Woman, you’ve just been trumped
Well, Americans just voted a white man to the White House. It was always going to be a bit too much to expect from the grumpy middle American male—long nursing feelings of disenfranchisement, erosion of identity-based authority on grounds of race and gender, and economic trauma—that he would go out and vote for a woman. That too, after eight years of a black President. Maybe the Democrat/Republican division did not matter as much as these rudimentary forms of politics—gender and race—in the mind. The same ‘Rust Belt’ voters, from the decayed industrial zones of the Midwest and northeast US, had voted for the openly socialist Bernie Sanders in the primaries and have gone for Donald Trump now. Yes, a sense of rage against the established order underlay both votes. But whether it was purely that, and how much of it was a latent misogyny—openly nurtured by an unabashedly crude, politically incorrect man—will be debated for a long time. But America will have to wait, for a longer time than anyone thought, to break the glass ceiling and get a woman to be the President of the United States. And thank God we are not Americans.
Thank God we don’t have leaders running for elections who have to be defended for locker room talk. Yes, there’s plenty misogyny and gender unfreedom in the formal power equations that define India or its neighbours— latent or open, structural and inhibiting. Jokes about women leaders whose marital status is single abound, but so do such women leaders. Despite all our imperfections, we don’t bat an eyelid before putting a strife-torn state in the hands of a woman. A state that witnesses popular unrest at a scale unknown elsewhere, one that’s in the international eye, and is Muslim-majority to boot. And Kashmir is not alone. Whether in the much-derided plains of the north, or the restless east, or the paradox-bound lands of the south, where rationality and idolatry can coexist, we have had women leaders. It’s another matter that we kill our girls before they are born, but that’s for another day. Or is it? Isn’t it the same harnessing of technology and devotion to capital gains without any thought to social outcomes that brings back the worst forms of male dominance through the back door? Whatever else Hillary Clinton may connote in terms of wider ‘politics’—certainly continuity rather than revolution— in gender-political terms a Hillary victory would have carried an emancipatory potency much higher, and much wider, than the immediate facts. And while everyone was waiting, so close to such a moment of disruption, it was Trump who brought about a revolution. Sorry, counter- revolution.
For, the clock has been set decisively back. The waspish, blond billionaire playboy, with his brood of Barbie blondes ranged obediently behind him, answers only to a male American dream of the 1950s. There’s some twisted glee among liberal-baiters on how power has been snatched from the jaws of status-quoists who reigned over Washington for decades. But no real celebration. For the future, if anything, is even more uncertain. The world watched with trepidation as America voted out of fear—for a candidate who had ploughed deep into their anxieties. To safeguard an Americanism that was exclusive, one opposite to what created America itself. America voted to build walls around itself. High walls that trade ties will find difficult to scale. That will put distant wars it created out of sight, so that its youth need not be sent to fight in alien lands. No Springsteen anthems, no lilting blues, no Dylan songs, no Hollywood heroics adorn this revolution. Nothing remotely inspirational. Heck, nothing even world-conquering in this inward- looking, unglobalised USA. Only the picket fences of Middle America. In a strange way, gender equations were turned on their head. Trump was the quintessential housewife, who promised to secure the home and keep the mantelpiece shining. And Hillary was the woman in pants, the neo- Alexander wanting to rule the world with carrots and sticks. Only Hillary and the media which supported her did not see it coming.
Though when she had to get Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” to prop her up—or President Obama to campaign as extensively as no other sitting president had ever done for his proposed successor—it was giving the game away. America clearly wanted its own Brexit. Not four more years of experts and policy wonks who will say what is good for them and not let them decide. Certainly not an Ivy- League smart-talker, whose bank balance increased in between private e-mails. America decided it would rather have an unknown quantity than a known latitude. Perhaps they had seen too much House of Cards. Hillary failed to seize the potential for novelty— of offering America a simple line, an option of making history by electing a woman. She submerged her gender identity in a maze of woolly words like values, inclusiveness, sacrifices—high standards that the voters felt was giving them low returns. In fear of having someone perceived as part of the pro-big business/ Wall Street set-up, they actually supported a free-market free radical. Trump, with a New York lisp betraying his privileged background, won working- class votes. A lurching US economy was driving the people either to the openly Left Bernie Sanders or to the Alt-Right, as always happens when the centre collapses. The Republicans, lucky to be conned into choosing a novel candidate, are laughing all the way to a presidency, Senate and House majority. Should India be worried? That’s for another day. For now, Bill Clinton is on a sulk. America was not yet ready to have an ex-prez as the First (Gentle)Man in the White House.
Santwana Bhattacharya is Political Editor, The New Indian Express
Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com