On at least one point there ought to be agreement in this deeply divided land: Our democracy is in serious trouble. Those on the left consider the Trump administration autocratic, and some on the far-left, as well as some scientists, think the only chance we have to address the rapidly approaching disaster of climate change might be to elect a benevolent dictator. Those on the far-right, including our vice president, secretary of state and attorney general, appear to believe our country’s best chance of protecting itself from Democrats’ “secular morality” is to continue supporting the aspiring dictatorship of King Trump.
Most of us in the middle, Republicans, Democrats and independents alike, try to make sense of our national predicament, to find reasons for hoping our political system can survive and come to grips with growing inequality and the looming disasters of climate change.
For me, knowing that women are expected to turn out in force in November is a source of hope, especially as we celebrate the fact that American women gained the right to vote just 100 years ago, in 1920 — a right that took decades, and considerable moxie, to secure.
One image that set me thinking along these lines was a photograph of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in a Montgomery, Ala., police station following her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955. She had refused to relinquish her public bus seat to a white man as a city ordinance then required. Parks is well-dressed in the photograph. She looks calm, not angry or frightened, as though she were accustomed to being arrested. I’ve since learned that her childhood, her family and her work with the NAACP, which sent her to a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, helped her to deal with her very real anger as quietly as did.
President George W. Bush and other Republicans must have understood the significance of the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott that followed Parks’ arrest and led, among other things, to the rise of a Montgomery pastor, Martin Luther King Jr. When Parks died in October 2005, early in Bush’s second term, she became the first woman to lie in honor in the rotunda of our nation’s Capitol.
Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state in the Bush administration, also grew up in Alabama. At a memorial service, she said she would probably never have been in her position “without Mrs. Parks.”
Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, wrote, “though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past.” I find that kind of hope in the photograph and the story of Rosa Parks.
It also helps to recall that many of the courageous, angry women who gathered at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 to launch the movement that gave women access to American voting booths some 70 years later would, like Rosa Parks, be arrested for demanding their rights.
The rise of the #MeToo movement, including its battles with powerful figures in politics, sports, the media and even with Dartmouth College here in the Upper Valley, reveal continuing injustice and brave, angry resistance. I have feminist friends, still distressed and baffled by Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, who believe our country is not yet ready to elect any woman president. (The question continues to roil the debate, as the current spat between Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren demonstrates). And it may well be true that many voters consider “courageous” and “angry” to be disqualifying traits for presidential candidates who happen to be women.
We seem to fear angry women, as well as angry black men, who have power. The major criticism of Sen. Amy Klobuchar seems to be that she has a temper and is sometimes hard on her staff. Crowds at Trump rallies still call for Hillary Clinton to be locked up, although multiple investigations have shown she broke no laws. President Barack Obama was careful not to reveal anything like the anger President Donald Trump expresses nearly every day.
The first Women’s March, the day after Trump was inaugurated, included hundreds of events and millions of protesters all over the country and even internationally. Journalist Marissa J. Lang, who says it is widely thought to be “the largest single-day protest in American history,” wrote in The Washington Post recently that the annual march has lost its influence as a national movement. In addition to blaming organizing mistakes, Lang says the anticipated diminished support for the 2020 version of the Women’s March, which took place Saturday, might have much to do with more encouraging developments: “Experts who follow protest movements said the group’s own successes — putting more women on the front line of American politics, inspiring a new wave of progressive groups, encouraging an unprecedented number of women to run for office — have rendered the Women’s March increasingly irrelevant.”
Running for office, working for a candidate, or changing your mind — those acts don’t necessarily risk arrest or humiliation, but they all require moxie. And voting in a way people around you might not accept can take a lot of moxie.
Women in suburbs, evangelical churches and rural communities supported Trump in 2016. But as they hear more about our president in his Senate impeachment trial, and in the election campaign that will follow what is expected to be his pre-baked acquittal, many may change their minds. A president who separates children from their parents, supports war criminals, risks war while claiming to want peace, and talks enthusiastically of violence and torture might well be undone, in part, by moxie.
Such a development isn’t likely to show up anytime soon in the polling, but it might at the polls.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.