Biden's #MeToo Problem

Joe Biden released a video yesterday (see "Joe Biden, in Video, Says He Will Be ‘More Mindful’ of Personal Space" by Sydney Ember and Jonathan Martin) where he says, by way of summing up the nearly one-week's-worth of stories of women coming forward saying that the former vice president touched or kissed them inappropriately, that “Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted, and the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset and I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying.”

Having read most of Sydney Ember's reporting on Biden's #MeToo dust-up, I'm inclined to accept Uncle Joe's assessment. We gone from revelations of predatory, quid-pro-quo sexual behavior, not to mention allegations of rape, by Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein, which kicked off #MeToo less than two-years ago, to complaints, in Joe Biden's case, about hands on shoulders and kisses on the top of the head.

The #MeToo goalposts have moved and moved quickly.

Women have yet to come forward and accuse Biden of sexual assault. Trump has faced numerous credible accusations of sexual assault; he even gloated about it on camera.

The manhandling politician probably goes back to the founding of the republic. What's changed, and changed in the last two years, is that women -- not all women, but a lot -- don't want intimate physical contact as part of the price of being in public.

My sense is that this will blow over, as did the Bernie Sanders #MeToo specter that Sydney Ember attempted to conjure up, and Joe Biden will enter the race in a formidable manner.

What's interesting is that there is so much institutional opposition to Biden's candidacy. Biden seems to me the only candidate who can take on Bernie at this point. And if we accept as fact that the Democratic Party wants to block a Sanders nomination at all costs, I don't know why there is so much boosterism in the mainstream media for Beto, Buttigieg and Harris.

Make or Break for #MeToo

It might be too much to say that tomorrow is a make-or-break moment for #MeToo, but it certainly feels as if some sort of Battle of Waterloo is about to take place. Judge Brett Kavanaugh is scheduled to be confirmed on Friday, but not before his accuser Christine Blasey Ford gives testimony on Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ford says that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers.

As was the case with Obamacare, Kavanaugh's confirmation hinges on the votes of two Republican senators, Collins and Murkowski. According to "Trump Unleashes on Kavanaugh Accuser as Key Republican Wavers" by Peter Baker and Nicholas Fandos,

With a 51-to-49 majority, Senate Republicans can afford to lose only one vote, assuming they get no Democrats. If Ms. Murkowski votes no, she could swing Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the other abortion-rights Republican in the Senate. But Republican leaders went ahead to schedule a committee vote for Friday, just a day after the hearing, a move that drew rebukes from Democrats who said the majority was not taking the allegations seriously. “I’m confident we’re going to win,” Mr. McConnell said.

What's encouraging is the number of arrests activists are willing to take to block Kavanaugh's confirmation. On Monday over 100 were arrested in acts of civil disobedience at senate office buildings.

There is no better gauge of democratic commitment than civil disobedience. Nationwide protests are being planned for tomorrow.

It makes me wonder why we as a nation aren't willing to take arrests for the genocide that the United States is enabling in Yemen because you know 50 years ago we would have, but it does speak to the potency of #MeToo.

My position on #MeToo since it leaped out of the fetid mass of the Weinstein scandal is that we must support it. Though at first blush it might reek of puritanical sexual McCarthyism, it is a legitimate social movement that expresses the real grievances of women in the workplace. In Western culture's currently decades-long neoliberal stasis, #MeToo is one of the only social movements to have generated momentum since Trump's election.

Kavanaugh needs to blocked. The damage a hard right supreme court can do cannot be dismissed. My guess is that McConnell will ram Kavanaugh through, and that Collins, if not Murkowski as well, will line up with the "good old boys."

Then we'll see what #MeToo can deliver. I would hope that Capitol Hill is shut down on Friday. Why not? It could be done with enough disobedient people.

#MeToo vs. Mein Kampf

Primary elections yesterday in Nevada, Maine, North Carolina and Virginia, summarized below by Nate Silver, were pretty much a status quo affair. Women national security state/corporate Democrats won in key races in Virginia, while on the Republican side a white supremacist triumphed in the state's gubernatorial U.S. senate primary. The overall Democrat vs. Republican theme for this election cycle is shaping up to be "#MeToo vs. Mein Kampf."

In contrast to last week’s results — which were pretty good for the GOP “establishment” — the two most interesting outcomes of the evening featured problems for traditional Republicans and underscored the degree to which the GOP has become Trump’s party. Those results were:

• Corey Stewart’s win in the Virginia Senate primary — Stewart defended the white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year and other Republicans in the state are already distancing themselves from him.

• And Mark Sanford’s loss in the GOP Congressional primary in South Carolina’s 1st District after Trump endorsed his opponent, Katie Arrington. (Sanford has an outside chance of holding Arrington to under 50 percent of the vote and advancing to a runoff, but it’s looking unlikely.)

When combined with the North Korea summit and the quelling of a discharge petition led by GOP moderates to potentially force an immigration vote in the House, it’s a pretty good day for Trump — but not necessarily a good one for the GOP’s long-term electoral prospects.

Let's Hope that #MeToo Doesn't Disappear Prematurely

#MeToo is approaching its flame out. (See David Walsh's "The petition against Matt Damon and the 'erasing' of Kevin Spacey: The fiercely antidemocratic character of the sexual misconduct campaign.") Apparently there is a campaign to erase Matt Damon's brief appearance in the all-female Ocean's 8 because he is alleged to have provided cover for Harvey Weinstein's sexual predations.

Walsh argues that

For the [New York] Times and the American ruling elite, the obsessive publicizing of allegations of sexual wrongdoing reflects in part the desire to “change the subject” from the social disaster in America, the cancerous growth of social inequality and the eruption of US militarism around the globe. It also serves to deepen the attack on democratic rights and inure the population to the “disappearing” of heretical or controversial figures, helping to set the stage for outright mass political repression. 

The arrogant, self-absorbed and affluent layer, male and female, pursuing the campaign also has its own economic and social agenda. Individuals who are already in many cases privileged and wealthy would have us believe that sexual harassment, which now includes a wide range of behavior, is a martyrdom and its victims are among the most put-upon and oppressed members of society. 

Such a claim would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago. It was generally recognized then, and not simply by socialists, that the working class and the poor, and especially working-class and poor women, were the principal sufferers in modern society. There has been a huge economic and ideological shift. A self-absorbed upper middle class, determined to elbow everyone else out of the way, now insists that its experiences are earthshaking and world-historical. 

This layer, made wealthy by the stock market boom, various media and entertainment industry activities and other parasitic enterprises, is distant from and hostile to the working class. Like the American ruling elite as a whole, it is utterly contemptuous of democratic principles.

I think the Trotskyites at WSWS are wide of the mark here. To NYT's credit, it ran a lengthy, excellent front-pager about entrenched, decades-long sexual harassment at two Ford plants in Chicago -- see "How Tough Is It to Change a Culture of Harassment? Ask Women at Ford," by Susan Chira and Catrin Einhorn -- which is the really real reality that #MeToo is up against, not censoring the content of the arts & leisure page.

#MeToo has come about because more women are becoming managers, executives -- leaders -- in our capitalist world. The preposterous fiction that patriarchy sits its fat sweaty ass upon -- that father knows best -- had to come tumbling down sooner or later. Let's hope that #MeToo doesn't prematurely disappear because of a drift to puritanical censorship. Let's hope it's given enough time to trickle down to the shop floor and the construction site.

#MeToo Tackles Jason Bourne

Don't get me wrong. I am all for letting the #MeToo fires rage for as long as possible. #MeToo offers proof of life in an otherwise moribund plutocratic society that needs to hurry up and disintegrate.

I must say though that I feel some sympathy for Hollywood leading man Matt Damon (a.k.a., Jason Bourne, and earlier in his career, "Good Will Hunting"). Damon, a thinking man, had the temerity to question #MeToo's conflation of an ass slap with pedophilia, which set off a row online, with his Good Will Hunting costar and former girlfriend Minnie Driver telling The Guardian that men “simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level.”

Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site summarizes in "More sexual harassment allegations hit congressmen, media and entertainment figures":

Actor Matt Damon drew fire for an interview with ABC in which he sought to differentiate between the conduct of Senator Franken and the comedian Louis C. K. and more serious allegations. “There’s a spectrum of behavior,” he said. “There’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?”

“You have rape and child molestation,” he continued. “That’s criminal behavior, and it needs to be dealt with that way. The other stuff is just kind of shameful and gross.”

For these comments, Damon has been denounced by some of the high-profile advocates of the sex witch hunt in Hollywood, including Alyssa Milano and Damon’s former costar in Good Will Hunting, Minnie Driver. Milano wrote on Twitter that Damon’s reference to a “spectrum of behavior” was wrong. These were “different stages of cancer. Some more treatable than others. But it’s still cancer.”

Driver is on thin ice when she says that men cannot fathom daily abuse. Aren't men also the victims of sexual abuse? Weren't the victims of Kevin Spacey and James Levine young men?

#MeToo should avoid gender Manichaeism and keep its eye on the prize, a radical leveling. Most of these #MeToo stories are about abuse of power; most happen to be about men because it is still "a man's world." Men -- men with lots of money -- are in control.

My last job was working with and for young women. In the spring of 2016 I noted on this page that

Women are definitely on the ascent. And let me tell you, they are not particularly gracious to a brother on his way down. Women feel a lot of pent up disdain and resentment, if not outright hatred and anger, towards men. "Loathing" might be the best term. I can bear witness as the only man at many a behind-closed-doors staff meeting.

Cry no tears for men though. We deserve every bit of bad news coming our way. There will be no Donald Trump helicopter rescue touching down in a green field to lift us off to safety as the boreal forest burns all around. No, it is all hellfire and sinks of sulfurous acid for us.

A good reason to let the #MeToo fires burn is that in the light produced Russiagate is exposed for what it is -- a ridiculous piece of deep state drivel (see the latest Robert Parry summary, "Protecting the Shaky Russia-gate Narrative"). #MeToo has coherence -- abuse of power -- and a string of journalistic delicacies -- the details that accompany predatory sexual behavior -- followed by results -- no more shit-sniffing Charlie Rose on PBS or CBS. Russiagate has none of the above..

The #MeToo "Great Awakening" Could Do the Trick for the Dems

Necessary reading this morning is Thomas Edsall's "The Politics of #HimToo":

Since the first week of October, when The Times wrote about Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of sexual abuse, the floodwaters have been rising. At least 51 prominent men have been accused of sexual misconduct, ranging from groping to rape. The accused — many of them abruptly removed from their positions — run the ideological and partisan gamut from Garrison Keillor to Leon Wieseltier to John Conyers to Matt Lauer to James Levine to Trent Franks to Al Franken to Charlie Rose and on and on, including, most recently, Mario Batali and Russell Simmons.

For Democrats, who have struggled to find traction in their battles with the administration, the explosion of allegations has created an opening to put the focus on Trump — a development greatly enhanced by the Moore debacle.

Among Democrats, Gillibrand stands out as the politician who first claimed ownership of the issue, and she is seen by many analysts and commentators as having moved into the front ranks of potential presidential candidates. But what Gillibrand started has become a broader movement encompassing almost the entire Democratic Senate caucus.

After initiating the call on Franken to resign his seat, Gillibrand swiftly received remarkably strong support from her colleagues: 32 fellow Democratic senators and the two independent senators who caucus with the Democrats. There seemed to be an emerging consensus with a basic chess tactic: Sometimes you are required to sacrifice a pawn to checkmate the king.

In other words, Democrats smell blood, Trump’s blood.

Gillibrand now says that Bill Clinton, one of her most steadfast supporters, should have resigned the presidency after his affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, and on Monday Gillibrand told CNN that Trump should leave office in the face of “very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity.”

“I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation,” Gillibrand asserted at a news conference on Dec. 6. “You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable.”

Gillibrand continued:

"We, as elected leaders, should absolutely be held to a higher standard, not a lower standard, and we should fundamentally be valuing women, and that is where this debate has to go."

On Wednesday, Trump did Gillibrand a favor, tweeting:

"Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!"

USA Today, a publication known for the moderation and balance of its commentary, promptly editorialized:

"A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush."

Edsall then goes on to parse the #MeToo moment with quotes from academics and political professionals. Edsall hedges on any prediction regarding the 2018 midterms, saying the Democrats are woefully hamstrung by gerrymandering, which is true. Edsall also seems to believe that GOP women have not been swept up in #MeToo.

But then how to explain the elections in Virginia and Alabama? Blacks are being apportioned a hefty role in both these Democratic victories. My thinking though is that the fictional gender gap that I accepted as a guarantee of Hillary's victory last fall is now becoming real. The suburban Republican who the Hillary campaign courted is finally coming around thanks to the unceasing piggishness of our POTUS.

#MeToo is a stand-in for the Great Awakenings of the colonial and early republic past. Our culture, largely static in its broad contours since the dawning of the neoliberal age in the 1970s, is finding ways to cleanse itself. Occupy was a brief and ultimately aborted attempt. But #MeToo appears to have all the chemical ingredients to burn indefinitely.