BRADLEY R. GITZ
If Donald Trump’s presidency is unprecedented, so too is the opposition which began even before he had much opportunity to inflict the damage to our constitutional order that the left insists he intends.
I had the experience of being in St. Louis the weekend of Trump’s inaugural and where one of the larger women’s marches of resistance occurred.
The marchers appeared happy rather than terrified, as if they were having a grand old time rather than suffering from oppression. The theme was identity politics and the key issue “women’s health” and/or “reproductive rights”; the latest euphemisms designed to avoid the word abortion (“pro-choice” having apparently been beaten out in those euphemism sweepstakes some time back by “prolife”).
But it was unclear how the marchers, which included some sheepish-looking men perhaps uncomfortable with the “men are mean” subtext, could actually claim to speak for women in general—there is no “sisterhood” among women any more than a brotherhood among men; no common set of positions on abortion or any other political issues or any tendency to constitute any kind of voting bloc either (Hillary Clinton’s efforts to create one based on her only recommending feature notwithstanding).
Women who favor even modest restrictions on abortion, such as prohibiting taxpayer funding, were apparently not welcome at the marches, but if the latest Marist poll is any indication the overwhelming majority of the country’s women actually wish to be oppressed in precisely such fashion.
So, too, when it comes to voting tendencies—the object of denunciation (Trump) won a majority of the votes of white women, an outcome suggesting that the marchers might have better marched against some of their own sisters as a first step in shattering their “false consciousness.”
“Woman” doesn’t automatically equate with “leftist,” which actually seemed to be a more accurate description of what the marches were all about, particularly given the pervasive LGBT, climate change, and “black lives matter” plugs.
In the end, however, it all seemed to be about nothing more than having a good time chanting and waving placards at the usual suspects on an atypically warm January Saturday. There seemed to be no actual objectives and little expectation of influencing anything, at least in terms of legislation or public policy.
As such, it was difficult to disagree (just this once) with a David Brooks column when he wrote that “Without the discipline of party politics, social movements devolve into mere feeling … People march and feel good and think they have accomplished something. They have a social experience with a lot of people and fool themselves into thinking they are members of a coherent and demanding community. Such movements descend to the language of mass therapy.”
Going beyond Brooks, one friend of mine said she was actually embarrassed by the spectacle, conveying in her mind as it did a politically unhealthy combination of weakness, insecurity and paranoia that reinforced rather than undermined sexist stereotypes.
In the end, the broader “resistance” to Trump, of which the women’s marches were intended to be the centerpiece thus far, suggests both simplistic nostalgia for the 1960s counterculture and a misguided use of historical analogy.
People want to be part of a cause, to claim to be oppressed (even when they aren’t) and to have a great evil to struggle against in order to give their lives meaning, and Trump contains just enough elements of the bogeyman to make it superficially plausible.
For those who couldn’t battle Boss Daley’s minions outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago circa 1968 or be on the Pettus Bridge in Selma, you can at least tell your grandkids that you marched against the ogre Trump, a synthesis of Il Duce and Bull Connor.
What did you do in the war Daddy becomes what did you do to resist American fascism once it began to cast its long, dark shadow over the land.
The left is preoccupied with history in a different sense than the right—whereas the right views history as a repository of lessons regarding what works and what doesn’t with an eye toward identifying the political and economic forms most compatible with human nature, the left sees history as a morality play in which the white hats (them) struggle against the black hats (anyone who resists them) on behalf of a better, more enlightened world.
The right sees history as potentially instructive, the left as something you never want to get “on the wrong side of.” The leftist protest compulsion will forever draw from nostalgia for the 1960s, even if the ponytails have turned gray and shuffling about in walkers makes it hard to throw Molotov cocktails.
The left always awaits America’s Kristallnacht, and even finds it in such unlikely places as Trump’s poorly drafted and clumsy but ultimately trivial executive order on refugees.
There are problems, of course, with maintaining such a high level of vigilance on behalf of the leftward arc of history; outrage fatigue can set in if every little thing Trump says or does becomes an occasion for yet more outrage.
We might all be worn out and tuned out or become simply terribly bored by the time the real thing (genuine fascism) rolls around.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.