There's an image circulating on my Facebook feed showing Kamala Harris striding forward, stomping on glass. Hillary was supposed to be the first woman to break the glass ceiling in politics, but she sadly took it for granted and left us with someone who represented the exact opposite. Now comes along Kamala, the first of many things, shattering that ceiling with her sledgehammer.
But did she really though? Did she actually break the glass ceiling?
I can't help but remember Joe Biden's pledge back in March that he would pick a woman as his running mate. The Democratic primary had dwindled down to two septuagenarians, two men who probably listened to Elvis Presley on the radio and saw Ben-Hur in the cinema. Biden's promise was, without a doubt, aimed to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd than would normally back him. And good for him to make that clear, unequivocal statement -- a woman is just as capable as a man to lead the US and take over as Commander in Chief. Walter Mondale said it already back in 1984 (when Biden was already freaking 42!), but it took a few more decades before a woman was finally on the winning ticket. Having recently watched Mrs. America on HBO, I'm still surprised at how much more progressive our parents' generation was than we are today.
The important thing about this for me though is that Joe picked Kamala. He essentially broke that ceiling for her from the other side. If he had decided to choose Bernie Sanders as his running mate, Kamala would have still been peering over at them through Coke-bottle lenses.
I'm not dismissing her career or her successes. I'm just questioning the idea that Kamala is the one that broke through. Four years ago, it was really exciting to be on the cusp of the country's first woman president, someone who would have left a trail of both shattered glass and crying men behind her. This time around, I'm finding it harder to be as excited, since I know that actually, Joe deserves as much credit as Kamala. If only one of the many women running in the primary had won the nomination and decided to give the VP slot to a qualified man.
The other thing I'm having a hard time being excited about is the election result. Yes, I'm really happy that Biden won, and I'm looking forward to our government agencies being staffed by people who know what they're doing again. Yet the fact that it was even a close election, that 70 million people could somehow vote for someone so grossly incompetent, immature and vindictive, that 55% of voters in my home county just 30 minutes north of NYC thought DJT a better choice, that it had to come down to a few thousand voters in a few swing states to decide, is so extremely bewildering and depressing.
After the last election, educated, liberal America seemed to go through the motions of soul searching to figure out what went wrong and how to understand disaffected America. It made J.D. Vance a household name, even as the exit polls showed that people like J.D. Vance did not represent the people who supported Trump in 2016. "We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than the people we talk to," said the NY Times' editor.
We clearly did not succeed in learning from our mistakes because we seem to be talking to each other even less. Facebook continued to create echo chambers of left- and right-wing thought. Local news continued to be decimated, and media conglomerates got larger and spewed more groupthink. Instead of talking to sources, half of political reporting seems to involve pasting screenshots of people's Twitter posts. And the NY Times continued to not do better. Immediately after Dean Baquet issued that statement in 2016, the newspaper started publishing articles about how Electoral College electors might switch their vote from Trump to Hillary. Of course, it was actually the opposite that was true (Washington State electors switched their votes from Hillary to Colin Powell in protest, sparking a Supreme Court case.) I canceled my subscription to the Times sometime in December 2016, tired of being in this information bubble.
A friend who worked in the Trump administration said that he was glad it was a close election. I guess I would reluctantly agree. A landslide would have meant that Trump was a blip in the radar, an anomaly we could write off as one of those once-in-a-lifetime freak storms. That it was a close election means a lot more soul searching. I hope we do a better job of it than we've done in the last four years.
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