If you are already angry because you feel fellow disaffected Clinton supporters are trying to pressure you to vote for the evil empire, turn back now. This post will only serve to piss you off further. As far as I’m concerned, you own your vote, and that’s good enough for me. Good luck with it.
But for those of you who’ve decided on McCain and want talking points, or who are still considering options and are open to any rational argument, allow me to bend your ear a little bit about my own reasoning on this topic. This post ended up being so long that I’ve decided to split it into two or three parts. I apologize for that, but I couldn’t just experience a paradigm shift and change directions on a dime. Intellectual consistency takes time and processing, and above all, paying excruciating attention to details. Look for the follow-up posts this week.
The Logic
I’ve created a Venn diagram to get us started.
The diagram is built around one vote, and the #1 and #2 issues to this particular voter. The sets, then, include Sexism, Corruption, and the major options for the one vote. I have labeled the intersection of sets one and two (the issues) as “Feminist Values,” for I hope obvious reasons.
I have assigned the characters according to their current record and rhetoric. For instance, Joe Biden belongs to the Party that claims it is for women, and he himself claims a feminist mantle because of the Violence Against Women Act, but his history is overtly sexist (see Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas). Likewise Obama. John McCain is currently talking about reform, and has somewhat of a history of it, but he belongs to the party most recently known for blatant corruption.
Finally, Sarah Palin has experienced the political corruption of sexism, and has both a rhetoric and a record of reform (local news links, pre-VP selection, they tend to be more trustworthy, IMO), even though she also belongs to the party most recently known for blatant reform. Remember that party loyalty is not a value of the sets. Palin falls in the shaded “Feminist Values” area because her record, rhetoric and experience match the values more closely than any other major party candidate. That makes her the major candidate most representative of feminist values running today, according only to these sets.
Those are my sets, because they are my values and my #1 and #2 issues. You can substitute your own, and I encourage you to do so.
Arguments
For me, the sexism of this entire year, everywhere I go, has been so startlingly in-your-face and insidious, that I now realize sexism in America is one of the most important issues we’re facing today. Hostility toward women, especially sexually unavailable women with feminist inclinations, is as pervasive as I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime. Because of the events of this election season, American women are currently threatened with an even more serious loss of power than we faced with the conservative backlash that Susan Faludi documented so well.
I also see a global loss of momentum in terms of feminine empowerment. Just as American influence is on the decline, so empowering women, and people in general, is on the decline. It’s all been slipping for some time now. This has given rise to the sort of events that Dr. Socks routinely reports on, and these events will get much worse and much more frequent due to a global trend in aggressive foreign policy, and due to China’s growth and population policy. Many of the events happening outside of America right now were actually foreshadowed at the U.N. Fourth World Conference for Women (1995), which focused on The Girl Child, and at which Hillary Clinton delivered her famous Women’s Rights are Human Rights speech. There is a reason they held the conference on The Girl Child in Beijing, you know.
I have come to the considered conclusion that we cannot afford to lose another inch of power as women in the U.S. Even as we defend ourselves, we may soon be called upon to defend our sisters around the world, and we need to be in a position to do it. It’s akin to a domino argument, if that helps you picture it. If we lose more power, they lose more power, and we will be less effective in driving equality throughout the world. Conversely, people outside of America can achieve that equality faster if we insist on nothing less than complete equality in America. If Democrats win after all of the sexism they have displayed this year against the only two females in the race, it could eventually effect billions of women, regardless of nationality.
Reform is my second issue. Sexism is a form of political corruption, and reform is the cure for it. But corruption also applies to more than just sexism, the same way choice applies to much more than abortion. The Republican Party is in serious need of reform, and has been for a while. Did you ever expect to have the opportunity to reform it? Neither did I. There are many reasons for that, not the least of which is deliberately obfuscating rhetoric on the left, which we will get to later in this series. The Democratic Party obviously needs to be reformed too, and it is much more serious, I think, than any of us former democrats thought. I’ll also go into that in the next part of the series.
Finally, I am an American, and my system of government says nothing about political parties. The founding document, The United States Constitution, uses the word Party five times, not once in reference to political parties. So, when I talk about reform, I’m talking about taking the country back from the parties. I’m talking about unifying with others of all political walks and demanding power be returned to us. I do not intend to simply cast my vote for John McCain, then kick back and wait to see if my bet paid off. I intend to be there to petition him, and other elected politicians, regardless of party, to address our nation’s most pressing issues. I intend to put them on notice that I am on to their rhetorical games, and I intend to continue to tell the truth about what I see and hear.
It does not stop with Nobama. We’ve got to get out of our comfort zones and stop believing all the pretty lies. This is a real political risk to take considering the circumstances, but having considered all of this, and keeping in mind that sexism and reform are my two most important issues, I think McCain, and certainly Palin, have a better chance of offering me something along those lines. They certainly have more of a record of it. Winning alone will help, because a glass ceiling will be broken, and we’ll be that much closer to a party system we can actually tinker with. It will not refute sexism, especially the New Sexism of the young, but it will send a powerful message that women are a valuable constituency, and you can’t play those games in the political realm if you want their votes.
Other posts in this series:
Part 2
