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Notes -
Over at Salon, Amanda Marcotte expresses enthusiasm for secret ballots because of concerns that husbands are forcing wives to vote for Trump:
She also thinks it would be good if wives used emotional blackmail to control men's votes:
Oddly enough, there is no mention of the issue posed by absentee ballots. These are the tools by which abusive spouses can use anything from cajoling to emotional abuse to outright violence to dictate the votes of those that reside with them. The only way to make sure this isn't an option is returning to the canonical secret ballot, which is in a voting booth where this is no option to show others who you voted for. Notably, this is a protection against other forms of coercion, such as from employers or caregivers.
Marcotte comes as close as I've seen anyone on the progressive side of things has gotten to acknowledging this problem, but somehow elides the solution to this fundamentally solved problem. Kind of interesting dynamic.
Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.
In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"? What would stop them?
If you believe that the republicans all want to enact Handmaid's Tale then it's pretty rational to not expect the procedure to stop them.
No.
A whole shitload of precedent and existing laws.
To somehow morph the constitution enough that individual lights could be altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions, you'd have to, at the very least, pass a bunch of amendments. Not laws, amendments. This requires ratification by 2/3rds of the states. I don't think there's anything, right now or in the foreseeable future, that 2/3rds of the states could agree on fast enough to accomplish this within a 4 - 8 year presidency and also assume zero turnover in congress. Along the way, I also assume there would be dozens of court challenges.
Remember that, for a few years, the Republicans really mad an effort to overturn The Affordable Care Act. They got close but failed. The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.
Altering the constitution (in the opposite direction of its original intent) would require an amazing level of sustained, focused, hyper coordinated action. Without any room for even mild electoral losses or turnover. While also assuming something like court packing happening in parallel. And ... in a single 4 year Trump admin?
It's a goofy catastrophy-porn scenario. Congress is fucking up its basic budgetary requirements. The Republican majority kicked out their own speaker. But, we're supposedly to believe that if Orange Man gets a sequel (which will almost certainly be decided by less than 300k votes) all of a sudden 2/3rds of the states and 3/4ths of their population will get out their well concealed ChristoFascist playbooks and get to work.
I never watched (or read) it and only know it through cultural osmosis, but why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?
What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/464243-photographer-defends-wedding-photo-with-handmaids-tale-theme/
I mean, we have real misogynistic dystopia at home! (Or rather abroad)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68634700
It’s effective because it’s pretty realistic. And by “realistic” I mean it’s basically what already happened in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 80s with the serial numbers filled off. Margaret Atwood used to explicitly say this, but she’s gradually memory-holed that in favor of the book being a metaphor for the dark days of Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s a way for liberal women to freak out about the rollback of women’s rights in the global south, and fear that it could happen here too, without saying any politically incorrect things about politically protected groups.
Except the handmaid's tale might be closer to what goes on in Islamic societies than it is to a hypothetical patriarchal Christian theocracy in the modern west, but it's still not particularly close. The only similarity is women not having rights.
The problem being that women “having rights” is really a subset of corporate control over America. What the rights mean, effectively is that women want to be free to work and have careers and be good little consume-product-bots. Freedom in the modern world is more of a brand than anything else. You’re free to choose what sectors of the economic engine you want to be a battery for, and which consumer demographics you want to buy the imagery of. But beyond that, we’re pretty constrained as more and more of the decisions we used to be able to make are things you can get unjobbed for saying where the wrong people can hear you, and your daily tasks are set by people in offices a thousand miles away. And your free time is spent watching whatever entertainment LA thinks is cool and of course must espouse Goodthink. Which is exactly why I think the fears of Christian Nationalism are not realistic— it would cost the economy too much money, and too many potential wage-slaves to have half of the American population shoved into kitchens to cook and clean. It would half the disposable income per household and thus fewer bobbles sold, less wine, fewer meals out.
I think the “fear” feels a bit like the wrangling over 50 Shades of Grey also seen at the time as a terrible misogynist novel in which women were shown the dark side of S&M and date rape. Except the main audience of the book was women who just couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Not because they were afraid of it or repulsed by it. It was because they wanted a man to make them feel like Grey made his woman feel. I get the same vibe from Handmaid. They want some outside events to force them to stop working their stressful job for a boss they hate while their baby hits all their milestones at daycare. They want a world where all they have to worry about is cooking and cleaning and hugging their babies. But since they aren’t supposed to want that it’s sublimated as horror. Wouldn’t it be horrible if they were forced into living like a tradwife? Don’t you know that Trump wants to do that?
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