I. Hillary is the last of a cohort of pioneer women feminists all born in the period between 1945 - 1955. They broke the trail and did a lot of heavy lifting, but they were not fated to reap the final results of a lot of the work they did. There's a lot left to do.
II. The Blacks-vs-women narrative of the primary was a false one from the get-go.
III. While women all Spring have been saying "It's our turn," that flies in the face of the American history of improving conditions for Blacks and women.
For 150 years, women's rights advances have pretty reliably followed African-American rights gains by about 10-15 years -- and were almost always precipitated by them. The original suffragist movement was a direct outgrowth of the abolitionist movement; and most of its early founders were members of both. The feminist revolution of the 1970s likewise grew directly out of the civil rights struggles of the late 1950s and early 60s.I had vaguely noticed this historical trend myself, but Sara spells it out clearly. Her historical statements are spot-on.
IV.
The real conflict that defined the choice between Hillary and Obama wasn't about melanin content or X chromosome status. It was about a generational hand-off of power -- a demographic shift that Obama saw coming, and Hillary did not.This trend was pretty clear to anyone who read the voting results and the polls by the time the SuperTuesday in February was over. The Boomers are in shock and denial. For the first time since they started voting in mass in 1968, they have had control of the results of an election taken away from them. And as a pre-boomer born early in WW II myself, all I can say is "Thank God! Finally!"
Sara refers to what looks like a very interesting book Millennial Makeover. The blurb points out "...the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five Millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama." The Boomers have been the pig in the python for four decades, and now they are beginning to fade fast into history. The Millennials are ready to replace them.
It is this new generation and their attitudes that is bringing out the conservative anti-immigration attitudes. The older White and mostly male individuals (like Lou Dobbs) find the attitudes and ethnically and racially mixed make up of the Millennials to be quite frightening. They feel that they are losing control that they thought they had over American society and don't know where it is going. The conservative reactions to the Civil Rights Movement and to feminism has a similar cause - fear of loss of control.
America's biggest problem has not been sexism. It has been slavery and the resulting racism. That's not to say that sexism has not been a major problem, only that racism has been much, much worse; and correcting slavery and the resulting racism has always been the first priority. But the corrections for racism have exposed the similar problems faced by women and gays (and all LGBTs.) The corrections for racism have also built the tools and organization techniques that other minorities needed to get their problems addressed.
The Democratic primary this year has been an interesting set of events that "played-out" the on-going relationships between racism and sexism, against a background of the generation shift as the Boomers begin to lose their dominance over our American society.
Of course, that's not all. In the political arena there is also now a reaction against the conservative overreach as the conservatives have tried under Bush/Cheney to remake American society in their preferred conservative small-government, low tax, non-regulatory federal government yet militarily monarchist image. This form of conservatism strongly resembles that of the pro-slavery plantation-owner elites in the South in the run up to the American Civil War.
The large plantation slave-owners prior to the Civil War made up most of the wealthiest men in America, based on their control of exported cotton. Cotton was the most significant raw material in international trade during the four decades before the U.S. Civil war, which made cotton then comparable to oil today.[*] Slavery allowed those plantation owners to sell cotton at a lower price than anyone else in the world, since they had total control over their labor supply. That's what made Southern cotton so extremely profitable. Slavery was the basis of the wealth of the planter class, much as oil and similar international trade today is the basis of the extremely wealthy conservatives. Wealthy families fight hard to protect their wealth and the status that it gives them, and their wealth gives them a lot of tools others don't have with which to conduct the battle. That's a key to understanding conservatism.
Even that's not all. Stack on the challenges of Peak Oil and Global Warming, as well as the continued population growth and urbanization of American society as well as the relative decline of America's economic and military power globally. It's going to be an interesting 21st century, in the same meaning as the old curse usually said to be Chinese"May you live in interesting times."
Go read Sara's discussion of the Hillary - Obama confrontation for a more in-depth presentation. Read Howe's book for a fascinating discussion of how America was formed in the first half of the 19th century. Much of the conflict there continues to today.
[*] See "What hath God Wrought: The transformation of America, 1815 - 1848" by Daniel Walker Howe. (2007) (in the series The Oxford History of the United States.)
He has a very interesting chapter entitled "The World that Cotton Made."
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