Headline: Brett Kavanaugh and the Republicans’ patriarchal bubble

Sub-headline: Party’s fight to approve Supreme Court nominee risks further alienation of female voters

Quite surprised that Mr. Luce has read the 1970 Feminist classic ‘Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society’ by Eva Figes.  I still have my paperback copy that I bought at the Compton College bookstore in the early years  of that decade.

As with his earlier essay Mr. Luce continues to frame his comments on Kavanaugh and the Republicans in an eternal political present, with the briefest nod to Kavanaugh’s reactionary political history. Anti-Patriarchy is the rhetorical  ‘actor’ that is at the root of the Kavanaugh opposition, as argued by Luce.  Trump’s growing unpopularity with women voters is another convenient framing employed by Mr. Luce.  Yet the record of the almost wholesale Dixiecrat Migration, from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act provides part of the answer to the ‘why’ of that racism, misogyny, homophobia and a generalized xenophobia that now dominate the Republican Party. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and Reagan’s notorious Neshoba County Fair speech, that opened his 1980 run for the presidency are just two examples of this. The Party of Lincoln has been supplanted, by a Republican Party, that willfully cast aside Lincoln, in favor of its newest member’s racism and misogyny, that defined the Dixiecrat’s identity politics, and in due course the seductive mirage of Free Market Economics.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/17c43268-bcab-11e8-8274-55b72926558f