Come Back, Sister Souljah

Go away, Bill Clinton

The recriminations keep coming. The least we can do is hold up our end. We hear that we lost the election because we lost the median voter to culture war ‘woke’ issues or to extremely leftist economics. We see calls for a new “Sister Souljah” operation. More about her below.

Let’s do woke first. It is not for me to propose how politicians navigate public opinion. It’s neither my expertise nor my interest. That’s right! I don’t care what people think! Oh no, I’m attacking the public for thinking differently. I’m an elitist. I’m looking down on the working class and driving them to the right. You know what? Fuck you.

I care more about what is true. I don’t do “optics.” Optics is amateurs doing politics as theater criticism, and it’s equally scientific.

People have an interest in remaining uninformed. Just getting through the week consumes one’s time and resources. I’m not judging, though some people are genuinely dumb, not to say nasty, and not just uninformed.

It seems to come down to transgender persons and bathrooms. People are most afraid of biological boys in girls’ bathrooms in public high schools. This just makes no sense, if you think on it for a second.

Gays have committed sexual assault. Boys go to bathrooms with other boys who could be gay. The same follows for girls. Are they in danger? Nobody ever says so. So why care if a transgender girl, a biological male who has gone through all the trouble of transitioning, ventures into a girls’ bathroom? If a bathroom is not monitored, which does not seem difficult to do, though public schools need so much in the way of resources that would probably not rank highly in local concerns, then any criminal can walk into any bathroom and do something heinous.

We had an illustrative incident here in Loudoun County. The headline was “a boy in a skirt” raped a girl in a girls’ bathroom. What is true was that the two had had sex in the past, though without doubt, a statutory rape was committed. It also emerged that the boy was not transgender but instead, according to his own grandmother, “psycho.” In any event, this incident got us a Republican governor in 2021. Such is how the wheels turn in our great democracy.

What is true is that when it comes to violence, transgender persons are usually on the receiving end, especially if they are forced to use a bathroom inconsistent with their gender identity.

Then there is the anxiety about trans men competing in girls’ sports. Trans men keep someone from competing in the Olympics or more commonly, getting a college athletic scholarship. We do hear of poster children for this kind of scandal, but what is true is that it almost never actually happens.

When all this nonsense began here in Virginia, in 2021, I submitted a column to one of our local newspapers. My proposed title was “Transgender is the new black.” This caused the editor to lose his cookies, so the title was changed. Local activists very sensitive to trans- and homophobia, because they were parents of children at risk, were disturbed by my title, but they understood.

Politically speaking, now more than ever, transphobia is the point of the spear for anti-LGBTQI+ bias of all types, and from there, the current full-spectrum MAGA assault on reproductive rights and women’s healthcare. At the same time, counsels of so-called moderation, the polite term for irrational bigotry, are attributing the Democrats’ electoral troubles to excessive wokeitude.

The actual electoral troubles come down to a three percentage point swing in vote totals, which next year will surely have big and important consequences for public policy but hardly represent any sea change in popular attitudes.

Now to Sister Souljah. Back in 1992, when he was running for election, Bill Clinton (WJC) slandered a young black activist as an anti-white racist. He lied shamelessly, and the press duly played along. Then there was his nomination of an eminent professor of law, Lani Guinier, for Assistant Attorney General. She would have dealt with civil rights and was the victim of racist slanders in no less than the Wall Street Journal as a “quota queen.” Clinton threw her under the proverbial bus, withdrawing her nomination and explaining that her views were abhorrent.

It was not quite as bad as allowing a mentally disabled man, Ricky Ray Rector, to be executed by the state of Arkansas, another of WJC’s campaign gambits, but it might have had bigger political implications. Nobody remembers Rector these days, but the Sister Souljah thing, where Clinton was basically telling black activists that they suck, traveled widely. These are the roots of the Democrats’ celebrated comeback from their humiliation by Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1980s.

The working class, not to say the population as a whole, is riddled with deplorable bigotry of all types. This did not prevent racists from voting for Jesse Jackson in 1988, nor for them voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It did not prevent the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, when bigotry was no less pronounced than what we see today. The CIO gave us four terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and the New Deal, and under the leadership of FDR, the U.S. defeated fascism in the second world war.

Class politics is still on the agenda, and extraneous manias such as that around “woke” will always be thrown up to distract us. These days, if anybody is too woke, it’s the Democratic Party elite, who throw up racial and gender bromides (Hello, Hillary!) in place of either serious treatment of racism or of working class interests.

That brings us to the extreme economic leftism bit. I’ve written about Biden’s and Harris’s economics repeatedly for In These Times. I’ve said and still think it was the best we could have expected under the circumstances, and hardly extreme. You want extreme, watch this space.

How will Democrats win elections? Damned if I know. I’d like to think it entails standing up for what is true, which includes full respect for LGBTQI+ and people of color. I do like a point I made a little while back, that banking on swings of three percent in vote totals is one type of enterprise, the province of professionals and techies who have no interest in what any of we slobs think. The other type of preoccupation is how to break the MAGA grip on the working class and restore the true purpose, to help it be all it can be, of the Democratic Party. The latter is my interest. I want more than the median voter.