electoral gender gambitology
A funny quoteth, so far as I remember, from — if I recall right — In These Times. Or maybe it’s the Nation. This in regards to the inevitable Hillary Clinton nomination…
Scratch a Bernie Sanders supporter and she will admit he’s not going to be elected president.
The operative word here was “She” — as in, we’re battling the Patriarchy and will use she as a default person instead of he… but here it stands out due to the nature of the campaigns. A Bernie Sanders supporter/ primary voter is more likely to be male than female. (So much so that we get things like this to explain female Sanders backers.)
It is thus amusing to see, as the campaign has developed, that the thematic break on Bernie Sanders backers is it’s a bunch of dudes. Kathy Pollit for the Nation, as she puts her support behind Hillary Clinton (yes, despite things like this), bemoans all the “Bernie Bros” — evidently a meme out there. And see here the wallop from the New York Times in comparing the backers of Bernie Sanders with those of Donald Trump — “Mad as Hell, Not Going to take it” — white males.
Which makes me wonder about this — I believe it was In These Times — when generically describing a Donald Trump supporter in this abstract. Would they ever use the word “she”? Or is there a percentage discrepancy out there or level of rhetorical vitriol that must be crossed which Sanders hasn’t and Trump has before we go ahead and shutter the pronouns back?
Incidentally, Paul Krugman, editorial writer for the New York Times, has a bit of a problem here on the Overton Window set by the front page…
There are still quite a few pundits determined to pretend that America’s two great parties are symmetric — equally unwilling to face reality, equally pushed into extreme positions by special interests and rabid partisans. It’s nonsense, of course. Planned Parenthood isn’t the same thing as the Koch brothers, nor is Bernie Sanders the moral equivalent of Ted Cruz. And there’s no Democratic counterpart whatsoever to Donald Trump.
Trump assumes the media is comparing Cruz with Sanders, when they’re not: it’s Trump and Sanders. Everything’s more out of whack than Krugman is suggesting here.