There will be gulags
The Cut is a women’s fashion and politics magazine published by The New Yorker.
This is a recent article they published.
The Imagined Threat of a Woman Who Governs Like a Man
On Tuesday, Politico posted a provocative, anonymously sourced piece claiming that New York congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be planning, in concert with Justice Democrats, to recruit a Democratic primary challenger to her fellow New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries in 2020, in part in response to his undercutting of California congresswoman and progressive stalwart Barbara Lee in a November House leadership election. Ocasio-Cortez later dismissed the piece, calling it “birdcage lining.”
However inaccurate the facts in Politico’s reporting may have been, the piece was useful and telling — the expression of a building fever dream about Ocasio-Cortez, and the fears of what she might be capable of, should she continue to flash her unprecedented willingness to make bold demands and push her party where she thinks it should go. Ocasio-Cortez’s eagerness to flex her muscles, without demurring or waiting for her turn — without even waiting to be sworn in — is undergirding nightmarish fears about her as an agent of chaos and destruction. The Politico story itself was illustrated with an image of the Bronx native appearing to literally rub her hands together while grinning like Dr. Evil.
See, this is what the writers of The Cut don’t seem to understand. My fear, and I believe the fear of many like me, isn’t that Ocasio-Cortez will govern like man. It’s that she will govern at all. Not because she is a woman, but because we assume ALL POLITICIANS HAVE A DR. EVIL STREAK IN THEM.
I don’t trust a male politician any more or any less than a female politician, which is to say, I don’t trust them at all.
Welcome to conservatism or Founding Fathers classical liberalism. the understanding that people in goverment are people, that they succumb to the same weaknesses and petty desires of all people, and that given power, most of them will turn into self serving shit bags, if they didn’t start out that way, who use the power of their office to enrich themselves and their friends and torment or oppress their rivals. If is for precisely that reason, we don’t want people in goverment to have any more power than they absolutely have to, and we want lots of checks, balances, and restraints on the power.
The reason Ms. AOC has become the focus of so much derision is that she is so quick to demonstrate both her ignorance on just about every subject, and her willingness to flex her abusive muscles. Most freshmen members of Congress lay low for a term or two, she’s out swigging for the fences on social media and hasn’t even been sworn in yet.
Reading the piece, I couldn’t help but think of Naomi Alderman’s brain-bending novel, The Power, published last year. It depicts a world in which women develop the power to inflict physical pain, and to kill, via electricity that emanates from their fingers. In Alderman’s fictional universe, this power is exhibited first by young women who in turn awaken it in their elders; as they are learning the possibilities and limits of their new power, the women giddily experiment with it, sending sparks and currents, determining how much of it they have, whether they can control it, and how they might best deploy it.
The book is extraordinary because it forces readers to think about all the ways — within our social, sexual, professional, and political relationships — in which men’s power over women is so much taken for granted that we don’t question it, don’t even notice it. But when women acquire an equivalent force, chaos and fear reign. The Power read to many, and was regularly reviewed as, a piece of chilling dystopian fiction. But as Alderman herself has said, “It’s only a dystopia for the men … nothing happens to a man in this book that is not happening right now to a woman somewhere in the world.”
Holy fuck!!! Way to prove my point. AOC comes into power and the first thing she is going to do is inflict pain and that is a good thing?
Also, this book sounds truly fucking horrible.
Feminism has turned into some incel insanity. This, that terrible book and show Dietland, the social phenomenon of The Handmaids Tale, they push this pervasive idea that all men torture all women everywhere and that women should murder men indiscriminately for it. If you reversed the genders, and Elliott Rodger was Elaine Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista killings would be a feminist holiday.
What the reaction to Ocasio-Cortez makes undeniable is that if and when women gain enough power to start behaving, in a political sphere, as men have for so long, they will be viewed with fright and discomfort.
I view anyone who wants power with fright and discomfort.
It’s this very possibility that’s exhilarating for some, chilling for others: that women, and in this case, progressive women of color, newly elected in historic numbers, might team up in defense of one another, come to each other’s aid, exact political revenge on those who would vanquish their allies in ways they have never been capable of before. Because it’s not that women in the past haven’t had the will or desire to respond to the affront of having been stepped over by powerful men; it’s that they have not had the numbers, the voice, or the chutzpah that comes with those things, until very, very recently. What’s scary to so many about Ocasio-Cortez is that she’s acting like a politician with power.
This article, at every possible chance, reminds us that the women and minorities getting elected will come into office and seek to use their power to hurt those that opposed them, namely white men.
But… fearing that they will do this is wrong?
I guess the principle here is that white men deserve to take their lumps and we should just let politicians abuse us.
This article is the greatest endorsement of limited government that I have ever read.
And apparently, that provokes an almost primal fear. Like The Power, like the #MeToo movement, like the rising activism of women around the country in the years since Donald Trump’s victory, Tuesday’s story elicited a kind of shiver down the spine. We live in a world in which some people are used to being able to ascend without obstacle, without recrimination, without challenge: What if, suddenly, that changed? What if men were taken to task for sidelining or kneecapping women on their way to greater power? What if there was a price to be paid?
Which men?
That is the problem here. Government is a big hammer. When it comes down, it does so without nuance. So when the government comes down on white men, it will come down on all of them. Do the young white men with no money or power deserve to suffer? How about rural working class white men who have suffered under the Obama economy? Does it really matter if you are a white man who hasn’t kneecapped a woman, will you still be stepped on?
This is identity politics collective punishment. A more civil society would recognize the evil of that. this brand of progressivism sees that as a good as long women are POC are the ones wearing the boot doing to face stamping.
But there was something downright electrifying about seeing how uncomfortable it made so many people to even imagine a young politician testing out her power in this way — the giddy, exhilarating thrill of watching those sparks fly.
I’m so glad that the fear of having the power of the United States Federal Government grind me into a pink paste under its boot just because I’m a white male with a six figure income makes you giddy.
I wonder if it the same feeling Klansmen had at a lynching or Hitler Youth had during a pogrom.
This article is bad enough. Then Congresswoman-elect Ocasio-Cortez saw it.
And she Tweeted her favorite passage.
“We live in a world in which some people are used to being able to ascend without obstacle, without challenge:
What if, suddenly, that changed?
What if men were taken to task for kneecapping women on their way to power?
What if there was a price to be paid?”-?from @rtraister
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 19, 2018
Great, she loves the idea of taking men to task and making them pay a price.
I’m still not sure which woman I kneecapped to get where I am today, but I’m sure that really doesn’t matter when She Guevara’s boot comes down on my throat.
I am not supposed to fear her. She has given me every reason to fear her, and every other politician in Washington.
