Well, the question is one of priorities too, though, isn’t it?
I don’t think Bernie Sanders has prioritized genderism in the way Warren has: he hasn’t made a show of his pronouns, and when he was specifically asked about what he’d do for transgender identified people, he said he’d do what he’d do for everyone and referenced health care, jobs, and wages.
I don’t accept that Trump is a better choice on a feminist basis.
But on the level of material need, I don’t accept that Elizabeth Warren is good enough. She’s quite good at identifying problems. But her proposed solutions are paltry, reinforce the rent-seeking economy, and operate on very very long time frames. She is after all, the one who said she’d consider Deval Patrick, of Bain Capital, notorious pillager of many companies and destroyer of hundreds of thousands of jobs on behalf of private equity investors.
She is the candidate of the professional-managerial class. She’s running the same-old, same-old Democratic playbook: hoping to win crossover suburban Republican voters. Maybe she will, after all, she was a Republican herself for most of her adult life.
My fear, though, is that more of the same incrementalism, market-based (ie rent-seeking) solutions that aren’t universal and thereby allow for differing benefits to people based on arbitrary factors (like geography, in the case of Obamacare) will only breed further disillusion and resentment and create an even bigger vacuum than the one Trump rode into, a vacuum into which someone much more competent and much more ideologically determined than Trump may ride.
FDR’s New Deal policies not only staved off a socialist revolt in the US; they also staved off a surge of the populace toward fascism.
Good policy makes good politics. If Obama had come up with a better policy response to the financial crisis, one that didn’t allow for 14 million illegal foreclosures, one that bailed out small business as much as it bailed out investment banks and AIG, one that didn’t end up slashing auto factory worker pay by 2/3 — I don’t think we’d have Trump. If he’d been more concerned with people actually getting health care than with creating a plan that bailed out the financial woes of the insurance companies (check what their stock valuations did immediately after Obamacare was passed) — we wouldn’t have Trump.
Warren’s policies aren’t good enough for the place a great swath of the US populace is now in — it’s that simple.
As for the Democrats supporting abortion rights — they do by word only, not by deed. During the Clinton administration, they decided they were a “Big Tent” party and that supporting abortion rights was not a prerequisite for receiving funds from the party to run as a candidate. It was Democratic Party controlled Justice committees that approved the Roberts Supreme Court nomination. It was Obama who codified the Hyde Amendment into the ACA, so that it cannot be overturned now except by an act of Congress (where before a president had only to refuse to sign it into effect each year.) It was Obama who spent years refusing the approval of Plan B for minors without parental approval because, he said, “as a father,” he couldn’t imagine wanting his daughters to take such a course — until finally he changed his mind. Hillary Clinton’s own VP running mate, Tim Kaine, is pro-life. The Democratic Party has stood idly by while abortion rights have dwindled such that abortion is available in only a third of American counties.
Finally, regarding the identities of the various party leaderships, I defer to Adolph Reed’s question (paraphrasing): is it the change we seek, if 50% of fossil-fuel CEOs are female; is it the progress we want, if Goldman Sachs is headed by a black man, does that change the vampire-squid effect firms like Goldman Sachs has had on the American economy; are the people who are oppressed by the great inequality of wealth in America less oppressed if a percentage of those wealthy or their political representatives are gay, Latino, trans, female, etc?
Obama oversaw the greatest rollback in African-American wealth ever, as a result of his handling of the financial crisis. Obama deported more immigrants than any of his predecessors combined. Obama expanded
American military adventurism into seven countries, all of which are populated by black and brown people.
Race was not at play in his choices: class was.
If the Democrats cannot talk about class, cannot campaign for the bottom 80%, the right will — as Trump explicitly did.
Look out for dominionist Congressman Josh Hawley, look out for Fox commentator Tucker Carlson. They’re angling to move into that space that speaks about class politics from a conservative, patriarchal, industrialist, Burkeian standpoint as opposed to a neoconservative, unfettered financial capital, imperialist standpoint — aimed at the precarity faced by the bottom 80%. And Tucker Carlson has ALREADY started taking on the trans issue.