Plurk paste

It’s entirely possible that both of them were telling the truth, though. It’s possible Sanders believed he was merely warning Warren that the race would be even harder for her, and it’s possible Warren believed he was saying something more forceful: that President Trump’s skill with weaponizing misogyny made Sanders doubt a female candidate’s viability.

It’s possible we still prefer our discussions of sexism in politics to be peppy, upbeat one-liners, because the alternative is for them to be messy rehashings of “whether a woman can be president.” That question isn’t ever about the woman but about her potential voters and the moral fantasies we spin about ourselves.

Presumably, whatever Bernie Sanders said or didn’t say, he wasn’t trying to imply that a woman wasn’t good enough to win — which would be a judgment about women — but rather that any woman running for president would face a country that wasn’t good enough to vote for her. Which is a judgment about society.

In that case, Sanders wasn’t saying anything that worried Democrats, including many women, haven’t said for months — the “electability” argument via which hordes of voters apparently plan to vote for Joe Biden not because they like Joe Biden but because they think their neighbors do. That argument says: I’m not sexist, but in order to defeat Donald Trump, we have to live in the real world, which is.

That argument is reasonable, sort of. If your primary goal is putting out a fire, then your instinct is to hand the hose to the firefighter wearing the most flame-retardant gear. In this case: the candidate protected by his age, sexual orientation, and XY chromosomes. That argument is also utterly exhausting. Because it’s also saying: I’m not sexist, but my position is that we should capitulate to the sexists by nominating only male candidates until the problem miraculously fixes itself. I’m not sexist, but rather than trying to make the world better, I think we should meet the world where it is, which is to say, in hell.

When is someone acknowledging sexism, and when is someone just being sexist?

That’s actually the conversation that should have happened on the debate stage.

Not Elizabeth Warren firing up a women-take-care-of-business sound bite, but Elizabeth Warren admitting that, yeah, it’s actually heartbreaking to have even your good friends tell you that the country won’t believe in you enough to vote for you. Yeah, you worry that if you lose, people are going to say it’s because you’re a woman, and the loss will unfairly impact female candidates for years to come.

Not Bernie Sanders denying that he’d ever even thought such a thing but Bernie Sanders admitting that of course he’d thought such a thing, just like many voters had. He worried that the country would eviscerate a female candidate, as had happened many times before, and he was trying to balance that fear against his very real desire for gender equality in politics.