A few weeks ago, I was preparing a diary about a very legitimate post on "The New Misogyny" at the Washington Monthly when I opened the New York Times to find a story about (another) gunman shooting up a Jewish school in France. I feel as if I should quote Yeats (you know, "what rude beast comes slouching toward Bethlehem) now, but I don't think it's really that. Instead, I think it's time to consider the idea that we really HAVE made progress and that all this anti-stuff is caused by people who are unhappy about it. Since we already have --and understand -- the concept of the avant-garde, activity at the forefront of cultural change, why not add the concept of the arrière-garde to cover the people and the theories that are fighting it?
I'm not sure this is anything new either, but there sure seems to be a lot of it these days. Follow me below the great orange Wienerbrot for more.
The Washington Monthly has turned up an amazingly good blogpost by Barbara Geier, "The New Misogyny" (h/t to Scott Lemieux, lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com). After she lays out, in a VERY measured manner, some of the latest abuses, she suggests that maybe there's a silver lining to it all:
Sometimes I think the new misogyny is actually a sign of feminism’s success, and that most of the sexism is perpetrated by old white guys bitter about using the patriarchal power they once had, yet refuse to go gentle into that good night. But plenty of young men engage in this kind of behavior as well — witness the ugly behavior of those male students at Columbia University. Perhaps the horrible economy and the increasingly stressful lives and economic insecurity of the 99% have made people in general a lot meaner, and specifically made men more likely to scapegoat women for the problems in their lives, financial and otherwise. Who knows.
Misogyny as a sign of the success of feminism. The times, they sure are a-changing, and that of course brings Bob Dylan to mind. Yeats, updated:
he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Dylan, 1962-1963. Wonder why people were using the word "prophet"? The '70s proved us wrong there, of course, but it was fun while it lasted.
Legislatures are trying to turn back the clock on so many things -- women's rights, the rights of labor, protection of the environment. The republicans in the house want to dismantle both the New Deal and much of LBJ's Great Society. They couldn't stop integration, they couldn't stop the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and now they can't stop the movement for full equality for LGBT people, but boy, are they ever trying!
They just get more outrageous, too. A while back, that paragon of reaction, Michele Bachmann, wanted to investigate the membership of the House to see which members were un-American or anti-American, and today, Allen West called the House Progressive Caucus Communists, in fine McCarthyite style (h/t Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog for the compilation). Back to the '50s, the decade -- and the ONLY decade -- in which the United States had anything like what the opponents of marriage equality call "traditional marriage" (h/t Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History [2004]). All the opponents of marriage equality seem to be engaged in an Arrière-Garde effort, trying to turn the clock back to the good old days where gay men were all criminals and sick, African Americans knew their place, and so did women.
Arrière-Garde may really be unnecessary as a concept here. Once upon a time, when the John Birch Society was one of the main faces of American conservatism, we didn't call them conservatives or ultra-right-wingers. We called them reactionaries. Maybe that's good enough for now too.
Further reading: Two books from the 1960s that still have an amazing amount of currency today as possible guides to what we're experiencing in the way of political culture, both by Richard Hofstadter, a political and cultural historian.
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964).
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other essays (1965).