| Moren said: I'm just wondering - what do you make of Biden's advantage with women across the board? Also, had not Sanders run, do you think Warren would have been able to beat Biden? |
Well that was another topic I was hoping to address at some point here anyway actually, so I guess now is as good a time as any.
It's like what I was saying in my last post on this thread: there are some problems that are shared by the global left broadly, not just Bernie's specific campaign, and this is one of them. The progressive left, as in campaigns and organizations positioned to the left of the neoliberals, is and has always been majority-male pretty much across the board. That's true here in the U.S., in the UK, in Canada, and really everywhere I can think of. What's more, the further out to the left one goes on the ideological spectrum, the more pronounced the gap becomes. Look at the sex composition of an Antifa line, for example, or of any of the communist parties and you'll find the membership to be more lopsidedly male than YouTube. Environmentalists are like the sole exception, but that's because their core of support is suburban, not working class. Working class women are like the most ignored demographic on Earth.
Anyway, why is this so, you as? Why is there this problem? Well, at lot of the left, especially the farther out you go toward like properly revolutionary movements, the more dependence there is on adherents connecting to each other and strategizing online rather than in-person...and I think that heavy internet dependence is one thing that promotes toxic internal climates that are hostile toward outsiders. I mean seriously, the inventor of the world wide web himself has recently characterized the internet as a cesspool of misogyny that's only becoming more hostile toward girls and women over time. (In large part that's just simply because far more men than women have internet access in the first place, and so men far outnumber women in most online spaces.) Movements that are based primarily online (with the obvious exception of internet-based women's movements) tend to wind up reflecting the attitude of the internet toward girls and women. I think that's one modern cause of this issue. There are others too, but I don't want people's attention spans to flag here.
Anyway, you ask if Warren could've defeated Biden absent Sanders being in the race? I don't know. We all remember that it was when Warren came out with her two-stage strategy for introducing Medicare-for-all that her support began to drop off. Would those people have left if the alternative of Bernie Sanders weren't present? I don't know. Speaking for myself though, I wouldn't have. I think that, at her peak, Warren had the makings of a winning coalition: one that was multi-generational, not just youthful, for example, as well as increasingly multi-racial and which included a significant chunk of the white suburban women who drove the Democrats to their victory in the midterm elections back in 2018 as well. Sanders has struggled with some of those groups, but has fared better among Latinos owing to his clear stance against ICE, in part, I think. It's really tough to say whether she might have won without Sanders in the contest. We'll never know the answer to that one.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 14 March 2020
