Sexist if not for Hillary

Coming soon--the desperate playing of the sexist card by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

With the polls now tightening, the last line of defense is about to be trotted out. The template will of course be borrowed from the Barack Obama presidency--any opposition stems from racism, only with Barack Obama now replaced by Hillary, and racism by sexism.

This has been the worst thing that has happened to American politics in the Obama era: That dissent from the liberal agenda isn't a reflection of ideological differences but de facto evidence of bigotry.

The interests of the Democratic Party and contemporary liberalism thus converge in a disgraceful form of political correctness which delegitimizes conservatism by re-defining it as racism. Rather than moving us forward into a post-racial society, Obama has encouraged the destruction of meaningful public discourse and the enshrinement of a grievance-based identity politics as our fundamental political dynamic.

The effort to defend Obama by playing the race card against his opponents denies the possibility of any rational basis for opposition. The problem isn't Obama or his left-leaning agenda, but those who dare criticize him or resist it. The identity-politics playbook is thus simple but effective--if you have a liberal Democratic black president accuse his critics of racism, and if you have a liberal female Democratic nominee for president accuse her critics of sexism.

An opening salvo of this campaign, with more certain to follow as Hillary's minions grow more anxious, came from a disappointing source--a recent Atlantic essay by Peter Beinart.

Beinart has long been viewed as a "good liberal," defined as one of the dwindling few who are generally fair, open-minded and interested in the play of ideas for their own sake. I once assigned his book The Good Fight: Terror and the Liberal Spirit in a seminar because of its vigorous call for liberals to more energetically defend Western civilization against Islamist fascism.

But in his Atlantic essay, "Fear of a Female President," is is implausibly claimed that Hillary's candidacy has "provoked a wave of misogyny" because the "precarious manhood" of American males makes them afraid of subordination to strong women.

Buried inside such gibberish is a more obvious if unintended conclusion: that identity politics now so thoroughly controls the left that all political disputes must be viewed through the toxic prism of race and gender.

We are rapidly retreating to a time when primitive forms of ascription determined what could and couldn't be said and who could or couldn't say it. Ethnic, racial and gender tribalism trumps the idea of a common humanity.

If only sexism can explain opposition to Hillary, then only a sad shedding of principle prompted by hyper-partisanship can explain Beinart's smearing of her opponents as sexist. As if the memo arrived just in the nick of time, Beinart resorts to the classic Clinton ploy of attempting to absolve Hillary of blame by blaming her critics.

Of course any fact-based assessment of the claim that conservatism equals sexism would run into contradictions with names like Margaret Thatcher, Condi Rice, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, along with Susana Martinez, Kelly Ayotte, Nikki Haley, and Carly Fiorina. If memory serves, conservatives even embraced Sarah Palin for a time, despite evidence suggesting that she was both a bit nutty and female.

Finally, what are we to make of all those polls showing that nearly as many women as men view Hillary negatively? Are they sexist too? Or simply suffering from "false consciousness," that favorite explanation for ideological disobedience in the fever swamps of the social-justice warriors?

Per Occam's razor, the simplest explanation for something is often the best; suggesting that in Hillary's case there might be reasons other than gender for why both men and women distrust her (hint: cattle futures, "bimbo eruptions," lost and suddenly found billing records, White House Travel Office firings, Benghazi cover-ups, "careless" handling of security secrets, etc.).

Indeed, reversing things just a bit, one could argue that neither Obama, given his exceedingly meager accomplishments and experience, nor Hillary, with her exceedingly meager accomplishments and all-too-unsavory experience, would have gotten anywhere near the presidency without benefit of their skin color and gender, respectively.

Far from a source of discrimination and opposition, race has been Obama's biggest asset all along. And gender Hillary's only.

That sad dependence upon gender pandering is especially reflected in those almost unwatchable "Humanity for Hillary" TV ads, which absurdly claim that women constitute a distinct voting bloc and attempt to shame them into voting for her out of some kind of creepy sisterhood solidarity, questions of integrity, trustworthiness and competence all to the side. That Hillary thinks women are that stupid is a form of sexism in a class of its own.

A central principle of contemporary leftism is that Americans are overwhelmingly racist. To that is now joined, per Beinart logic, the idea that they are also overwhelmingly sexist. But American men have mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they are quite fond of. They don't dislike women, not at all.

They just dislike people who make a profession out of lying. Like Hillary.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 09/19/2016

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