Thursday, February 11, 2016

When Progressives Aren't

So I have had something bugging me for the past week or so that I wanted to bring up here. Given the current political climate, it will be possible to read this as a condemnation of a certain political campaign, that being Bernie Sanders, and I want to say up front that such is not my intention. This is not meant to be an indictment of Sanders or his supporters, merely pointing out what I see as a problem, not among them, but among "progressives" in general.

As progressives, we pride ourselves (we darn near define ourselves) on being forward thinkers, pushing towards a better status quo for everyone. We look at the backwards thinking of conservatives with barely constrained rage tinged with disgust... they are the old thinkers, the backwards dinosaurs holding us back in a world we would like to see relegated to an embarrassing page of history.

We have set particular earmarks of this on various -isms that we see held up by those rich folk and their poor yokel adherents (you may already see where I am going with this...) such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, etc. We also add some -phobias, like transphobia and homophobia, just to keep things interesting, and we wave our hands and point every time we see evidence of those tendencies.

At least, we do so every time we see it among conservatives.

But we progressives have a dirty secret. We also, we personally, continue to have issues when it comes to gender, class, race, and sexuality.

This isn't to say that we ONLY pick a Bernie Sanders because he has a penis, or that we look at a Hillary Clinton and think, "Nope, Vagina, she can't lead." But as progressives we ALSO know that prejudice is rarely so simple and straightforward as that.

So run this drill. Imagine that a female candidate is running for office and supporters of her CONSERVATIVE opponent were putting out memes that wrote her off as weak, or shrill, or too emotional, or not palatable enough. We'd raise cain, right? If we then found out that those same supporters had done the same thing in a previous election it would be confirmation. We would point at the support base and say, loudly, "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM THAT MUST BE DEALT WITH."

But when the opponent is another progressive, as with Sanders now and Obama before him, we write it off. It can't REALLY a problem. Because they, and their supporters, are progressives. And WE are progressives. And progressives would NEVER be sexist, or racist, right?

The reason this bothers me so much is because it follows a pattern I have seen before in the church. When a scandalous thing happens in a lot of churches, the wagons quickly circle and the members go on the defensive. Not wanting to believe that such a thing could happen in a forum so sacred to them. Do you want to know HOW the abusive priests in the Catholic Church were protected so long? It wasn't just popes and bishops. It was large groups of the membership refusing to see the problem for what it was, not necessarily because they liked the perpetrators, but because they couldn't even begin to imagine that such a thing could happen in THEIR church. So they would assume that the problem was with the victims, not the institution, and a horrible abuse of power became internalized and even institutionalized to a major religious organization.

I am seeing all those same patterns emerge now. Not from the leadership, mind you. In what might have been the strongest move of his campaign YET, Bernie Sanders outright rejected anyone who approached his opponent in a sexist means and said he wanted no part of it. It was brave, brilliant, and a move worthy of a presidential candidate who claims to want to take us to a better place.

And a lot of his base proceeded to ignore him. In the days that followed I saw articles saying that Clinton made a similar claim last time, and so it was just a despicable political ploy. They claimed that the Berniebros were just a false narrative. They raised articles where certain supporters of Clinton were seen to be racist, to show that if ANYONE had -ism problems, it was Clinton.

You know, I don't doubt, not even for a second, that some Clinton supporters had strong racist undertones in their objection to Barack Obama, because there were a lot of white people who supported her and, yeah, we still have BIG issues with race, as well.

And amid all the rejections, returned accusations, and diversions I saw in the progressive moment precisely what I have seen a million times before, all the way down to the point where one female Sanders supporter, in a moment of frustration, posted the thought, "But not ALL Sanders supporters are like that?"

And so we've added #notallmen to the pile, as well, rejecting what should be an obvious truth to a progressive; there is a difference in privilege when it comes to an older man running against a woman, regardless of the identities of the man or the woman.

We've got a problem, Progressives. And the problem is that we have become so attuned to see these problems in others that we have begun to refuse to see it in ourselves, and repeatedly fall into near identical behaviors that we have called out in others, all because we refuse to confront the reality that people who fall under the progressive umbrella still struggle with many of our hot-button issues.

And in the end, if we are unable to name and address those issues in ourselves, while being so eager to point them out in others, then we are precisely the hypocrites the conservatives make us out to be. We have a problem. It doesn't mean you should vote one way or another. But if there is to be any integrity to the direction we push our world in, it absolutely must affect the way we campaign, the way we debate, and the way we live.

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