crowley in a New York City primary — toppling old, powerful favorites.

This inattention to — and, at worst, disregard for — the political exertions of a furious and often female left is what led many major news outlets, including the New York Times and MSNBC, to be caught by surprise at the upset win of the 28-year-old former bartender and organizer for Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign over ten-term incumbent Crowley. In its story about the upset, the Times reported that Ocasio-Cortez had not been covered by “national” publications, and only in places like “Elite Daily, Mic and Refinery29,” publications that were “popular among millennials and women.” The Times issued a correction, acknowledging that those publications, which are indeed aimed at young people and women, were also national, but the ease of the original locution was telling: Women are more than half the population (and millennials a quarter of it!) but news outlets that cater to them are not considered national, also a code word for “serious.”

This view was reinforced by CNN host Brian Stelter, who is based in New York City and covers the media, and who revealed on Twitter that he’d only heard of Ocasio-Cortez eight days before her victory, despite the fact that she had received lots of coverage: in the Cut, in Vogue, in The Village Voice, on WNYC, and at the Intercept, which has doggedly reported on her. Again, it wasn’t just individual white guys who were caught by surprise. MSNBC’s Joy Reid also conveyed the relative lack of notice given Ocasio-Cortez on cable news, tweeting that political reporters were “doing an Ocasio-Cortez crash course tonight, myself included.” Even though one of Ocasio-Cortez’s ads had gone viral, even though she was all over certain parts of social media, the electoral threat she posed had remained off the radar of the political media. As have the women who’ve been leading protests and engaging in unprecedented levels of political organizing around the country, who’ve been forming new progressive groups to change the face of power, who’ve have been winning upset elections from Virginia to Nebraska to the Bronx.

News media hasn’t taken these groups as seriously as they’ve taken Trump supporters because they don’t take people of color, they don’t take women — or the validity of their political anger — very seriously.

Twenty-seven years ago this fall, Anita Hill, came forward, not of her own volition, with claims that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

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