So now the Democratic Party learns, once again, in an awful but necessary series of exposures, that it has near-zero credibility in pretending to stand up for women.
This time the Designated Kinder Money Party went for the kill against a sickening, misogynist, sitting duck of a target: Roy Moore, a creature who, as a judge, pimped out the Constitution to succor white supremacy and anti-LGBTQ hatred, and who, decades ago as an up-and-coming assistant district attorney, reportedly sweet-talked a 14-year-old girl away from her mother in the hallway of a courthouse so he could convince her to secretly meet him away from her home and drive her to a place where he stripped down and fondled her through her underwear before she was able to make it stop. The first time.
Problem is, the Kinder Money Party forgot, as entitled bosses often do, that its own flank was just as vulnerable on matters of gender justice as that of the Republicans. And Republican and pro-Trump operatives recognized – as mercenaries and misanthropes usually do – that the overwhelmingly male Dems, including some of their liberal champions, had, of course, the very same brutal penile boss-male histories rattling in their closets. Hello, Al Franken and John Conyers.
The supreme irony here is that what now gives Repubs and Trumpists their leverage in catapulting Democratic fellow abusers of women through the windshield is their own Republican, amoral, mercenary willingness to use all available ammunition – including the very crimes of which they themselves are perennially and viciously guilty – to implicate and incapacitate Democrats. Do Steve Bannon and the other bottom feeders who fuel the right-wing political hit-man machinery care in the least about the continued millennia of rape, abuse, and dominance of women by men? Please.
What we have here is one wing of the Male Dominate-Women Club prosecuting another rival wing of that same fraternity because it can.
It's not that it is intrinsically Democratic (or Republican, although the Republican ethos is more hospitable to raw patriarchy) for men to behave this way. It's that it has become part of the literal body politic of the Democratic Party as it has come to exist. In the same way that corporate patronage has become a calmly-accepted given for any national candidate's gaining even a foothold of power in either party.
New Jersey State Senator Diane Allen, R-7th Legislative District, said yesterday on national radio that it will take both determined women and committed men to break this outmoded political lock on gender authority.
Speaking as a man and as a citizen, I'll second that. We progressives can do better than the prison of today’s Democratic Party, whether we create momentum with which it is forced to catch up or we displace it altogether.
The parties of money and legacy may not see any other choices. But the rest of us can.
