I watch way too many debates.
And every time I watch, I keep wondering what America those four white men on stage are talking about that the president is apparently trying to destroy, the one they all want to return to. Because based on my scholarship back in the day, it wasn’t that great a place to be if you weren’t white and male for centuries. I look at statistics on class stratification and the growing income gap and I think about the supposed “opportunity society” these men prefer. I listen to them talk about being pro-life while knowing that not one of them will ever have to carry a child to term; they do not believe in the agency of my sister or my female friends while spouting about smaller government. They rouse fear of socialist Europe, not knowing that the president’s policies barely straddle the line of liberals, never mind anything resembling socialism as it’s actually defined. They decry the “problem” of unions, refusing to acknowledge that workers fought and died to unionize and establish some of very basic regulations we have today — and even that’s too much for them.
These men frighten me. If one of them is president, it will affect me a lot less than many others, but each one pledged themselves to a vision of the past instead of the future.
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