Monday, October 8, 2018

Two Versions of Reality

One hundred and sixty years ago there were two diametrically opposite views of the reality of slavery:  the view of the South that slavery was a “noble” institution, reflecting human nature, with abolitionism seen as a serious danger to social stability;  and the view of Northerners that slavery was wrong and shouldn’t be allowed to spread to the new states in the West.

In 1856 a famous incident in the United States  actually helped to crystallize this divide.  Senator Graham Sumner was an abolitionist.  He was viciously caned in the Senate chambers by a Congressman from South Carolina over his remarks attacking the institution of slavery and the immorality of the slave owners.   Sumner, who had no means to defend himself, came close to death. It took him three years to physically recover enough to return to Senate duties.   The Southern Congressman, Preston Brook was literally given a hero’s welcome in the South.

The effect of Sumner’s caning on Northern opinion was to become more profound and transformative over time.  The growing outrage over the caning of Sumner energized the fledgling Republican party, leading, four years later, to the election of America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln. But the South collectively refused to accept the democratic results of Lincoln’s election and attempted to abandon the Union en masse.  The Civil War was the result of what amounted to an epistemic crisis over the reality of slavery.

Something has crystallized over the last few days, early in October  2018. It has become apparent that the controversy over the  Kavanaugh Supreme Court Confirmation was really a  conflict over two versions of reality.  “He said, she said,”  refers to two particular views of the family, the role of the father, and the status of men and women.   

According to the Linguist George Lakoff, Conservatives see the family and by analogy, politics and society in terms of a “Strict Father”  “Strict Father” is the traditional view that the father is the unquestioned authority in the family, and the duty of his wife and children is to obey him.  Projected onto the political situation, it means unquestioning support of male authority figures and male led institutions.  It means the silencing and denigration of women who are witnesses to sexual abuse.  Projected onto political ideology it means that income assistance and universal medicare are bad programs because they reward bad behaviour.  It means inequality is good, because it reflects natural differences, eg.  males are naturally superior to females.  It is not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how similar this view is to the Southerners’ view that the slaveholder was a superior specimen to the slave.

Patriarchy, the unquestioned rule by males, is a breeding ground for sexual abuse, precisely because it gives men unchecked power to abuse and to cover up their abuse and silence their victims.  It is not a coincidence that religious conservatives fear feminism. Neither is it a coincidence that a mark of Fascism is the cult of masculinity. Nor, that women who publicize allegations of sexual harassment are bombarded by anonymous death threats on the web. 

Supporters of Donald Trump’s Presidency see him as the man who can get the job done.  They didn’t think that a woman was competent for the job, and their hatred of Trump’s female challenger Hilary Clinton, seemed fanatical.  Remember “Lock her up!”  I am 65 and I have never heard any group of people speak that way about a Presidential candidate before.  Trump became embroiled in a controversy involving accusations of sexual harassment and a recording in which he boasts of inappropriate sexual touching of women.  That controversy appeared to solidify and strengthen his support.  His followers seem to especially appreciate the way he openly mocks and denigrates women in public rallies and on Twitter.  There is plenty of evidence that Trump goes out of his way to denigrate his female opponents in a way that he doesn’t when talking of his male opponents.  But it’s not just words.  Trump has had multiple wives, and multiple affairs, the latest of which, he had with a porn star after his wife Melania gave birth to his youngest son.   It would be hard to come up with a better example of a “male chauvinist pig” than Trump.

What would have been political suicide before 2016 became a hidden strength in Trump’s campaign, and the only thing that could have made this possible  was his penchant for saying whatever he felt in order to deliberately offend and the remarkable way that that energized his supporters.    Donald Trump has made misogyny great again.  But he didn’t do it alone, he had help from Evangelical Christians, who are so concerned about a blocking a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have a baby, that they threw their wholehearted moral support behind an amoral, lying, adulterer. 

Trump just stated that he was afraid for young men growing up in today’s world due to #MeToo and Blasey-Ford’s allegations against Judge Kavanaugh.  This is not surprising, given that #MeToo was a powerful grassroots movement that was largely motivated by the response to his election in 2016.  It’s quite possible that Blasey-Ford would not have come forward with her allegations if not for MeToo. 

Recent events testify to the fanaticism and fervour with which supporters of patriarchy want to turn the clock back on MeToo and equal rights.  Make no mistake about it -  in the Confirmation of Kavanaugh we are witnessing a powerful coordinated action to reverse progressive advances and bring back the dark ages.

1 comment:

  1. Good summing up of the situation in this piece from the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/authoritarian-sexism-trump-duterte/576382/?fbclid=IwAR1KfdCTwuNxT8uuX4RSdDvLDABh3IEVx2xWmRLqt7HgsqO0jI8PWVVvX9g

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