I was on an airplane somewhere between Des Moines and Manchester when the Americans learned of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s demise. They had expected her death for the past two years, at least, and many of them privately hoped for it; certainly, the right-wing conservatives who voted for Donald Trump in the wake of Antonin Scalia’s death wanted to see the president put one of their preferred ideologues on the Supreme Court, but we ought not to forget the pessimists and nihilists who were looking forward to the political turmoil that would follow the news that Ginsburg was dead. They must be disappointed with the reaction hitherto, as we haven’t heard any of the caterwauling, nor have we witnessed any of the scuffling, that defined Brett Kavanaugh’s infamous appointment to the Court. On the contrary, the confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett have been downright dull, laden in their sense of inevitability. Even the Democrat Senators, whose mawkish gestures in the Kavanaugh affair almost equaled the plangency of the protesters, seem to be struggling to stay awake as they ask Barrett the same pointless questions again and again.
Perhaps they exhausted themselves in their relentless attack on Kavanaugh, an assault that did not appeal to the public nearly as much as the corporate media would like us to believe. Joe Manchin, a Democrat Senator representing West Virginia, received permission from his party bosses to vote for Kavanaugh, as this was expected to benefit him in his re-election campaign—and so it did, as he defeated his opponent by the thinnest of margins. In other words, the political operatives in the Democratic Party believed, correctly, that voting for Kavanaugh was the “moderate” position, that the “moderate” or “centrist” position rejected the Democrats’ mass of allegations that Kavanaugh had raped dozens, if not hundreds, of women. That is a remarkable discordance for a political party that has claimed the exclusive right of representation, as well as the only right to speak, for every American woman.
The deliberate conflation of American women and the Democratic Party has been an effort several years in the making and accelerated quite conspicuously in the Trumpish Age. It failed to win the Democrats the presidency in 2016, and it did not prevent Kavanaugh from reaching the bench, but it did propel several congressional races in 2018, and it looks as though it will push Joe Biden into the White House in just a few weeks. Such should be enough—more than enough, really—to make us forget the surreal sight of women in the Democratic Party castigating Barrett for her refusal to adhere to “the feminist standard”. They have reached this conclusion because Barrett will support some future overturning of Roe v. Wade and thereby jeopardize the legality of elective abortion in the United States. Undeniably, this is blasphemous to modern feminists, but here we must pause, for we have ceased to speak of women and have begun to speak of feminism—and the distinction is as critical as the distinction between women and the Democratic Party.
Continue reading “Amy Coney Barrett and the Feminist Contradiction”