The Dems’ Sarahstein
By Mitch Berg
Feminism, at one point, was about “empowering women”; making them legally and socially equal to men”, or things to that effect. I’m usually loathe to try to actually define feminism, since for most of the past thirty years most “feminists” have been more concerned about the semiotics of defining degrees of victimization than about actually doing anything useful for women.
Of course, the Clinton years – where organized feminism dropped all pretense of being about women in favor of being about the politics of infanticide – stripped away a good chunk of the canard for those who were paying attention. And if the organized “feminist” movement had any remaining credibility, the Palin episode should have fed it into the wood chipper.
“It’s not about actually being able to go where your merits take you“, the message has become; “it’s about abortion, and about institutionalizing victimization, and not a lot else.”
And so the kinds of women that feminism would have held out as dreams and ideals a generation ago – Sarah Palin, Condoleeza Rice and others – are excoriated by organized “feminism”; while they’ve succeeded, and done it their way (Rice by leading an academic and political life not tied to any particular guy, Palin by having a family and a wildly successful political career), they have neither supported the civil sacrament of infanticide nor equated federal funding and programs with achievement.
And so, behind the backs right in front of the eyes of Big Feminism a crop of real feminists – women who actually embody the higher original ideals of feminism, merit and equality – have grown up and taken their places and, to the mortification of Big Feminism, realized that the Empress has no clothes is so 1972:
R Tammy Bruce, writing at RCP:
Make no mistake – the Democratic Party and its nominee have created the powerhouse that is Sarah Palin, and the party’s increased attacks on her (and even on her daughter) reflect that panic.
The party has moved from taking the female vote for granted to outright contempt for women. That’s why Palin represents the most serious conservative threat ever to the modern liberal claim on issues of cultural and social superiority. Why? Because men and women who never before would have considered voting for a Republican have either decided, or are seriously considering, doing so.
They are deciding women’s rights must be more than a slogan and actually belong to every woman, not just the sort approved of by left-wing special interest groups.
Palin’s candidacy brings both figurative and literal feminist change. The simple act of thinking outside the liberal box, which has insisted for generations that only liberals and Democrats can be trusted on issues of import to women, is the political equivalent of a nuclear explosion.
Big Feminism traded a benevolent husband for a huge, uncompromising, unthinking, hidebound “movement”. Little feminists, like Palin and Rice and a whoooole lot of women who are deserting the Democrats today, have worked out the details with hubby and – I get to be optimistic sometimes, don’t I? – ditched the movement.
