Other People’s Sexism

My favorite thing about the primary election cycle in 2020 has been the mainstream media being forced to acknowledge how a few tiny, mostly unrepresentative states’ early calendar placement warps their coverage of the entire primary season. Seriously. Like, as of now, Bernie Sanders, the front-runner, has 58 delegates. Joe Biden, the establishment favorite, has 50. Elizabeth Warren, my preferred candidate, lags at 8. Mike Bloomberg has 0, but he does have $60,000,000,000.

To win the nomination takes 1,991. Tomorrow, 1,357 are up for grabs. A week later, 365. A week after that, another 577. Which gets us to 61%, according to Vox.

All of which is to say, this isn’t over, however convenient it might be for the media’s preferred narrative.

And hey, if Sanders or Biden or Bloomberg’s your guy, then by all means, vote for your guy. That’s what we’re supposed to do, come the primary season. For what it’s worth, I’d have said the same about Buttigieg and Klobuchar, if they hadn’t dropped out.

But if your guy isn’t a guy at all, if your candidate, like mine, is Elizabeth Warren, then you should vote for her.

I mean, Elizabeth Warren is far and away the best candidate on the merits. She not only understands the depth and breadth of the problems facing us, from incipient climate disaster to the drivers of wealth inequality to the descent into authoritarianism and white nationalist fascism our oligarchic overlords have decided is more in their interest than the messy unpredictability of democracy, where the mass of people they’re the cancer on might decide it was time for a bit of elective surgery. In addition to her well-developed and wide-ranging arsenal of plans, her singular focus on rooting out corruption and getting rid of the institutional brakes — like the filibuster — that keep change from being enacted is our best chance at reversing the trends that are destroying us. And her deep, complex understanding of the powers — and limitations — of the Presidency would make her a more effective Executive and Commander-In-Chief than anyone else in the field.

That much, to me, is obvious. But a whole lot of people seem to think it’s time for her to get out of the way so we can figure out which white man in his late seventies to put up against the white man in his late seventies currently driving the country over a cliff into a dumpster fire that is also a toilet we’re going down the drain of and which will  dump us, eventually, in Hell. If it hasn’t already.

The problem, we’re told, is she’s a woman. Not that the people telling us that are sexist. Nor, for the most part, are the people listening. Far from it. They’re not prejudiced at all. It’s those other, other people. The ones who are prejudiced and sexist, who are the problem. It’s a sad calculation, but we must bow to pragmatism, and accept the prejudices of those we’ll have to educate more later for now.

To which I say, all my bollocks. Because it’s not pragmatism being bowed to in that calculation. It’s prejudice. It’s sexism. It’s the same old self-fulfilling prophecy. Put it like this: if your reason not to vote for a woman is because you’re afraid other people won’t, you’ve surrendered to sexism without a fight, no matter your personal convictions.

To be honest, I think that capitulation is even more sexist than being a misogynist prick who actively works against women’s agency and representation. Because that guy, at least, is honest. He’s standing up for what he believes in, even though what he believes in is wrong. The person who concedes in advance to that guy is not only declining to stand up for what they believe in, they’re declining to say that guy is wrong. They’re letting perception, someone else’s preferred narrative, drive their choices, when the reality is that possibility’s still wide open.

To me, Elizabeth Warren’s the best candidate running, hands down. She has the best ideas, the best story, the best mind, and would, to my estimation, be the effective, transformative President our country, and history, need. If you think elsewise, that’s fine. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to vote for her this primary season because I’m afraid she might lose because of her gender.

Like the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina — with all due respect to the voters of those states — the perception that America is too sexist to elect a woman President is just a perception, one rooted more in the interests of those most invested in a status quo that needs to change than in reality, present and future. I, for one, am not gonna let it warp my actions, and goddamnit, I don’t think you should, either.

Vote for Elizabeth Warren.