I first encountered the concept of the Identity theology when I read about the White Aryan movement. The foundation of this White Aryan movement (aka Brüder Schweigen) was Christian Identity theology. Identity theology casts non-believers as subhuman undesirables. Identity Politics is a variation of the same song of Christian Identity: both share the ideology of the unjustly oppressed struggling against the unworthy (and undeserving) them. For the White Aryans, them was shorthand for nonwhites who are pawns in a conspiracy to deny White Aryans their social and economic birthright. Likewise, Identity Politics assures its adherents that they are denied their political, social, and economic birthright by a similar conspiracy of them. The Clinton campaign is fueled by Identity Politics in the fight against the "vast Right-Wing conspiracy." Was it possible that Monica Lewinsky was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the vast Right-Wing Conspiracy"? As Richard Hofstadter wisely observed in The Paranoid Style in American Politics: political success in this country often accompanies accusations that a "vast conspiracy" frustrates the will of the people. If this is (fair & balanced) delusion, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Duel of Historical Guilts
By Maureen Dowd
SAN ANTONIO
Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don’t like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.
They feel that women have moved past that men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary’s campaign has lately revived with a vengeance.
And they don’t like Gloria Steinem and other old-school feminists trying to impose gender discipline and a call to order on the sisters.
As a woman I know put it: “Hillary doesn’t make it look like fun to be a woman. And her ‘I-have-been-victimized’ campaign is depressing.”
But Hillary — carried on the padded shoulders of the older women in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island who loved her “I Will Survive” rallying cry that “I am a little older and I have earned every wrinkle on my face” — has been saved to fight another day.
Exit polls have showed that fans of Hillary — who once said they would be happy with Obama if Hillary dropped out — were hardening in their opposition to him, while Obama voters were not so harsh about her.
Three Hillary volunteers, older women from Boston, approached a New York Times reporter in an Austin, Tex., parking lot on Tuesday to vent that Hillary hasn’t gotten a fair shake from the press. They said that they used to like Obama but now can’t stand him because they think he has been cocky and disrespectful to Hillary.
As Hillary, remarkably and cleverly, put Obama on the defensive about a real estate deal, health care and Nafta, her campaign ratcheted up the retro battle of the sexes when they sent Dianne Feinstein onto the Fox News Sunday-morning talk show to promote the idea that Hillary should not be forced out, regardless of the results of Tuesday’s primaries, simply because she’s a woman.
“For those of us that are part of ‘a woman need not apply’ generation that goes back to the time I went out to get my first job following college and a year of graduate work, this is an extraordinarily critical race,” the senator said.
With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.
People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?
As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?
As Ali Gallagher, a white Hillary volunteer in Austin told The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’ ”
And meanwhile, the conventional white man sits on the Republican side and enjoys the spectacle of the Democrats’ identity pileup and victim lock.
Just as Michelle Obama urged blacks to support her husband, many shoulder-pad feminists are growing more fierce in charging that women who let Obama leapfrog over Hillary are traitors.
Julie Acevedo, a precinct captain for Obama in Austin, noticed that things were getting uglier on Friday, during the early voting, when she “saw some very angry women just stomping by us to go vote for Hillary. They cut us off when we tried to talk about Barack.
“I’m 46,” Ms. Acevedo, a fund-raiser for state politicians, said Tuesday night. “Maybe I missed it by a few years, but I don’t know why these women are so fueled by such hostility and think other women are misogynists if they don’t vote for Hillary. It’s insulting and disturbing.”
She said that if Obama definitively outpaces Hillary, she will work to “heal the wounds” and woo back women who are now angry at him.
Watching Bill Clinton greet but not address — the Big Dog has been muzzled — an excited group of students at Texas State University in San Marcos on Tuesday, 19-year-old Allison Krolczyk said she was leaning toward Obama and felt no gender guilt about voting for him. “Not at all,” she said. “I think they’re both pretty amazing.”
The crowd held up their camera phones to capture the former president, in his bright orange tie and orange-brown ostrich cowboy boots.
“We love you, Bill!” yelled one boy. “You did a good job, except for Monica.”
[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary (on the Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment), became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995.]
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company
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