The Second Coming – and I don’t mean Jesus.

I have been saying for a while now that we are in a second civil war. I’m no longer alone.  Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now interviewed professors Carol Anderson and Michele Goodwin to discuss Harris’s historic campaign. “The Confederacy won,” says Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,” says Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown. 

Anderson said what we are seeing is the backlash to the “great replacement” and feels that it’s the last stand of white supremacy. I wish that were true, but we have been saying that for decades and still white supremacy stands.  Anderson pointed out that what Project 2025 means for Social Security, Medicare, education, and equity could not override the depth of the misogyny and racism that fuels white supremacy. But it did override a hundred years of progress.  

Michele Goodwin asked how could we be a nation that tolerated children standing on blocks and being auctioned off, bid upon? We not only tolerated it up until 1865, but we tolerated it again starting in 2016 when families were separated and children put into cages cold and hungry without even a ball to kick around or a teddy bear to hold for comfort. Children were kidnapped and adopted out to white families.  And that’s coming again, and immigrants and children of immigrants voted for it.

White women voted for their own interest by passing state abortion referenda but voted for a president who promised to criminally punish women for abortion and to prohibit it nationally.  Go figure.  Parents voted for a party opposed to any kind of gun control.  They love their guns more than they love their children.

Working class men are no better. During the first three years of the Biden administration, 14.6 million net jobs were added. That is the largest increase for any first three years of a U.S. presidential administration and represents a 10.3% increase in the number of jobs.

The only president to do better was Carter, another Democratic president, when jobs increased 12.5% between January 1977 and January 1980.  Then Reagan took over and we have been sliding downhill ever since.

Real wages went up under Biden too. Average hourly pay for production and nonsupervisory workers —  four-fifths of employees — hit $30.27 in August, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Tariffs, promised by the incoming administration, will raise prices and kill small business. Attacks on the National Labor Relations Board that protects workers have already started. The working class voted for that.

White people are about to find out what Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics and uncolonized women have known for centuries – the U.S. is a racist, sexist, violent country.  It will come as a surprise to some that they will roll right over the middle- and working-class too no matter their color or sex.

Recognizing that this is war is the only way I have been able to deal with it. In a war one does not check out; one checks in.  We Baby Boomers who contributed so much to the civil rights movement, feminist movement, anti-war movement and virtually every other progressive movement, have been anxiously waiting for the next change generation to take our successes forward.  We thought Gen Z was it, but they broke for the right. We’re still waiting as our successes are stripped away.

The attack on the Third Reconstruction has already started, and an intensified attack on women has too. Not only abortion but even voting is up for grabs. The Christian Nationalists are brazenly calling to repeal the 19^thamendment. The 19^th Amendment solidifying women’s right to vote went into effect August 26, 1920. 

Suffragist jailed for marching for women’s right to vote.

Two years later, Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130 (1922) reached the Supreme Court.  Male voters in Maryland had sued to strike off all the names of women voters saying that the state constitution limits the suffrage to men and that the Nineteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution was not validly adopted and is not maintainable under the Maryland law.

The Court compared the 19^th amendment to the 15^th amendment that gave Black men the right to vote and said if the 15^th is valid; so is the 19^th.   The Maryland men had argued that the 15^th was a war measure and therefore not valid anymore though it was passed after the war was over in 1870 as part of the First Reconstruction.

The Court also pointed out that the state legislature has one job relating to federal amendments – vote on the proposed amendment.  A simple yes or no.  The people of the state do not have an independent right to challenge it.  That is why when people have suggested AZ put a proposition on the ballot to pass the ERA, it won’t help because even if the people passed it, it would still not be valid because the state legislature must do it.

The court also said that the notice from a state legislature to the Secretary of State (who at that time published the amendments, now it’s the national archivist), duly authenticated, of its adoption of a proposed amendment to the federal Constitution is conclusive upon him and, when certified to by his proclamation, is conclusive upon the courts. This has relevance today to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) because the required 38 states have passed it and authenticated their passage to the archivist. The archivist is obligated to publish it but has not because the incoming administration told him not to and the current administration did not, despite four years of lobbying, do it either. The ERA is still valid as the 28^th Amendment, but this failure says all you need to know about the importance of women in both parties.  

Since the election, attacks on African Americans, Hispanics, and women have ratcheted up.  Universities are bowing down and stripping even the word Latina from their websites.  Corporations are halting their DEI programs.  This is a society that is crashing not crumbling.  Why corporations are complying in advance tells me that they were never committed and had only responded to societal pressure. Now they are free to return to their real selves.

Someone really obsessed with stiff rods.

As I mentioned in an earlier column, the “manosphere” is accelerating threats toward women.  (Emboldened ‘manosphere’ accelerates threats and demeaning language toward women after US election, Christine Fernando, 9:10 AM MST, November 30, 2024). “Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”  She said some progressive women have been shocked by the speed of this attack.  I’m not. As lesbians, we have always understood that men, including gay men, really do fear and hate us. Women who sojourn with men or who have male children don’t believe it, but this election shows you how true it. They hate you more than they like themselves. They will punish themselves and their own children to make sure you do not gain equality.  

One factor for the election victory was the shift of men, concentrated among younger voters.  But 44% of white women ages 18-44 also voted for their own enslavement.  Who raised those boys and girls? The men believe they have regained their place and can now put women in theirs. Rather than admit their own shortcomings or admit that women might be just as good as they are, men blame women for their own failures and insist if only women would stay in their place, men could win. Of course they could because they have just cut the competition in half.

For some reason, I have been re-reading Andrea Dworkin, Ashley Montagu, Crystal Eastman and other feminist texts from the 1970s when women made great advances.  Perhaps I’m reminding myself of the force behind us back then to reinvigorate that force. Interestingly a Black friend said he too was going back to basics with James Baldwin and Maya Angelou.

In one essay Dworkin discusses how, after the Civil War, abolitionists joined with slave holders and formerly enslaved men joined with their enslavers to support the 15^th amendment that gave voting rights only to men. She used it as an example of how men ignore their own individual situations to unite with other men to deny women rights. As they did in 2024.  

During the Second Wave of feminism, activist couples often broke up when men wanted women only to make coffee and have sex but ignored their other talents. I briefly joined SDS at UW Madison when I was an undergraduate student but found the masculine atmosphere unbearable and left. Once, when asked about the role of women volunteers in SNCC, Stokely Carmichael famously replied that the “only position for women in SNCC is prone.” Two years later, a Black woman defended him that it was only a “joke.”  We all know how funny those “jokes” are.

Two white female activists, Casey Hayden and Mary King, wrote memos in 1964 and 1965 detailing their frustrations at the failure of the civil rights movement to recognize issues of women’s oppression.  (Feminism and the Civil Rights movement (1965), Casey Hayden and Mary King.) It’s rather ironic as feminists are often criticized for ignoring Black oppression. They wrote that the assumptions of male supremacy are as crippling as the assumptions of white supremacy.  Talent and ability are lost in both cases. The result is the straitjacketing of both sexes which ERA proponents have been pointing out for years. The ERA frees men as much as women.  Society should shape institutions to meet the needs of people not shape people to fit into institutions.  

I once had this very argument about the identical dynamics of white and male supremacy with a guy I was dating in 1971 (when I dated guys). While he could well understand why Blacks wanted to be free of stereotypes, he could not understand why women did too.  Somehow, we started arguing in a theatre and others finally loudly told us to shut up. He had what he thought was the last word. I got up and walked out never to see him again. 

I gave up on working with the GBT groups in 1990 when I returned from two years in Russia to find that the PAC was now supporting anti-abortion legislators so long as they promised to be pro-gay.  My personal experiences taught me that women cannot join with allegedly progressive or BIPOC men because they will sell them out as they did in November. 

The Third Reconstruction and the Second Wave may have been defeated but people have never been defeated because people will struggle for freedom like flowers turn to the sun.  Of necessity we must use guerilla tactics. The Art of War by Sun Tsu a 6^th century Chinese strategist is still the best.  Saul Alinsky, a political activist and theorist in Chicago, needs to be dusted off and put back into service. Some of us won’t make it to the promised land, but like our ancestors did for us, we will pave the way for a better future.