How Doug Jones's Alabama Surprise Could Change Everything

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/how-doug-joness-alabama-surprise-could-change-everything

How Doug Jones’s Alabama Surprise Could Change Everything
Adele M. Stan
December 13, 2017

In the brutal contest for an open Senate seat, the question of identity politics should be settled once and for all.


Hell hath no fury like a predator scorned. And so it was that Roy Moore, the far-right Republican U.S. Senate candidate who Tuesday night lost a special election in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones, refused to concede to his rival that evening, even after all the major news outlets called the outcome. On the same day, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to insult a high-profile woman senator with sexual innuendo. As Paul Waldman noted, Trump all but shouted, “Whore!”

Moore and Trump, on the surface, have little in common, Trump being an areligious, foul-mouthed New Yorker, and Moore being a performatively pious Southerner. But they are bonded by an experience they share: a chorus of female voices aimed at them, the voices of women with credible stories of having been groped, forcibly kissed, stalked, and more.

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Meanwhile, as America faces its reckoning on its institutionalized sexual oppression of women, Trump is confronted with his own history once again, as women who made credible allegations against him during the presidential campaign again resurfaced (here in a video by Brave New Films) to reassert their claims. It was this that prompted U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a likely contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to call on the president to resign on December 11, eliciting the Twitter insult from Trump.

Because here’s the thing: Now that the public is becoming more accustomed to powerful men losing their posts due to sexual crimes and misdemeanors conducted against women, a case for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump broadens. The impeachment case against Trump needn’t be predicated simply on whether or not his campaign committed crimes or colluded with Russia. It needn’t prove a crime. The tribal affinity for Trump among majorities of white women in particular states should not deter the Democrats from making the case based in part on his treatment of women, and his braggadocious misogyny. The culture at large is bending under the weight of such allegations against men of high office and handsome payment.

However unlikely it may be that the House of Representatives, with its Republican majority based on ruthlessly gerrymandered maps, would ever vote to pass articles of impeachment, the case must be continuously made. And if Trump is ultimately pushed from office, it will be African Americans and Democratic women of all colors (but especially African American women) who will make it happen. To dismiss them as purveyors of “identity politics” is to simply display the institutional biases the Democratic Party is supposed to guard against. This coalition is the party’s present—and its future. Get used to it.

[Irish_Dem]

1. Anyone who dismisses the power of women in this new century will do so at their own peril. nt