PJ: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
While both Palin and Bachmann claim to support the freedoms provided by the Founding Fathers of America as written in the Constitution, sadly, it does not appear that either woman has actually studied that famous document.
Both women are Evangelical Christians who do not believe in a woman's right to reproductive rights among other things. They both firmly believe in Christian doctrines and believe that they should be taught in schools while at the same time they fight against other religions being recognized in either government or education. They both believe in the 'end of days' practiced by their right wing churches whereby a war to end all time will be fought in Israel with the Jews fighting alongside Christians to defeat Muslims. After this final battle, Jews must convert to Christianity to be risen up into the heavens by Jesus himself.
Neither woman accepts gay rights, denying in a way that they even have a right to exist (Bachmann's family owns a clinic which practices 'pray the gay away') and neither supports a gay's right to marriage.
They differ on freedom of the press somewhat in that Bachmann freely and courageously will submit to questions from all media members, while Palin will only submit to interviews on friendly outlets such as the Christian Broadcasting Network and conservative Fox News (and has encouraged other republicans to do the same), so in a sense Palin seems to believe in control of the press.
The list goes on but suffice it to say that if you are on their side they support your freedoms; if you happen to disagree with them then you are damned.
Al Jazeera
America's reactionary feminists
What do Palin and Bachmann have that make them so appealing to the American public?
By Naomi Wolf
It is obvious that the left and the media establishment in the United States cannot fully understand the popular appeal of the two Republican tigresses in the news - first Sarah Palin, and now, as she consolidates her status as a Republican presidential front-runner, Michele Bachmann. What do they have that other candidates don't - and that so many Americans seem to want?
Both Bachmann and Palin are regularly derided in the mainstream press. In Palin's case, the dominant perception is that she is an intellectual lightweight: a clip of her unable to mention a single newspaper or news magazine that she reads regularly got millions of hits on YouTube during the last presidential election.
Bachmann, on the other hand, is portrayed as being slightly unhinged. Indeed, I can attest from personal experience that to debate her is to encounter someone who is absolutely certain of facts that must exist somewhere in a parallel universe.
But it would be a mistake simply to dismiss their appeal with no effort to comprehend its source. This is especially true of Bachmann. Palin has not managed to secure the support and mentorship of the Republican Party establishment, and will continue to showcase her odd appeal as a media personality. But Bachmann, weirdly, might become president of the United States.
The source
The nature of their attraction has to do with two strains in American thought to which the US left and media establishment are truly blind. One is the American tradition of populist demagoguery - a tradition that, in the twentieth century, included the racist Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s, the anti-Communist witch-hunter Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and the radical Malcolm X in the 1960s. Populist leaders inspire passionate devotion, usually in people who feel (and often are) economically, politically, and culturally marginalised.
These populist movements' energy can be directed for good or ill, but demagogues in the US embrace similar tactics to fuel their rise to visibility and power. They use emotive rhetoric. They often invent shadowy networks of "elite" forces ranged against the ordinary, decent American. They create an "us versus them" scenario. And they ask their listeners to believe that they alone will restore American dignity and articulate the wishes of the unheard.
Palin and Bachmann speak this highly personal or emotional language, which even the most rock-ribbed male Republican finds difficult to emulate. In the last three decades, the US's male-dominated politics have become increasingly wonky, abstract, and professionalised. This is bad for demagoguery, but it does not inhibit the tigresses on the right, who did not come up through the "old boy's club".
As a result, Palin is free to talk about "death panels" - a wholly invented threat of President Barack Obama's health-care reform - and Bachmann can summon the spirit of McCarthy to raise the equally bizarre spectre of socialism's tentacles infiltrating the highest levels of government. Both can issue homespun appeals as "hockey moms" or "soccer moms" - precisely the type of emotionalism that more cut-and-dried professional male politicians, even (or especially) at the top of the party, cannot manage to deliver.
The second reason that Bachmann and Palin appeal to so many Americans - and this should not be underestimated, either - has to do with a serious historical misreading of feminism. Because feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was articulated via the institutions of the left - in Britain, it was often allied with the labour movement, and in the US, it was reborn in conjunction with the emergence of the New Left - there is an assumption that feminism itself must be leftist. In fact, feminism is philosophically as much in harmony with conservative, and especially libertarian, values - and in some ways even more so.
Freedom of choice
The core of feminism is individual choice and freedom, and it is these strains that are being sounded now more by the Tea Party movement than by the left. But, apart from these sound bites, there is a powerful constituency of right-wing women in Britain and Western Europe, as well as in the US, who do not see their values reflected in collectivist social-policy prescriptions or gender quotas. They prefer what they see as the rugged individualism of free-market forces, a level capitalist playing field, and a weak state that does not impinge on their personal choices.
Many of these women are socially conservative, strongly supportive of the armed forces, and religious - and yet they crave equality as strongly as any leftist vegetarian in Birkenstocks. It is blindness to this perfectly legitimate approach to feminism that keeps tripping up commentators who wish to dismiss women like Margaret Thatcher, or Muslim women, or now right-wing US women leaders, as somehow not being the "real thing".
But these women are real feminists - even if they do not share policy preferences with the already recognised "sisterhood", and even if they themselves would reject the feminist label. In the case of Palin - and especially that of Bachmann – we ignore the wide appeal of right-wing feminism at our peril.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
A version of this article first appeared on Project Syndicate.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
http://aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011827168800963.html
No comments:
Post a Comment