There is really only one good explanation for the success of Donald Trump, the most absurd candidate that any party has ever put forward. From the moment he announced his candidacy riding down the elevator in Trump tower and claiming that Mexicans were rapists, through a long list of statements each more absurd than the next, he was greeted first with laughter, then chuckles, then silence and now dread. Any one of several hundreds of things that he has said would have disqualified any other reasonable candidate, I don't have the energy to go through the list of them all. It's exhausting and depressing. It was all I could do to watch the whole litany recited in the recent video that Keith Olberman released about Trumps ridiculous behavior, titled "176 reasons Donald Trump should not be President”. If you watched that (and if you are at all on the fence you should) you wonder how on earth- or in hell- could this man actually be nominated by a major party, and be seriously in the running? The question that it raises is: are there that many fools, or that many bigots, or that many crazy people in this country?
Well, in my opinion there is one and only one real reason for this degree of societal madness. And yes, it falls under the rubric of bigotry. But a specific type of bigotry. It is not the bigotry that is publicly professed, but the one that is adamantly denied. It is not racism- which Donald Trump has essentially professed in his birtherism rants and refusal to rebuke David Duke and his support, nor is it Islamophobia- which he has no problem discussing. He says he is just being real and telling the truth as he readily calls publicly for racial profiling, screening and even banning Muslims . It is not about the professed xenophobia with which he opened his campaign, promising to build a wall and crack down on immigration. What other deplorable issue is there that he refuses to get into?
It is of course the elephant in the room this election. We all see it, and pretend that it is not the real huge and unusual creature standing in the room with us. We pretend there is nothing unusual about a woman running for president and in very serious contention for it. We pretend that the woman running, even though infinitely more qualified than her opponent (only the most ridiculous candidate ever presented by the Republican Party) is not the only reasonable option this season. The press is constantly taken to task for normalizing Trump and marginilizing Clinton. But they could not do that without the widespread, systematic, misogyny that we all carry in our unconscious if not our conscious thoughts everywhere, every day. We react with outrage and defensiveness at any assertion that we ourselves are misogynists. But methinks we dost protest too much.
Just as President Obama being elected has brought the systemic and ubiquitous racism that plagues our country into focus and into the public eye over the last eight years, Hillary Clinton is exposing some ugly norms in this country that we like to pretend don't exist. None of us wants to admit that we have racist or sexist ideas or other bigoted feelings. But we know we all do. The criminal act is not in thinking the wrong idea, but in acting on it. We all may want to strangle someone occasionally, but that is not a crime. But we can't act on it and strangle the person driving us crazy, or we would be prosecuted. Similarly we all may have a thought that we recognize as racist, Islamophobic, etc. We just have to acknowledge and label that thought as such, and then choose to act appropriately. I don't know what your personal sexist thoughts are, and I don't want to, but they are probably pretty much the same as most people's.
One of the things that makes this so hard to bring into public discussion is the fact that it is an issue present not just in a minority of the population, but in every workplace, every home, every family, every marriage between a man and a woman. The pain of inequality is suppressed and repressed just in order to get by from day to day and hold it together. Who makes the meal, does the dishes, the laundry, picks up the kids, takes time out of their career for child bearing and when the kids are sick. Then who sucks up the smaller paycheck, and fends off the unwanted sexual innuendos from their boss because they need the job. How proud we feel when we rise above a few of these stereotypes in our own lives, while not attending to the other areas in which we all continue to live the 1950’s sexist dream. How do we function as a society without this familially bred gender inequality? We don't even know. We are unconsciously afraid of how true equality could cause the collapse of societal norms as we know it. Those who can't deal with the reality of it just deny it, many out of self preservation. Some people are afraid of strong women to the point that many politicians succeed by making their platform largely based on making sure that birth control and abortion are not accessible to them, and why would that be if they are not perceived as threatening when too powerful?
The single most alarming thing to me, that being the case, is the insistence of so many Americans that they are not sexist. It's other people, but not me. When we say that, we demonstrate that we have not yet risen to the point where we can even see and label our thoughts as such, let alone chose consciously to not act on them.
So instead, as a country we are actually seriously entertaining the thought of electing an unqualified, dishonest, dangerous and absurd candidate for president rather than a woman, regardless of the fact that she is sane and competent and he is neither. She is experienced and he isn't, she is good and kind and hardworking, he is a ruthless business man as well as a business failure and scam artist. She actually lives a life based on Christian values, and yet the Christian Right has embraced the appallingly unethical and downright criminal actions of Donald Trump. She made some statements that in retrospect turned out not to be fully accurate, while he lies as easily as he speaks, but the press calls her a liar and the public believes them. We insist it is not all women, just this one that we dislike, this one who coincidently is the only one actually qualified enough to make it and also brave enough, and frankly most uncommonly, willing to go through the gauntlet to do so as a woman. This woman who has actually taken on the male dominated political arena in our country and not backed down, and refused to be bullied. This claim of “just not her” may be so. But we have a deep seated fear and revulsion of women in power that we don't want to talk about.
Oh yes, yes, yes, I am sure you can think up a lot of other reasons for this debacle. But the more you refuse to acknowledge your own unequal preconceived notions about gender, aka misogyny, the more you prove my point. And I speak to women as much as to men. It is not just a coincidence that now as we are finally seriously nominating a woman, who is so overqualified as to be no contest, that she is forced to still constantly play defense with the media about the few imperfections they can dig up on her. And meanwhile the onslaught of lies, criminal behavior, downright insane lies and dangerous concepts spews out of Trumps mouth like an over flooding sewer, and he is given a pass. They say there are too many to focus on, and maybe so. But Trump would have gotten nowhere if he wasn't running against Hillary. We are fearless in this country when it comes to attacking women. It is so easy to do. We equally knee jerk respond to men with respect. It's what we do.
There is still time before the election to discuss said elephant in the room, but the moment when it is too late is rapidly approaching. Let's all take a deep look into our ugly subconscious and societal psyche and try to deal with this as adults, or we as a country will be in serious trouble. And when America sneezes the world gets a cold. Trump is now up in the recent polls. The rest of the world is terrified. When will we get the courage to discuss the real issue here? The eleventh hour is upon us. We need to stop dismissing discussions of misogyny as the angry woman’s rant and bring it into the realm of serious political discussion. When we get the courage to do that, even if Hillary loses, we as a society will win an important battle. Just like Anita Hill probably accomplished more for the issue of sexual harassment when she courageously told the truth and was ignored by the men in power. If they had declined to vote him in we would most likely have forgotten the event long ago. But every woman in the workplace watching knew she was telling the truth, and her courage to speak truth to power angered but also empowered them. Similarly if Trump wins, Hillary will become a martyr for all the women in this country who have lost a job to a less qualified candidate, who have been spoken to and about disrespectfully, and generally treated unfairly because of gender, and there will be a furor.
We are going to have this discussion eventually. I beg of you readers to help push it forward before we have to deal with the consequences of a president Trump and martyr Hillary. Not now when the planet is on the verge of climate collapse, and the world is such a dangerous place, and when the economy is finally recovering from the disastrous GWB presidency; we never needed a steady competent leader more. Hillary will be that superior leader precisely because of all she has overcome to get there, while Trump, if he sails easily into the Whitehouse on the winds of misogyny while getting away with unbelievably inappropriate behavior and without doing any of the hard work to become president, will take the presidency about as seriously as he took the millions of dollars his father gave him, and which he used to bankrupt himself over and over again. The disasters that ensue would probably dwarf September 11 and the ensuing and Meltdown in the Middle East.