The left was ready for a black President. The right was ready to fight for a pre-Civil War America.

kontroversydotorg:

The more I think about how things have developed, the more I suspect that Hillary Clinton would’ve been a better outcome for the U.S. than Obama was.

Don’t get me wrong: I disagreed then with a number of Clinton’s policies & plans that she had in the election year, and I still disagree with them now. But she was hardly all bad, like McCain was. Conversely, I disagreed with far fewer policies of Obama, but in retrospect it seems so naive of us all to think that the powerful yet overly privileged white-male Americans would actually accept a black President as their leader, or that they would show him any respect at all. Of course their racist tendencies would take over!

Here is why Hillary would have had far less trouble dealing with Republicans: not very many of the cretinous Republican leaders are married to a person of colour, but almost all of them are married to a woman.

The voracity of Republican’s disagreement over policies has been fueled subconsciously by the deeply-rooted beliefs of white superiority of these Confederacy-loving maniacs; but as much as they may try to treat women’s bodies as if mere objects they have any say over at all, they would never have gotten away with so much of their bellyaching about the President’s actions—their wives would’ve reigned them in some.

Also, there are far more women in America than there are, say, black people. And virtually no white male, no matter how bigoted and racist he is, thinks he’ll have a better life if all women were driven out of the country. If anything, his sex life would be much more troublesome to deal with for his narrow-minded brain.

Sure, some of the craziest people the Republicans and Tea Party have brought forward are white women — Palin, Bachmann, O’Donnell — but imagine for a moment how the average Republican male talks about his opponents at the dinner table or in bed late at night with his wife, and how it is subliminally received by her:

  • A dislike towards Democrats? That’s fine, she hates Democrats too
  • A dislike towards black people? That’s fine, she has racist tendencies too
  • A dislike towards women? “Excuse me, what?!”

That sort of nonsense won’t always go over well with her, if at all.

There are many Republican women who will readily support their husbands because they still think in 1950’s-era roles themselves. They aren’t emancipated, and that’s fine. But plenty Republican women are more modern than that, at least when it comes to self-worth and identity. They have jobs. They don’t like getting second-class treatment anymore. They may not have any socialist tendencies like empathy for people who are different than themselves, but they at least recognize when they are being gradually attacked through misogyny.

Where their ambivalence towards Democrats and non-white demographics would let them ignore the bigoted underpinnings of their husbands’ political attacks and efforts, they would far less often permit them to get away with misogynist behavior. Certainly they wouldn’t let the misogyny get completely out of hand—because what would that say about themselves?

When it comes to individuals, I still think Obama is a more stand-up person than Hillary Clinton. But when it comes to the psychological affects of a black President versus a female [white] President applied to the American people at large, across the entirety of their political spectrum, I think Hillary would have been much better. She’d been attacked less for reasons that had nothing to do with politics or agenda, and all the hatred or incompetence she’d have gotten for being a women would’ve been disagreed with by a much larger share of the population. After all: women are 50.5% of the population, versus only 12.6% of black people. (source)

Hindsight is 20/20? Maybe. And I could easily still be wrong. But bigotry is reduced by exposing bigoted people to those whom they fear or don’t understand, by introducing them those whom they don’t know so that prejudices are slowly eroded. There are a lot more women to expose men to, everywhere, than there are black people. Plus, a female President would have been a role model to women of both parties, and that is a much bigger group than black Republicans.

Unfortunately it is impossible for anyone but The Doctor to go back in time and change history. But hopefully we can all learn some things about bigger picture thinking from the recent past.

- QR

Feminism++

This reminds me of that research that showed that the best way to combat environmental decline was emancipating women so that they’d get jobs, rather than start families prior to the age of 30+.

Source: kontroversydotorg