The Problem That Isn’t Named

Hint: It’s not the price of eggs.

Last week, responding to a mournful stack of mine, another substacker sent me a poem by Elizabeth Jennings (the British poet, not the wife from “The Americans”) I’d rarely read something that so aptly captured the push/pull of my life right now.

Answers

I keep my answers small and keep them near;

Big questions bruised my mind but still I let

Small answers be a bulwark to my fear.

The huge abstractions I keep from the light;

Small things I handled and caressed and loved.

I let the stars assume the whole of night.

But the big answers clamoured to be moved

Into my life. Their great audacity

Shouted to be acknowledged and believed.

Even when all small answers build up to

Protection of my spirit, I still hear

Big answers striving for their overthrow

And all the great conclusions coming near.

I’ve tried, since the election, to let the small, near things protect my spirit. And at times, they have. The tender velvety insides of my dog Scout’s ears, her plushy jowls. My husband Edward’s goofy jokes. “Bad Sisters” and “Shrinking” and “Cross” and “1,000 Pound Sisters,” and “Black Doves.” (My tastes are broad.) Making brownies this past Saturday with my daughter Cassie.

Making brownies, the small answers won for a few hours. The brownies were from a mix, and Cassie ruled that part. The vanilla mint ganache started as kind of a mess that wouldn’t form but my improvisations saved it. The Jackson Pollack-like drizzle is just melted semi-sweet chocolate and butter. Cassie was inspired to crush up candy canes and sprinkle on top. We laughed because Edward had to be sent to the store twice. “Right now!!” Cassie instructed; she enjoys ordering him around and he enjoys being ordered around by her. The dogs, excited at all the multi-person kitchen activity, milled around our legs hoping for fallen bits and almost knocked me over several times.

I’ve also gotten much pleasure from the responses I got to my Thanksgiving Day stack in honor of Kamala Harris and Jasmine Crockett:

The delight and relief and community of readers made me realize how much people—myself included—need moments that change the molecules of our atmosphere, even if only briefly.

The push/pull that the Elizabeth Jennings poem describes is my life now. Moments that sparkle and warm. But always the return of a feeling I’ve never had before and struggle to describe. We’re not supposed to feel defeated. Some influencers won’t even allow gloomy sentiments on their pages. Maybe they are younger than I am, but for me—and I suspect for many feminists of my generation—it doesn’t feel like a “setback,” it feels like a death.

After 2016, we cried, we raged, we marched, and we vowed that we wouldn’t let it happen again. I wrote a book about the election, and imagined that there would be post-election panels and conversations about gender and some kind of reckoning by the corporate media, who coddled and underestimated both Sanders and Trump while allowing—no, amplifying—mistrust and negativity toward Hillary and divisions within the party.

But there were no such conversations. Instead, the Dems’ electoral college defeat was chalked up—by both the media and by other Democrats—entirely to Hillary’s failures, while the Republicans, in contrast, closed ranks, protecting Trump from any and all accountability in the interests of retaining power. They were unscrupulous about it, too, grotesquely unscrupulous. But their behavior never got the pants-on-fire treatment that the corporate media had bestowed on Hillary’s emails.

In 2024, what once seemed like a temporary roadblock to the future now has become (or at least feels like) a more-or-less permanent environment. I’ll quote myself from an earlier stack here: “It’s too thick and swampy to be drained, too spread out over everything to be contained. It’s continually regenerating, regrowing its clinging sludge. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And no effective rinse agent. And already it’s being treated less as a monstrous growth that one should shudder in the face of and more as an ‘administration’ to be reported on. That’s how it grows—by absorption, like the blob of the old sci-fi movie.^”

Absorption—call it “normalization” if you like—feeds on silence. And in 2024, those of us old enough to have been grown-ups not just during 2016 but through Anita Hill (and, for some of us even further back, to when the problem “had no name”) are not just mourning Kamala Harris, but the silence around gender and race. If once there was “no name” (for harassment, for “date rape,” and for all the boring, everyday humiliations, discriminations, double-standards), now we have the names but have stopped naming. The pundit’s autopsies are full of talk about “the economy,” the price of eggs, the “working-class” (Thanks, Bernie, for bringing that vague, outmoded phrase into continual circulation.) The words “kitchen table” has been said many times. But the fact that the Democratic candidate was a woman? Crickets.

No, not even crickets, but Silence. We rarely even hear Kamala Harris’ name anymore. It’s just “the Democrats” (another blob) who “need to do better.”

Of course—although it’s never mentioned—Kamala did address the “price of eggs”(can’t these guys occasionally come up with a different example?) and although she didn’t bellow like Sanders, she proposed an “opportunity economy” that had actual plans (not just “concepts” of plans) for making the cost of housing, child-care, senior-care, education less back-breaking. She didn’t talk metaphorically about “kitchen table issues”; she recalled the actual kitchen table at which her actual working-class mother sat, figuring out how to pay the bills. She vividly described the everyday challenges of caring for aging parents—and proposed actual dollars that would help buy the soothing lotion for papery skin.

None of that, in the end, mattered. It didn’t matter that she had economic proposals and Trump just had “concepts.” It didn’t matter that she travelled to the swing states, over and over, working tirelessly. (That old 2016 blame —that Hillary failed to go there at the end—was finally proven BS.) Kamala went there, and went there, and went there. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Trump is a pathological liar and an incompetent human being, let alone will be a dangerous POTUS.

What mattered was that Kamala didn’t talk or look “working-class” to white people (Black people knew better) but like a successful, professional, career-oriented woman. (The little Black girl who was bussed to a different district? She was forgotten, an old image from the distant history of the 2019 primaries.) What mattered was that she was married to a Jewish lawyer instead of an upstanding white Christian. What mattered was that she had the nerve to have all those degrees. What mattered was that she was without biological children (and didn’t seem to have even tried.) What mattered was a self-assurance (“I’m speaking now”) that delighted Black women and Black and white feminists but was read as “uppity” by white suburban moms (not just a Black woman’s problem, Hillary had it too.)

What mattered was the men who felt “unmanned” by all the women who they believed had taken the jobs that were rightfully theirs. What mattered were those men who knew a gorgeous, confident woman like that would never be interested in dating them. What mattered was a corporate “liberal” media who harassed her—as they had Hillary—for ignoring their demands for “hardball” interviews, who criticized her for preferring “softball” conversations, who seemed to be determined, once they got her to “sit down” with them, to expose “flip-flops” and treated her discomfort in answering “yes or no” questions as “word salad.” What mattered were the headlines and chyrons and leading questions that were the only sources of “news” for many people. Did she have what it takes to be POTUS? Would she fall apart without a teleprompter? Are “vibes” and “joy” all she has to offer? Is there any “substance” to her? What mattered was all the (usually male) commentators blathering on about the groups she was “in trouble with” what she “needs to do.”

And of course, what mattered was that she had to wade through a mountain of right-wing disinformation about “cultural” issues. Like babies being killed at birth. Like pet-eating immigrants. Like:

Think of it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs, 15 years later say, what the hell happened? Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me? It’s incredible.”

Yes, it is incredible. Because it never happens. But Trump said it, and when the votes were counted, we found out just how many people believed him.

And they then had the nerve to say they won because of “the economy”?

Donald Trump had nothing for the “working class” (and a lot of goodies for the “ruling class.”) He was “duh” when asked about child-care. He was stubbornly stupid (or maybe just lying, his PR go-to) about how the economy actually works and, like the ad-man that he is, offered magic words like “tariffs” that would make everything affordable again. He had nothing to say to working-people’s economic pressures except “I’ll fix it” by making sure immigrants don’t steal your jobs and rape your women and eat your pets. And your sons and daughters will come home from school the same sex they were when they left in the morning.

Trump won because of the mythology of Trump. He managed to convince those that were hurting that he would be their redemption, their retribution, their savior. When he was “reborn”—his ear barely grazed by something, maybe a bullet, maybe a tiny shard of glass—it fit right into that mythology. And so, too, did the persecution narrative, aided by the dedicated corrupt brilliance of the right-wing media. The deification of Trump made it easy to believe that, as with Jesus, all the charges against him were a witch-hunt, a “weaponization” of justice.

People voted for Trump not for his “economic policies” (there weren’t any, there was just rhetoric) but because they mistook a reality-show creation for actual success at business. Because he was so “manly,” even when posing for a mug shot. Because he didn’t let the liberal press call the shots when he was on trial, but had the balls to insist on his own unhinged rants outside the courtroom in which he charged, over and over, that every prosecutor, judge, and jury who were “against him” had been hand-picked by “Biden’s DOJ.” And then took no questions from the press. (And for some strange reason, the press wasn’t as furious with him as they were with Kamala Harris when she “avoided” meeting with them in the two weeks after the DNC, as she travelled across the Midwest, meeting people in person. No, they televised his rants as though they were campaign rallies. Which they basically were.)

Men voted for Donald because they liked all the faults that Dems mistakenly thought they’d recoil from: saying whatever disgusting thing he wanted to, doing whatever he felt like, grabbing any pussies in his vicinity. They liked that he mangled language. They liked that he said “fuck you” to (what had been branded as) “woke” politicians—particularly the feminists. They didn’t want an accomplished, educated, articulate woman that made them feel “less than,” and they especially didn’t want a mixed-race woman with stature and confidence and a big laugh. They wanted a mirror of and permission to be themselves, just as they are.

Donald’s lizard-brain was as astute as always in picking up on the resentments of men. He started out selling a comic-book version of masculinity: Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt at the Republican National Convention. But it didn’t take long for the real misogyny and violence to emerge.

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People voted for Donald Trump not because of the price of eggs but because too many Americans still can’t deal with the idea of a woman president.

Don’t try to “refute” that proposition by pointing to the women who won down-ballot, or the show of support for reproductive freedom. Don’t protest that you’d love to see a woman president, just not this one (or the other one, who was a hugely popular senator and Secretary of State—until she decided to run for POTUS.)¹ You can adore women and vote for women as Senators and City Council members, and Governors, and still not be able to “see” them in the highest office in the land. “‘Service” to the country is fine, leading the country is something else. (Women can think this too.) And support for laws that aren’t allowing us to be killed is the minimum we should expect.

We’re winning that particular battle, by the way, because Kamala and other activists now being accused of not addressing “real people’s” problems spoke loud and clear. Democrats sounded the alarm, Kamala Harris rang it resoundingly and—perhaps most important—the corporate media amplified it with dramatic personal testimonies and the unusual amount of passion media anchors and commentators brought to it. In contrast, they didn’t amplify her “opportunity agenda” or all the ways in which she directly addressed the economic concerns of the working-class. And they certainly didn’t help people to see that reproductive choice and access IS an “economic issue.” (Who do we buy all those eggs for????)

The resistance to the U.S. becoming Gilead is winning, in no small part thanks to—say her name—Kamala Harris.

During the Hillary Clinton pneumonia hysteria, in which Hillary was accused of hiding every malady from a stroke to Parkinson’s, Stephen Colbert, addressing Clinton’s critics, said, “You’re just tiptoeing around the medical condition you’re really upset about, one that she has that no other president in history has faced. Hillary Clinton has Chronic No-Penis. It’s congenital . . . every woman in her family has had the same thing.”

It’s true. And it was true in 2024, too. But we never really confronted it then, and aren’t confronting it yet.

Partly, that’s because it requires recognizing that in addition to “earth one” (the “factual” reality that “responsible” journalists learn is their wheelhouse) and the “alternative” MAGA-world that they are not very good at combatting, there is another world of ideas and images that influence voters that political pundits typically ignore—but that powerfully mediate their own thinking too. This is the world of archetypes, deeply embedded narratives, embodied but not fully brain-conscious notions about men and women, race and gender and class that aren’t revealed in the polls and don’t show up on Steve Kornacki’s big board.²

We study them in some of the courses that would be excised from the curriculum if the architects of the 2025 Project—who are now poised to be the leaders of our country—have their way. Gender Studies. Race Studies. Sexuality Studies. All their disciplinary variants in psychology, literary studies, history.

But even without the bans, we seem to be disappearing the kind of analyses that go there. Why, in the seeming endless stream of autopsies of 2024, are “liberal” pundits so content to go along with the “Dems didn’t address the problems of the working-class” diagnosis? Why have they so readily bought the notion that people voted for Trump “because of the economy”? Why have white men like Bernie Sanders and James Carville been allowed to set the terms of the discussion? Where are the feminist commentators who dare to actually talk about misogyny, sexism, and/or the media mistreatment of female candidates?

“Talking” on Facebook with other feminists of 65-plus (I’m 77) I see how 2024 tore away, for many of us, whatever scabs were forming over the wounds of 2016. As my sister reminded me on a day when I felt particularly low, wondering if I’d ever be able to write about the current political situation, the Kamala/Susan relationship was like a second marriage for me, and one I was crushed to see end as the first one had. For awhile, it felt as though it was the end of my life as a writer, too. I’d followed every turn in 2016–eventually dissected in my book The Destruction of Hillary Clinton: Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact that Decided the 2016 Election—and couldn’t imagine doing anything like that again. So what would I do?

I’m feeling my way, day by day, through that question. My Facebook and Substack pals are helping.

1. People may not remember just how popular Hillary Clinton was after her stints as senator from New York and Obama’s Secretary of State. By 2014, a year before Hillary announced her intention to run for president, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 82 percent of Democrats favored Clinton over both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, and a Quinnipiac poll reported that registered voters in Ohio (yes—Ohio) chose Clinton over the six likely Republican candidates: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich. “If the election were held tomorrow,” John McCain said, “Hillary Clinton would most likely be the president.”

Then, In April of 2015, Hillary announced her candidacy, and within weeks, John McCain’s prediction was replaced by the press with her annoying “presumption of inevitability.” They complained she was being “coronated” and gave her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, tons of positive press for supplying them with a competition whose progress they could excitedly report on, and—bonus!—it began to seem like a “movement”!

2. For a discussion of some of these archetypes, see my stack: