Posted by
Pete Chase on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 9:30:00 PM
Weeks after the election, the left can’t stop obsessing about Sarah Palin. There’s nary a mention in the media about that gentleman she was paired with on the GOP ticket, old what’s-his-name, but it’s like they have this involuntary tick when it comes to Palin, who – even though she’s back home in Alaska - continues to haunt their paranoid delusions. Really, guys – the election is over, you won, get over it.
Among the most rabid denunciations of Palin have come from feminists, a fact that surprises some but shouldn’t. That Palin has successfully integrated family life with professional achievement should have been viewed as vindication for a generation of feminists who insist that women can have both without compromising either. Instead they reviled her. Was there a double standard in the way Palin was treated by the very women who under other circumstances would have lauded her accomplishments?
In a word, no. The apparent contradiction is simply the result of a flawed assumption – that feminism is a cause unto itself. In fact, the opposite is true. Modern feminism – at least the virulent in-your-face strain so ardently championed by Maureen Dowd and the National Organization for Women, for instance – only exists within the context of a larger ideology. As the New Testament is understood only within the framework of Christian belief, so feminism has zero meaning outside of left-wing politics.
Feminism, like every other identity-based ideology, divides the world into oppressors and oppressed – the oppressed being, of course, women, minorities, gays, the poor. For having so little in common, it’s strange how groups purporting to represent these victim classes always seem to fall on the same side of virtually every issue, and they are unanimous in their dislike of Palin. Also curious is that despite the profusion of victims of every stripe, there is ever but one perp: white Christian maledom and its institutions.
And since oppression is the coin of the realm, it follows that membership is to be denied anyone not wallowing in his or her respective victimhood. Clarence Thomas, ergo, is not really black, and Sarah Palin is anathema.
Palin doesn’t merit inclusion in the Big Book of Feminist Achievement, but not because she doesn’t represent everything they claim to be about. It’s because of the R on her business card.