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Politics of Identity - 4. page

Originally an article series, this category covers Stuart’s writing about identity and self-making in contemporary capitalism.

Even at a Symbolic Level, Hillary Clinton’s Candidacy Sets Feminism Back

To date, debates about whether a vote for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders is a feminist vote have centred around policy differences between the two candidates and have compared the two candidates’ platforms and records, and Sanders’ record is clearly superior when it comes to the issues. Left uncontested until now, however, is the idea that electing Clinton would be a victory for feminism at the level of symbolic discourse, that the election of a woman over a man would, at least symbolically, strike a blow for feminism and against patriarchy. This was a view that I myself held. But now I am not so sure.
In 1986, Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas. A feminist, pro-choice Democrat, Richards faced all the usual character attacks one might expect and then some. That was because she was a divorced, recovering alcoholic who refused, on dozens of occasions, to deny second- and third-hand claims that her past drinking had been matched by an equally prodigious cocaine habit. In this way, she challenged, in every way, the double standards of respectability women face on a host of questions concerning personal and familial morality and lifestyle. Four years before William Jefferson Clinton was nominated to run for president, Richards had given the keynote address to the Democratic convention that nominated Michael Dukakis.

When asked about being the first female governor of Texas, Richards was quick to correct her interlocutors and remind them that she was not, in fact, the state’s first governor due to a long-standing tradition in hyper-patriarchal Dixie. Ma Ferguson, wife of former governor James Ferguson, had been elected Texas governor sixty years previously. That is because the culture of the former Confederate States of America is not only highly conservative with respect to racial issues; this extends to class and gender politics as well. And that is why, as soon as women gained the right to vote in the South, the region’s planter aristocracy began dodging term limits and corruption charges by using their wives as electoral proxies through whom they could hold onto power, skirting the spirit of the law.

Such arrangements were public and blatant. Speaking to audiences of Klansmen and religious conservatives, disqualified male politicians could travel from town to town, proudly proclaiming that if their wives were elected, their regimes would continue without the slightest interruption. To such audiences, these claims seemed reasonable because, in a highly patriarchal society, it is inconceivable that a good wife or daughter would be anything other than a simple extension of her man’s will. This was the campaign of legendary segregationist governor George Wallace for his wife Lurleen in 1966. While she stayed home, her husband went back to the hustings to remind voters that she would rule in name only; he would be calling all the shots. And true to his word, upon “her” victory, he did just that.

And this sort of thing is not unique to Dixie. In 1970, social conservatives in India turned out to elect Indira Gandhi at Prime Minister precisely because they understood her personhood to be wholly subsumed in the greatness of her late father, Jawaharlal Nehru who had ruled the nation from 1945 to 1964. Next door, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir succeeded him in a similar fashion in 1993. What we have often missed, watching such elections from the Northern US or from Canada, is that periodic election of a great man’s daughter or widow, functions to reinforce the greatness of a patriarchal lineage, showing that a man’s greatness is such that he can rule through a minor proxy from a sickbed, prison cell or even beyond the grave. However autonomous these individuals are, once elected, their election campaigns rely not just on exploiting but reinforcing popular beliefs about the inferior and subordinate character of women’s agency in religious, conservative, traditionalist societies.

For all the legitimate criticism Margaret Thatcher might face for her policies, her election in 1979 showed women in modern democracies that effacing of their own agency and deliberately campaigning in the shadow of a man was not the only route to national leadership. Thatcher helped blaze a trail for governor Richards, as well as for tough, independent national leaders of the right and the left, like Angela Merkel and Julia Gillard.
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More than that of any other self-styled progressive in the industrialized world, Hillary Clinton’s so-called feminism is based on a retrograde political understanding of the meaning of gender in the public square. As I first observed in 2008, Bill Clinton, as any good campaign surrogate should, tailors his message to his audience when speaking for this wife. And, the more conservative and Southern the state, the more he speaks not of “she” but “we,” when it comes to the next Clinton White House. It is actually this phenomenon that has given rise to claims by analysis that the Clinton campaign has an African American “firewall.” Whereas the overwhelming majority of white voters in the South who identify as conservative and evangelical are diehard Republicans, the same is not true of black conservative evangelicals, who remain a major constituency for the Democrats. It is that demographic phenomenon that is conferring Hillary Clinton’s lead in South Carolina: a bloc of conservative evangelicals are, once again, hearing from her husband about how a victory for her is really a victory for him.

Clinton, herself, relies on this kind of thinking, as she has since beginning her first presidential run in 2006, by emphasizing how her “experience” distinguishes her from other candidates. Yet, curiously, the record, the experience she most frequently references—and the record and experience her adversaries are most likely to attack—are initiatives associated with her husband’s presidency. Holding no office other than “First Lady,” a royal consort equivalent office that reminds us that the US has not conducted an overhaul of its constitution since the 1780s, she claims credit for any major law passed in the US by dint of her husband’s signature appearing on it.

The move that Clinton is making here is not some clever feminist tactic to stick it to the man; it is an affirmation of the ancient English legal doctrine of “couverture” in which a man’s legal personhood wholly subsumes the personhood of his female dependents, his wife and daughters, who only cease to be part of his legal body through his death or their marriage to another man. Her claims of an ontology coterminous with her husband’s from 1993-2000 should be enough to sicken, never mind discourage, the deeper thinkers in modern feminism.

Compare this to her reluctance to take credit for the policies of the cabinet in which she served from 2009-12, her indifference to the accomplishments of Senate Democrat majority in which she served with Bernie Sanders from 2006-08, and the bizarre patriarchal traditionalism of her campaign is thrown into sharper relief. Ultimately, Clinton is claiming that her experience as a part of her husband is actually more real than her experience as an autonomous political actor.

In this light, we must ask whether, even in a symbolic universe of rhetoric, position, titles and ceremony, a Clinton victory will be a step forward, sideways or backwards for women in America and throughout the democratic world.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Political Geography of Community – Part 3: Communities and Neighbourhoods: Conflate at Your Peril

Recently, events in the organizations in which I am most involved these days have brought two crucial questions to the fore: (a) what is a community and (b) how does a community achieve representation? As the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) seeks to rebuild itself, as Fair Vote Canada struggles to deal with a fight over municipal voting reform in Toronto that threatens to engulf an entirely national movement in an ugly parochial schism, they avoid these fundamental questions at their peril.

Community, in my view, is an experience, a set of interactions that bind a group of people together. Communities are contingent upon continued interaction and interrelation; their composition is in constant flux and individuals’ interactions shift, based on their interests, location, time, tastes, politics and a host of other factors. Individuals, corporations and governments can decide to try and create communities but their success in doing so is never guaranteed because community is not prescriptive; it is descriptive of something that is taking place in the present. In other words, community is something that is done, not something that is declared.

Every day, we participate in community. Our workplaces are sometimes part of that, depending on where we work, how we work and what our colleagues are like. Similarly, depending on the kinds of families we have, this, too, is often but not necessarily a locus of community for many of us. Those of us who are part of racialized minorities are often in communities constructed along racial lines, sometimes in shared self-defense, sometimes in celebrating a history of struggle. Religious affiliation is also a major locus of community-making in our culture. Often, the communities with which we most enthusiastically engage are communities built around aesthetics, ideology or shared recreational pursuits. In my life, some of the most important communities are based around a shared appreciation of old school Doctor Who and Asian fusion cuisine, a commitment to proportional representation and to fighting poverty and climate change.

When one looks at community as a lived experience, it is hard, in a dense, urban centre, to find people who would rate their neighbourhood or their street as a major locus of community. I certainly do not. I have no shared day-to-day experience of fellowship and commonality with the overwhelming majority of people who live near me. That’s not to say I don’t care about them or that I won’t experience community in the future. But it does mean that when I do experience future community with them, it will likely not be because we are engaging around issues to do with our surroundings but because it turns out that, coincidentally, they are part of one of the communities that is real for me, because they turn out to be fellow socialists, environmentalists or Doctor Who fans.

The reality is that I experience more community, in a week, with a college instructor in Maricopa County, AZ, I have never encountered in person, whom I met through a friend of a friend of a friend in a Facebook discussion about the US 2010 midterm elections, than I do with either of my next door neighbours.

That is not to say that neighbourhood identity is not an important part of experiencing community for some of my fellow Vancouverites. In a handful of places, there exists a real sense of geographic identity and neighbourhood solidarity. But the experiences of people in places with the most intense neighborhood consciousness, the Downtown Eastside, Commerical Drive and Shaughnessy are generalized at our peril. People who live in those places are generally pretty special people who have, unlike the vast majority of Vancouverites, decided to make significant sacrifices and difficult life choices to situate themselves in one of the handful of places in the Lower Mainland where neighbourhood identity matters.

There is another group of people who experience neighbourhood as a significant form of community. They are the local — and excuse the pejorative tone of the term but nothing else will suffice — busybodies. They are people who have decided to be unlike the majority of their neighbours and get involved in organizing ratepayers’ associations, local civic festivals and government planning processes around transportation and development. But these groups should not be mistaken for people typifying or representing their neighbours; they are people who draw solidarity and generate community, who develop affinity with one another, precisely because of how unlike their neighbours they are. A residents’ association activist in Dunbar has far more in common with a residents’ association activist in Fraserview than she does with a Dunbar resident who never attends neighbourhood-focused events.

Neighbourhood activists, then, are not so much people whose experience of community is based on their neighbourhood as they are people whose experience of community is based on a shared set of political and aesthetic commitments about what neighbourhoods should be. These commitments, furthermore, are not located in the present. Neighbourhood activists are aspirational or nostalgic in their politics; they either celebrate an imagined past of neighbourhood solidarity and community or they look forward to creating such communities in future, often allied with the hundred mile diet, slow food movement, etc. While neighbourhood activists often deserve accolades for their work against gentrification, overdevelopment and a host of other ills, I do not believe we should compliment them with the concession that their theory of neighbourliness is true in the present for most people, because it simply is not.

These questions of community would merely be academic if they did not so profoundly taint our politics and the ongoing project of seeing voters represented by officials they choose, who reflect their concerns and priorities.
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When I vote, I want to be able to pool my vote with people with whom I actually experience community and I want others to be able to do the same. I want my vote to be counted with people who share my environmental concerns, whether they live on Boundary Road or Oak Street; I want my vote to be counted with people who share my concerns about poverty and issues of affordability, whether they have a view of the Fraser River or Burrard Inlet. And I would be very happy for us to be represented by the same person or people in City Council.

The last thing I want is for an arbitrary polygon containing about 61,000 people to be drawn around my apartment and to be told “this is your community; your interests are those of the other 61,000; and you will all have a single representative on city council to reflect the consensus of your community.” What consensus? What community? Benedict Anderson wrote of nations as “imagined communities.” Municipal wards aren’t even that. They are imaginary communities.

How the people chosen to represent these false, nonexistent communities are chosen is of no interest to me because conceding this makes a mockery not just of community but of representation and democracy.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, forward-looking people in England came to recognize that the old voting system they had designed in 1215 to represent medieval communities, which were profoundly geographically structured, had run its course and the “limited vote” system was instituted to give the residents of the ascendant market and industrial towns a form of proportional representation, so that communities in overlapping geographic areas could enjoy concurrent representation in parliament. Unfortunately, as the nineteenth century wore on, those reforms were chipped away and people were once again shoehorned into false communities of neighbourhood as the English elite took measure to prevent the rise of labour politics and the emancipation of the working class.

The deliberate and coercive conflation of “neighbourhood” and “community” in a political system is a fundamentally conservative project. It seeks to displace voluntary and real forms of community with coercive and hypothetical forms. It alienates the majority of the populace from participation in government by ensuring (a) that they are “represented” by someone for whom they did not vote and (b) that they are alienated from elected officials with whom they might share ideological, ethnocultural or other genuine forms of community. Neighbourhood consciousness seeks to erase real cleavages in terms of ideology, class, wealth and status and replace them with a romantic myth of community that never existed. It helps to render our political conversations incoherent and to turn them away from real debates about the fundamental questions that determine the kind of city in which we live to focus on intersection signalization and potholes.

Now that is not to say that single-member wards are the worst thing that could happen to a city. It may well be that the current rigged, majoritarian, at-large system in Vancouver that can allow a party to sweep all 27 seats with only 43% of the vote, as happened in 1996, is actually worse. But having lived in Toronto with its hyper-parochial neighbourhood politics, it is not that much worse. But much more importantly, in both of these cities, we can do a lot better; we can create a voting system that actually empowers communities, that actually represents people, that facilitates, instead of repressing political debate.

It is for this reason that I have taken the position I have in the Fair Vote Canada referendum currently underway and it is for this reason that I am working hard to have COPE update its electoral reform policies and return them to the platform on which we ran in 1999.

In a future post, I will talk about some alternatives that could move us towards a civic politics that represents communities. In the interim, as I encourage you to look at the two reports I co-authored on civic democracy in Toronto in 2005 and 2008.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity | fusangite |

No Demographic Apocalypse for Republicans

I read yet another article the other day reiterating some comforting falsehoods that opponents of the US Republican Party like to repeat to themselves.

The argument goes like this: non-white people just don’t vote Republican in large numbers. And because America keeps getting less white, little by little, the GOP will be destroyed by simple demographics. Democrats living in red states like Texas are especially enticed by this line of thought. It seems to offer some kind of permanent future victory that flies in the face of the country’s increasingly conservative turn over the past four decades. This analysis, if it can be called that, has a very serious flaw: it assumes that race is heritable, permanent and unchanging, a belief typically only held by racists. It is a theory that accepts the falsehoods on which American racism is based.

In reality, there is no fixity to what whiteness is in America. With the exception of the Republican lock on black voters from the 1850s to 1930s, the Democrats, since their inception under Andrew Jackson, have been the party of the non-white and the newly white. And it is this second category to which those predicting demographic Armageddon for the Republicans would do well to pay attention.

A century and a half ago, it was impossible to be Catholic and white at the same time in America. More recently, it was impossible for light-skinned people with black parents or grandparents, people like me, in other words, to be white. But this is no longer true.In the mid nineteenth century, the Irish started turning white; a couple of generations later, the Italians did the same, soon followed by the Poles and then other Slavs. The Japanese and Turks were briefly white in the early twentieth century but it didn’t stick. On the other hand, the Jews only turned white about ten years before I did.

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It may be that the prominent place of Jindal, Rubio and Haley in today’s Republican Party is indicative not of the party branching out and seeking support from non-whites but of America’s colour line shifting again. Just as Catholic voters have gradually shifted towards the Republicans the whiter they have become and the longer they have been able to stay white, let us consider the possibility that the increasing number Hispanics and South Asians are emerging into leadership roles in the GOP is evidence of the whitening of subsets of these racialized communities. Similarly, the Republican-Likud bloc among Jewish Americans continues to grow at the expense of the Democrats, a process also intimately tied to the community’s increasing whiteness.

To believe that race has an inflexible and historically consistent relationship to ancestry, skin colour or physical features is to buy into the junk science of racists and to ignore four hundred years of race-making and unmaking in America. Democrats who imagine some kind of triumphant demographic eclipse of the Republican Party are missing the flexibility and dynamism of racism; if racial categories were inflexible, America’s racial hierarchies would have collapsed under their own weight long ago.

Gradually, over the coming decades, not only will Marco Rubio and millions of other Hispanic Americans who would be white in Latin America will turn into white Americans and so will all of their ancestors, just like Nikki Haley’s are about to. And then the Republican Party’s demographic problem will vanish again, just as it has so many times before in the past century and a half.

Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |