The official theme of the third night of the Democratic National Convention, the night that sen. Kamala Harris of California accepted the nomination as running mate of Joe Biden, was “A More Perfect Union.” It soon became clear that the really theme of the evening was Ladies Night.
This convention is aimed at women from the get-go – not only are women the majority of Democrats, they are the majority of voters, period – with female faces and issues that are highly rated with female voters in advance. But Wednesday night it went well.
The night was filled with Democratic Party ladies’ lights: The first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The former female president, Hillary Clinton, must have been. The first woman to murder a billionaire live on television, sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. And of course Harris himself, the first Black woman and the first Asian-American to run for president, and, as Democrats and sensible people everywhere fervently hope, the first woman to assume the role of vice president.
We even got a cheesy video about female rebels, from the suffragettes to the women of March participants, which was perhaps expected in the same week that the 19th Amendment would be 100 years old.
It is tempting to sneeze and make accusations of pandering, because, truth be told, most of the things that are traded to women, most of which are ingrained in maximum inclination. Paint it in pink, put some glitter on it, make it “sassy” and the ladies will eat it, right?
But the truth is that the night was nothing. Instead, women were not addressed as materialistic morons with pink bedazzled, but smart men with an interest in important issues, including many who are not traditionally coded as female. The issues highlighted on Wednesday – immigration, climate change, gun control, violence against women, youth care – were clearly chosen not on the basis of sexist assumptions, but real research into the issues that women actually care about.
It set the perfect tone for Harris, who – if American democracy has any hope of survival – will be the first woman on a winning presidential card. (When Hillary Clinton reminded the public, however, it is possible to “win 3 million more votes and still lose.”) The only way women – and especially women of color – will ever achieve complete equality is to take seriously full men on their own terms, without erasing or diminishing their gender as racial identity.
When Harris took the pop stage, talking to banks of video monitors in an almost empty convention center in Wilmington, Delaware, she illustrated exactly how the gender of women can inflate their perspective without diminishing them to nothing.
“I have fought for children, and survivors of sexual assault. I have fought against transnational gangs. I took over the largest banks, and helped one of the largest colleges profit,” Harris said, describing her time as The Advocate -General of California.
“I know a predator when I see one,” she added.
So-called ‘women’s issues’ are often addressed by other issues, as if they were boutique concerns that have no greater social relevance. But as feminists have long argued, and as Harris’ “predator” line has made clear, the same ugly forces that drive women’s oppression are reverberating throughout our society. The man who advocates for women, as Donald Trump has spoken to do, is the same man whose sadism and lack of empathy will lead him to destroy the environment, terrorize immigrants, wreck the economy and let a pandemic rampant run.
That mentality is the reason why so much of the women-centric programming on the next-to-last night of the DNC focused on topics not traditionally understood as “women’s issues,” such as gun control and climate change. But, as politics at the time of the ‘grab’ em by the pussy ‘has shown, the same toxic masculinity that does so much direct harm to women is also damaging to our economy, our public safety and, in time, of coronavirus, our ability to not spread a virus all over us by one joke that thinks a mask makes him look like a girl. The remedy here is to stop treating women as a narrow special interest group and to understand that “women issues” are better understood simply as problems of men.
That point was made emphatically by Elizabeth Warren, who spoke from an empty classroom about the critical issue of affordable child care.
“We are building infrastructure such as roads, bridges and communication systems so that people can work. That infrastructure helps us all because it keeps our economy afloat,” she said. “It’s time to recognize that childcare is part of the basic infrastructure of this nation – it’s infrastructure for families.”
Of course, Clinton’s 2016 campaign went a long way toward educating the public that “women’s issues” are not a side issue, but touch on every part of our lives. It is good to see that the realization has only intensified in the years since. And it was refreshing to see that women are not treated as a special interest group to pander, but as what women really are: A majority force both among Democratic voters and society as a whole, who therefore have the right to change the political agenda stealing without being treated as offenders.
The other good news of the night is that Democrats are taking Donald Trump’s efforts to seriously steal the election – especially his campaign to destroy the Postal Service – and have regularly reminded voters, in this event, to take action to prevent it. . And they do not draw punches when describing the very real threat to this fundamental right to vote.
“Why do they not want us to vote? Why is there so much difficulty in silencing our voices? Harris said in a brief statement early in the evening, an unusual move that emphasized the critical nature of this “vote early” message.
“We need figures so that overwhelmed Trump cannot cut or steal his path to victory,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech.
“Do not let them take away your power. Do not let them take away your democracy. Make a plan at this time for how you will participate and vote,” said former President Barack Obama in his moving and powerful address.
It was not only good messaging discipline. There was evidence that Democrats are responding more quickly to the emerging story of Trump’s attempts to steal the election. In 2016, there was talk of Democrats hesitating to speak directly with voters about Russian efforts, aided by the Trump campaign, to interfere with the election. Understandably, they did not want to sound as hysterical as conspiracy theorists, although the conspiracy clearly happened.
Democrats now seem to realize that they can not give the pressure to undermine Trump’s obvious efforts to damage the entire election process. As we all know now, man has no morals, no shame and no sense of decency. As Michelle Obama would say, it’s what it is. Democrats finally appear ready to deal with that problem head on, instead of just hoping it goes away.
