Thank you Senator Warren, best wishes moving forward
I want to speak briefly regarding Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Because I’m on the left, I’m not a member of the Democratic Party. I occasionally vote for Democrats, but only if they have a modicum of principles and lean left. There were three candidates in the 2020 cycle that earned that consideration: Senators Gravel, Sanders, and Warren.
I did something I almost never do for Democrats on the national level, I contributed to all three of their campaigns.
I had mixed feelings when Senator Warren dropped out. I don’t dislike the Senator, despite (acknowledging my privilege here), inter alia, her engaging in egregious conduct like doing a race science (which caused real harm) and endorsing a blood-thirsty war criminal in 2016 (that took a lot of time to forgive). That said, her suspending her campaign was a tremendous loss. Especially in that now the Democratic Party will marshal all its forces around right-of-center, neoliberal, imperialist, liar Joe Biden, and will relentlessly attack the mildly center-left candidate, Senator Sanders. Warren’s absence on the debate stage will be missed.
Many second wave feminists, particularly white bourgeois ‘feminists’ like Sady Doyle, Amanda Marcotte, Jill Filipovic, and Amy Siskind will be quick blame sexism alone for Warren’s performance in and subsequent withdrawal from the race. Certainly sexism played a substantial role, but there was more than that going on. Another part of Warren’s problem was that when she began moving to the right, she alienated a number of progressive voters. Meanwhile, the right-of-center Democrats she was courting with her rightward shift didn’t trust her. Had she not tacked right, she might have survived Super Tuesday. Campaign post-mortums are appearing, and there’ll likely be more discussion around the complex reasons she dropped out.
We’re told by white feminists that men often say, “I’d support a woman POTUS candidate, but not that candidate.” The follow up to their straw man is where they assert that for these hypothetical men it’s always “not that candidate.”
That’s certainly not my case, I’ve voted for women POTUS candidates in the last three general elections.
The general response from white feminists to people voting for leftist women, like those mentioned above, is “you only voted for them because you knew they couldn’t win.” Aside from being a terribly fatalistic statement, it diminishes the accomplished women running in left parties like the Green Party or Peace and Freedom Party. Left-leaning women could win if more people voted for them. The idea that someone would vote for a candidate based on shared principles and values is seemingly a cipher to white feminists.
At any rate, I can say that in addition to contributing to Warren’s campaign, I vowed back in August 2019 that I would have voted for her if she had made it to the general election in November 2020:
That was a promise to vote for a woman should she secure the nomination of the Democratic Party. So much for “you knew they couldn’t win”.
I frequently defended and supported Warren. The only time in this election cycle that I really went after her is when she hired a TFA operative. There were also a few times where she praised right-wing coups or attempted coups in Bolivia and Venezuela respectively, that I was highly critical of her policies. It turned out my fears regarding her TFA advisor were unfounded, since her education platform was very good. My feed reflected that.
I defended Warren against monster Liz Cheney:
I praised Senator Warren’s tax plan:
I even agreed with white feminist Jill Filipovic when she complained about how awful centrist Peter Buttigeig was getting outsized media attention in comparison to far more qualified women like Warren. Filipovic has apparently deleted the tweet I responded to. She was right though.
There was another thread by Filipovic, also now deleted, where she said “But you might be sexist if you decide to attack Warren by portraying her as Hillary 2.0, relying on sexist stereotypes of power-seeking women as untrustworthy…” The part of her thread was on point. Warren, for all her flaws, was no Hillary Rodham Clinton. Anyone suggesting that was wrong, and I once more found myself in the awkward position of agreeing with the white feminist’s cogent point.
Sometimes my support for Senator Warren still earned me ire from white feminists, like this incident with Helen Stickler.
Ultimately, Senator Warren suspended her campaign. It’s my hope that she and Senator Sanders can work out any differences and put Senator Warren on the ticket as Vice President. I would gladly vote for Sanders-Warren ticket, despite the fact that both candidates have major shortcomings. At least they would shift the conversation to the left, and fight for things that aren’t even on the table at this point. I hold out hope that the scholarly law professor will find a way. I’m still not sure, given how hard the ruling class is working to prevent any left-leaning candidate from securing the Democratic Party’s nomination, that a Sanders-Warren ticket could overcome the advantages that the other candidate has.
If the vile Joe Biden secures the nomination, then I’ll be voting for a woman POTUS for my fourth election in a row. Gloria Estela La Riva will have my vote.
