“It’s about time,” was my first reaction when I saw the headline on Michelle Goldberg’s column saying “The Right is Furious with Liberal White Women.” This has been an uncontrollable thunderstorm steadily building in ferocity for years. Conservatives have known for a long time that this was a huge problem and have ignored it at their peril. Truthfully, it’s worse that just liberal white women, because they are losing women, one demographic at a time, on one issue after another. Let’s be honest. When you lose women, it’s just a matter of time before you lose everything.
I know something about liberal white women. I was raised by southern women, which is a whole different problem. If you combine that with politics, right or left, it’s “Katie, bar the door” and no surrender until it’s the last man standing. I’ve worked alongside women my whole career, both liberal and progressive, and there’s not much space between those poles, it just a matter of degree before something makes them explode. They never forget, and forgiving can be equally rare.
Conservatives lost black women long ago. They may have pretended they had a chance with Hispanic women, but that’s a ship that has sailed and won’t be coming back. Trump and his pussy-grabbing, misogyny and tone-deaf policies lost suburban women years back. Now you start shooting white women, who are mothers with children, and pulling them out of their cars and holding them in cells, and it’s past time to say you’re sorry, which they seem almost incapable of doing.
Goldberg shares some quotes from the right that are spot-on crazy. “Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the ‘greatest threat to our nation’ is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’… [another] wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.” See what I mean? If I were a conservative, I’d have to think twice about how to choose sides. Would I rather have some “trad” wife at home, baking cookies on my team or “organized gangs of wine moms”? No contest there. Case in point, conservatives made abortions illegal in one state after another, but the number of abortions in the US increased, despite every obstacle they put in the way of women making choices in their own lives. Those choices are sticking with them on the way to the ballot box as well.
Conservatives need to add another factor in looking at how badly they are losing women. The boomer sisters are past the pale with this gang. I can testify from my Facebook feed. These women are carrying signs and dragging their old men out to the demonstrations with them. They are whistling like mad about ICE, and they are also out canvassing for their candidates in any elections on tap from Congress to dogcatcher.
Couple all of this with conservatives and Trump deciding that the hill they want to die on is a little bump in Minnesota, the home of Midwestern “nice.” These folks are out in the snow, bundled up in freezing temperatures. Who does that? The optics for the administration make them the Russians and the locals Ukrainians.
Insurrection? No one believes that. Conservatives have lost this one and are going to lose more if they don’t call their ICE dogs back into the kennel. The women are going to win, and it’s just a matter of time before they drag all the men along with them.
