The Women’s March

Despite Chait’s usual whining about identity politics and protest, making one wonder why he is taken seriously at all, the Women’s March is producing a highly progressive platform.

Organizers have laid out an unapologetically radical, progressive vision for justice in America, placing the march in the context of other past and ongoing movements for equality. “We welcome vibrant collaboration and honor the legacy of the movements before us—the suffragists and abolitionists, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, the American Indian Movement, Occupy Wall Street, Marriage Equality, Black Lives Matter, and more,” the statement starts out. It name-checks feminist leaders that represent a diverse range of ideologies and issues, including Harriet Tubman, Gloria Steinem, Audre Lorde, Malala Yousafzai, farmworker organizer Dolores Huerta, former Cherokee Nation chief Wilma Mankiller, and Sylvia Rivera, a trans woman who was an instrumental leader of the Stonewall uprising.

The platform supports increased accountability for perpetrators of police brutality and racial profiling, demanding the demilitarization of American law enforcement and an end to mass incarceration. It calls for comprehensive antidiscrimination protections, health care, and gender-affirming identity documents for LGBTQ people. It calls unions “critical to a healthy and thriving economy” and aligns the march with movements for the rights of sex workers, farmworkers, and domestic workers.

March leaders have gone further than supporting access to safe, legal abortion and reproductive health care to demand the right to abortion for women of all incomes. (Even many supposedly “pro-choice” politicians have squeaked away from advocating an end to the ban on public funding for abortions, so this is commendable.) As for immigration, “we reject mass deportation, family detention, violations of due process and violence against queer and trans migrants,” the statement reads. “We recognize that the call to action to love our neighbor is not limited to the United States, because there is a global migration crisis. We believe migration is a human right and that no human being is illegal.”

Is this the be all and end all of what needs to develop against Trump? Of course not. But it is an important expression of an alternative to the hell to come. It is almost certain to drive Emperor Tangerine crazy and lead to an epic Tweetstorm. And maybe the bizarre decision to sack the head of the Washington DC National Guard during the inauguration is part of an attempt to bust some heads Bonus Army style. That would be an appropriate start to America’s first fascist presidency.

Also, I await the Jacobin piece criticizing the Women’s March for being a bunch of white liberal feminists and saying this is why Democrats have lost white working class men, as well of course as their preference for Grey Poupon over French’s.