A Dyke A Broad, #4
U.S. Election and disgruntled dyke doomscrolling, plus the answer to why people vote against their interests. Spoiler alert: they don’t.
Well, this has been fun. I woke up around 4 a.m. Wednesday morning Paris time, and managed to go back to sleep without looking at my phone. But when I woke up again around 8, and saw Biden had lost Florida where Bloomberg spent so much money, I may have briefly wept and pulled the covers over my head.
Thank goodness I can always count on the random poetry fragments of the Sappho Bot on Twitter to reflect my mood.
I spent most of the day doomscrolling as I waited for the official results, arguing (in my imagination) with all the lefties I saw online. Who at first thought all was lost, and started assigning blame.
…This nation with its history is unredeemable. I mean we had slavery, Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow and now it's all in the open with a white supremacist as President who could end up re-elected. And the Democrats? Sort of fine with the status quo since Clinton because they keep nominating him again and again, in some form or another, with the idea that "moving towards the center," is a winning strategy.
“So much for Obama,” I mumbled, “who was as centrist as you could get, and was elected not once, but twice. And what about the four members of the progressive “Squad” of Democratic congresswomen who handily won re-election: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. What are they? Chopped liver?”
Then there were many versions of this.
To her I said, “Do y’all not see how the Democrats treat the Hispanic community in Florida??? Biden’s team said OUT LOUD, when they were still considering el comandante-loving Karen Bass as VP, that they didn’t need the Cuban American vote there, because they had the Black vote sewn up.” (Yes, I had a link. No, I can’t find it.) “In any case, why are you blaming Cubans when there are so very many white people in Florida, and most of them voted for Trump?”
Almost four hours in, I finally see somebody mention the word sexist. I don’t see it repeated.
I increasingly hate everyone. I eat a lot of corn chips. With and without fake chili flavoring. There is beer to go with them. I try to take refuge in a cooking show on TV, Le Meilleur pâtissier, but the theme this week is the United States. And the best they can do is reinvent the brownie and put peanut butter in everything, including brownies. Seriously? Fuck you, French bakers.
Thursday, I wake up with a giant fucking migraine, and keep refreshing my browser. Who the hell is counting these votes? I laugh a little at memes with cute little sloths.
Obsessive scrolling continues. I finally see a dyke, my pal Anne-christine d’Adesky, suggest that religion and especially abortion were central to Trump’s success.
Lots of FB comments on how whiteness and racism is the factor behind big Trump vote number but I think its religion: pro-life Christians. I’ll be interested in the post-election breakdowns but Believe that’s what motivated the Latin Miami vote more than the socialism Cuba paper tiger
Not saying white supremacy isn’t a common thread: it is, yes, racism etc big but I think abortion is the personal issue that tipped lotta Trump voters.
This idea does not go viral. Because introducing the role of misogyny in our election is once again of no interest to anyone, despite pre-vote articles like Jessica Bennett’s in the New York Times about how “The 2016 election was a referendum on many things, including what Americans thought a woman could do or be. Now it’s a question of what a man should be.”
Even as it looks almost certain that Biden will take the White House, I am swamped with posts about how the U.S. is nothing but a cesspool of racism because there wasn’t a landslide. And more and more puzzled people worldwide ask versions of the question I’ve heard for twenty years, “why did those [hillbillies, black people, Latinos] vote against their own interest?”
And as always I think, “Maybe they didn’t.”
People usually have more than one interest. Some of them contradictory.
Despite the global Left’s current love affair with the word intersectional, which implies humans at large are not uni-dimensional and have many interests and many identities, this is not, in fact, a popular idea.
Most of the comments I read seem to imply that black people are only and above all Black. Latinx should only be Latinx and will use that fucking x whether they like it or not. (FYI: most don’t). Poor white people should care only about their economic prospects—though it’s widely understood that because they’re white, they’re unredeemably racist, and racism trumps class, so that explains their votes.
I am reminded—again—that identity politics, sometimes a useful tool for political organizing, can also dangerously reduce us to cardboard characters.
This leads to major miscalculations. Like Democrats assuming that black and brown people only care about race, and so will definitely vote blue, which means they rarely bother to listen to them. This is one of the reasons why Trump did well among young black men. (1 in 3 black men living in the Midwest voted for him.) It also explains why Some Latinos voted for Trump. Get over it. Another good article focuses on how Democrats floundered in California, apart from the presidential race.
This racism of the Left, which btw also afflicts Lefties of color, is made worse by the American character, in which we must be exceptional in everything, even our depravity and racism, so that we are unable to acknowledge signs of change, especially those occasions when we get it right. Like electing and re-electing Obama. Ditto for the Squad.
This creates a false and simplistic narrative that paints us into a corner where the outcome is always defeat. And the only solution is a complete and total revolution. No matter that if you know anything at all about history, revolutions don’t always end well for the revolutionizers.
Enough grousing. It’s Friday, thank god, one outlet, @DecisionDeskHQ, has already called the race for Biden, and the presidential race aside, the election actually reveals the situation in the U.S. is not as dire as we want to think on the racism front. But also for women.
There is of course, the Squad who won re-election. Plus the record number of Native American women elected to Congress. And in California’s giant L.A. county, there’s now an all-female board of supervisors, making it “the largest county in the entire country just in terms of people, but also the largest county budget in the entire country.”
Above all, there’s the magnificent Stacey Abrams.
She totally transformed Georgia, re-franchised people of color, may have given Biden the state. In the process, she showed what you can do using traditional political tools if you have the vision and determination to do the work. Hell, you don’t even have to be an optimist. You just have to be sufficiently stubborn. Which gives even me hope.
Slightly less disgruntedly yours,
Kelly Dogswell
And in other reading, because I need to dyke things up a bit:
The sole function of the clitoris is female orgasm. Is that why it’s ignored by medical science?