Mick Hartley

Paul Berman's latest piece at the Tablet is a long meditation on the present counterrevolution, which he sees as a revenge of the people left behind and forgotten in the great liberal revolutions that exploded in the late Sixties – yes, he's very much of the baby-boomer generation – which led to the civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, and onwards and upwards from there. What's the most important element here, he wonders, in terms of the current backlash? He cites "the liberal revolution in gender roles and women’s equality":

I think that, in the United States, some of us may have imagined that, in our own corner of the world, the general principle of women’s rights carried the day long ago, even if we recognize that success will require another hundred years. Our confident feeling on this matter is a main reason why, in the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump seemed to so many of us to be headed for an overwhelming defeat. His demeaning comments about women and about his opponent appeared to disqualify him from office, simply on grounds of manners.

And yet, we ought to have reflected that in other parts of the world, the advances in women’s rights and equality have aroused feelings of perplexity, consternation, indignation, and rage, and have never stopped doing so. The Islamist movement is the extreme example—a movement that has flourished precisely in response to the advances in women’s rights, out of a belief that women’s rights figure within the larger imperialist and Crusader plot against Islam. But Islamism is unique only in its paranoia and cult of violence. A baffled outrage at advances in women’s equality animates a few peaceable corners of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel as well, and it animates the populist and Catholic right-wing parties of Central and Eastern Europe. Here, at last, has been an ecumenical response—which ought to have led us to suppose that America might not be so different. Trump has taught us a lesson in this regard. He is the American unexceptionalist. The very commentaries and behaviors in regard to women that we imagined would doom his political career turn out to have been keys of his success, as much and probably more than his tirades against Mexicans and Muslims. Every time he spoke, he struck a blow against the modern idea of women’s place in society. He discovered he could do it merely by demonstrating that, on a debate stage with the most accomplished female political leader in the history of the United States, he could casually withdraw the simple courtesies that signal respect—and thereby increase his popularity.

He doesn't come out and say: Hillary lost because of her sex. It's more subtle than that. Still, when I dared to suggest that misogyny might be playing a part in her unpopularity – and by extension in Trump's unlikely triumph – I was promptly rebuked by my American readers. Well, fair enough I suppose. I'm on the outside looking in. I have to accept that there must be elements of Hillary's personality, making her uniquely repulsive and appalling and unsuited for office, that only Americans can see.

Then there's Putin – the unlikely hero of our times:

Putin’s appeal is the appeal of dictatorship. It is the appeal of patriarchy restored. It is the appeal of a retreat from liberal democracy—a retreat from the social and cultural advances of the last 50 years, from the culture of innovation and openness, from feminism, from gay rights, from tolerance in general. It is a retreat even from military progress—a retreat from the fussy little moral and political considerations that have slowed down the American-led campaigns. Crudity, vulgarity, simplicity, the iron heel—this is the appeal. To the frightened and disappointed person who is cowering in fear at the many failures of the liberal revolution, to the person who has been left in darkness by the collapse of newspapers and authoritative information, to the person who cringes at the diminution of the father’s role and the husband’s role and the brother’s role, to the person who feels that his world has collapsed—to that unhappy person, Putin offers reassurance. He does not promise a better world. He offers the consolations of masculinity. And around the world, the parties of the counterrevolutionary movement of our time, the right-wing populist parties, occasionally the neocommunist parties, together with their ally, the new-leaf GOP—all of these groups join together in saluting the president of the Russian Federation, the world’s most prestigious leader in this reactionary year 2017….

I don't buy all of it, but Berman is always worth reading.