The retired lawyer has had a whirlwind few months, and she’s starting to decompress and reflect on how she, a first-time activist, was able to launch the Women’s March on Washington with a single Facebook post. Now that the main event is over, she wants to ensure that she and people across the Hawaiian Islands remain in the movement to battle White House policies they think will set women and the country back.
Interestingly, though, not quite all of the liberal media are so starry-eyed in their reflections on the march as the Washington Post. A few progressive journos have actually been quite critical.
One is Rob Cotton of The Inquisitr, who faulted the prominent presence in the march of establishment Democrats using the anti-Trump sentiment behind the march to further their own careers. Cotton writes:
Some on the left have raised concerns that the event was merely a public relations campaign for the Democratic Party as it begins its battle to regain power from the Republicans. The presence of establishment Democrats at the march, such as Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, only served to amplify such concerns. Many progressives and other anti-establishment leftists are weary of the Democratic Party co-opting what they see as a people’s movement to reform the Democratic Party. Many of these people are Bernie Sanders supporters who feel like their candidate was cheated out of the nomination in 2016 by the Democratic National Committee, and they blame the Democratic Party for nominating what they see as a poor candidate in Hillary Clinton, thereby making it possible for Donald Trump to be elected president…. Further fueling these concerns from the anti-establishment left was the presence at the Women’s March on Washington of numerous celebrities who were vocal Hillary Clinton supporters, such as Madonna and Ashley Judd. Bernie Sanders’ supporters and others on the left outside of the mainstream of the Democratic Party have grown weary of famous celebrities lending their voices to political causes. Given the manner in which Madonna and Ashley Judd used their time on stage at the Women’s March, they may very well have a point.
Since by now Madonna’s F-bombs, and Judd’s epic poetry-reading comparing Trump to Hitler and raving about her menstrual blood have been so widely reported, I need go no further. As Cotton wrote, “It is time for the political left to fire its celebrity spokespeople” and start thinking seriously about how to appeal to the grassroots constituencies variously attracted to Sanders and Trump if it wants to recapture the presidency in 2020.
At The Week columnist Damon Linker asked, “Was the Women’s March a revolution—or a self-indulgent dead end?” Linker suspected it was the latter:
Gathering many thousands of ideological compatriots and whipping them into a frenzy of impassioned camaraderie might have some value as therapy or a team-building exercise. But it won’t do much to persuade those with different commitments to change sides, join a new cause, and help elect more Democrats to state houses, governorships, House and Senate seats, or the presidency.
And at the liberal Forward, columnist Bethany Mandel (herself no liberal, granted) wondered why so many prominent Jewish organizations had signed on as sponsors of a march co-chaired by Linda Sarsour, a Muslim Palestinian-rights activist who, as it turned out, has had some nasty things to say about Israel. New York Post reporter Andrea Peyser had dug up some of Sarsour’s tweets in 2015:
Sarsour contends that Israel and American supporters of the Jewish state are responsible for slaughter in the Mideast….Her outrageous online assaults sank to a depressing level this month, when [she] tweeted a picture of a small Palestinian boy standing before Israeli soldiers clutching rocks in both hands. She added the words, “The definition of courage.” Mandel asked, “Is this the kind of feminism Jewish women, or American women in general, really want to align themselves with?
Now, it’s likely that many of the pink-hat wearers who threw themselves into the Women’s March will pay absolutely no attention to such criticisms, even from the left, about celebrity grandstanding, lack of serious purpose, and co-option by unsavory radicals. But maybe they ought to.
