The Other McCain

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Fascism or Feminism? Amanda Marcotte Says We Have Only Two Choices, So …

Posted on | September 14, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

 

It’s been a while since we’ve taken notice of Amanda Marcotte, but the living embodiment of evil has not been idle, nor has she been less ridiculous than usual, it’s just that Trump Derangement Syndrome has produced so much craziness on the Left that Amanda is less obtrusive nowadays. This week, however, Ms. Marcotte wrote a column at Salon-dot-com which she then publicized with an extended Twitter rant:

There are many reasons, no doubt, for the rising worldwide rejection of liberal democracy. But I suspect the biggest reason — and interestingly, the one that tends to be downplayed — is misogyny. It’s an international tantrum in reaction to feminism. . . .
It’s clear to me that a lot of men will choose fascism over feminism.
In sum, men around the world would rather burn down democracy than do the dishes.
I’ll add that I think one reason a lot of liberals, including feminists, downplay the centrality of misogyny to rising fascism is because of liberal sexism. We don’t want to admit that women are important enough to inspire a worldwide rise of fascism.
A lot of people, especially men, on the left want to relegate “women’s issues” to a boutique concern. They can’t allow the thought that women’s issues are actually central concerns that dictate the rise and fall of civilizations.

You can read the rest of that, but the place to begin debunking it is with Ms. Marcotte’s first premise, i.e., that we are witnessing a “worldwide rejection of liberal democracy” and “a worldwide rise of fascism.”

You will have difficulty finding any pundit who asserted such a thing prior to Nov. 8, 2016. America came this close (picture me holding my thumb and forefinger half an inch apart) to the Triumph of Hillary, who would have become President had she not lost a handful of Rust Belt states by quite narrow margins, and yet Hillary’s defeat has been treated by many in the media as a catastrophic omen of incipient fascism.

Quite frankly, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are guilty of believing their own bulls–t. Every four years, the two major parties try to convince Americans that we are facing the Most Important Election in History, a stark choice between Good and Evil. If you’re a Republican who lived through the Obama years, you welcomed Trump’s election as a return to a pro-business agenda in Washington — lower taxes, less regulation, an emphasis on economic growth. Whatever else a Republican might vote for, and whatever else Trump might do, at least we could expect him to act on the basic pro-business sentiment of the GOP, and in this expectation we have not been disappointed. But Democrats have other ideas, and to them Trump’s victory signified the dawn of a new Dark Age, an era of evil worse than anything in all human history.

Ask yourself why we spent more than two years being bombarded with the phony “Russian collusion” narrative. Wasn’t this bizarre conspiracy theory part of the justifying rationale of the #Resistance? If Trump had not been legally elected, but instead had stolen the election from Hillary with the clandestine assistance of nefarious Russians, didn’t this justify the Left in treating Trump’s presidency as illegitimate?

The rioting mobs of masked Antifa thugs were condoned by liberals as an authentic expression of democracy, whereas the man who won the election — 62.9 million votes, and an Electoral College majority of 304-227 — was an enemy of democracy. This weird reversal of reality, where “democracy” is no longer about who wins elections, and where violent street thugs are celebrated as exemplifying liberal values, is symptomatic of many things, but mainly it shows what happens when the media bubble generates a pervasive echo-chamber within which liberals can wallow endlessly in a warm bath of confirmation bias.

“TRUMP IS HITLER! ORANGE MAN BAD!” This was the essential premise upon which Democrats and their media allies constructed an alternative reality in the aftermath of Hillary’s defeat, and viewers of CNN and MSNBC were immersed in that distorted worldview.

As I say, Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter rant this week was publicity for her Salon-dot-com column, which begins thus:

What if the reason democracy is collapsing around the world is because men really don’t want to do the dishes?
That might sound a bit silly, but it was a thought that kept creeping up on me while reading this excellent and thoughtful examination of the rise of anti-liberalism around the globe by Zack Beauchamp at Vox. By “anti-liberalism,” Beauchamp doesn’t mean a rejection of the narrowly defined liberalism of the Democratic Party, but the “school of thought that takes freedom, consent, and autonomy as foundational moral values” that is traditionally understood to have been defined by Enlightenment philosophers, particularly John Locke, and underpins the institution of democracy itself.
As Beauchamp explains, the political compromises necessitated by liberal democracies frustrate radicals on both the left and the right, but especially the right, and so there’s increasing talk — again, mostly on the right — of abandoning liberal democracy and turning to authoritarian governments that will foist radical ideologies on the public, whether they like it or not. Politicians like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and, yes, Donald Trump of the United States are all hostile to the core values of liberal democracy, Beauchamp argues, which include “democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, and equality.”

Wow. It’s fair to make analogies between Trump and Orban or Bolsonaro, but Erdogan? Is there an opposition in Turkey that supports “the core values of liberal democracy”? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that if Erdogan is overthrown, it will be by radical Muslims who don’t give a damn for “democracy, the rule of law, individual rights, and equality”?

To compare Trump to Erdogan is such an apples-and-oranges comparison that it boggles the mind, for in what sense is Turkey like the United States? Yet this is not even the worst idea that Marcotte borrows from Zack Beauchamp, to wit: In what sense does the opposition to Trump — the Democratic Party of the 21st century — represent the Enlightenment values of John Locke, et al.? It’s been a few years since I’ve read Locke, but as I recall, the author of such works as The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and Two Treatises on Government never wrote a word in favor of legalized abortion, same-sex marriage or banning plastic straws. This objection is relevant, because what Marcotte and Beauchamp are really upset about is not any actual threat to liberal democracy as described by Locke, either here or abroad, but rather Trump’s threat to the policy agenda of the Democratic Party.

Let us not pretend that Amanda Marcotte actually knows anything about Turkey, Hungary or Brazil, or that she actually cares about Turks, Hungarians and Brazilians. Ms. Marcotte is a Democrat, and like all other Democrats, she is committed to maintaining the propaganda claim that Donald Trump is analogous to Hitler, and that all 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump are a “basket of deplorables.”

Mere partisanship does not a political philosophy make, and anyone who mistakes Amanda Marcotte for a philosopher is a fool. How she dares even to speak of “the rule of law” is astonishing, given her commitment to fictional “rights” found nowhere in our Constitution, but imposed upon the nation in the name of imaginary “penumbras and emanations.”

We can be amused by Ms. Marcotte’s assertion that “fascism” is on the rise, both here and abroad, because men don’t want to wash dishes. But were men washing more dishes under Obama’s presidency? Would men have washed more dishes had Hillary won the election? Is the equitable division of household chores the best measure of “liberal democracy”? Was such a proposition ever entertained by John Locke?

It’s humorous to think so, and I don’t want to argue too strongly against Ms. Marcotte on this point, because I think it might help Trump’s prospects for re-election if men were to be convinced that voting for Trump would permanently exempt them from dishwashing duty.

Welcome to fascism, sweetheart. Now fix me a sandwich.



 

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One Response to “Fascism or Feminism? Amanda Marcotte Says We Have Only Two Choices, So …”

  1. The hypocrisy of the hipster left – The First Street Journal.
    September 15th, 2019 @ 12:01 pm

    […] Fascism or Feminism? Amanda Marcotte Says We Have Only Two Choices, So … […]