| 9:18a |
fem
Matthew Yglesias:
Here’s a hypothesis I have without much hard data.
There’s been a decades-long debate in the US between Christian conservatives and feminists but also a third force in the debate that rarely articulates a self-conscious ideology — a sort of raunch culture.
There was an idea in the 1980s of forming a feminist/Christian alliance against raunch, but for various reasons it didn’t really take off and that concept fell apart.
Then in the 1990s you had an alliance between feminism and raunch, very much personified by Bill Clinton, that sort of put together a big secularist tent around vaguely libertine principles.
What you see going on today between Trump on the one hand and Me Too and the Me Too Backlash is a realignment the other way with feminism standing alone against the other two — Trump & Pence being the perfect pairing in this regard.
This realignment is one reason you are seeing things like a renewed appreciation for Andrea Dworkin among mainstream progressives as well as a more negative reappraisal of many of the older men of the Democratic Party.
Then on the right side of the aisle part of what’s going on in the Shapiro/Rubin IDW nexus is an effort to build a more solid ideological foundation for the current anti-feminist alliance than logrolling an opportunism. |