Doug Henwood constantly attacks feminists, has no criticisms of Putin

To nobody's surprise, Doug Henwood attacks feminists in defense of Trump/Putin. 

Now I have my own problems with Amanda Marcotte - in fact I blocked her on Facebook a couple of years ago when she defended one of her asshole friends who maintained that the Bronte sisters - who grew up in virtual poverty and worked their entire lives to support themselves in often horrible conditions - were "privileged" and so we shouldn't care about their books overmuch.

Speaking of differences of opinion with other feminists, I feel that my side of the argument over Anthony Weiner vs. Marcotte and her friend Lindsey Beyerstein has been fully vindicated. This is from 2011. I can't believe that's seven years ago already.

I certainly have had my differences with other feminists, but Henwood and his wife and their dirtbag left gang have a problem with all feminists. 

Just as the Right claims that professional misogynists like Christina Hoff Sommers are "equity feminists" the far Left claims that real feminists are women who don't focus on women's rights. As Henwood explained it:

“The side of feminism I’ve studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal [of a more peaceful, more egalitarian society], and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged.

Henwood feels that "feminists" shouldn't spend their time thinking about the lives women are living in the here and now, but should rather devote themselves to the "peaceful more egalitarian society" of the ideal future. And screw that self-centered feminist project of getting women elected. 

As I've noted before Henwood also criticizes feminists much more harshly than he criticizes the Koch brothers.

In 2017 the Daily Beast mentioned Henwood in an article about how the Far Left was played by Putin. I have serious doubts that Henwood was played rather than went along - and is going along - quite willingly:

Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. 

Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches—Henwood annotating, Assange writing the foreword—transcripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, two of which concluded that this was done with the express purpose of helping Trump get elected. When I brought up this pending project, as detailed both on the book publisher’s website and in multiple articles, Henwood called me a “fucking idiot.” 

(Henwood’s publisher, when contacted for this story, noted that Henwood was no longer affiliated with the endeavor, saying that he had now grown “weary of chronicling Hillary Clinton’s boundless political shortcomings.”)

Henwood's hatred of Hillary Clinton is partly explained, I believe by his own misoygny, but more and more I've begun to think it's also because he's aligned with Vladimir Putin. I've looked and although Henwood has mentioned Putin, on occasion  and defended the Trump-Russia connection I have never found any evidence of Henwood criticizing Putin. 

And yet Doug Henwood has no problem at all harshly attacking feminists, none of whom have been accused of murdering journalists or meddling in US elections.

In which Katha Pollitt hands Doug Henwood his ass

I'm a long-time fan of Katha Pollitt and although I have only become aware of him recently, I despise Doug Henwood. So of course I was very interested in Pollitt's review of Henwood's book about Hillary Clinton. And Henwood's response.

Henwood does not hesitate to smear his opponents, whether it's Hillary Clinton or me. And Pollitt calls him out on his blatant bias:

Still, negative rumors and remarks by unfriendly witnesses are given credence by Henwood, while positive ones are dismissed as the dutiful murmurs of flunkies.

And she shows Henwood in true unethical form:

The book has an epigraph from former undersecretary of the Treasury Brad DeLong, who worked on Hillary’s healthcare-reform initiative in the 1990s and wrote a long complaint on his blog in 2003 about her flubbing of that effort (“Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life”). Henwood writes that DeLong didn’t respond to his attempts to find out if he still felt this way, but a minute’s Googling would have revealed that DeLong retracted that view on his blog in 2008 and again in 2015. Today, he writes that Hillary “has been a successful Secretary of State, ran an almost-good-enough presidential nomination campaign, and been an effective Senator.” As a result, he enthusiastically endorses her.

And the best part is that in Henwood's response, he demonstrates exactly what Pollitt was talking about:

Although I use a highly critical 2003 quote from Brad DeLong, which includes the declaration that “Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life” as my epigraph, DeLong now endorses her. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but perhaps the reason that DeLong took down his blog from that era (thank God for the Wayback Machine!) and now disowns the statement is that he’d like a job in a Hillary Clinton administration, probably better than the one he had in Bill’s. 

So when DeLong was trashing HRC he was OK, but now that he praises her, he's a flunky.

Since Henwood is familiar with the Wayback Machine I don't doubt he's familiar with Google. And yet he somehow omits to mention DeLong changed his mind about Clinton. And you have to wonder why - clearly Henwood was ready to dismiss DeLong as a lying opportunist, albeit based on nothing more than "perhaps I'm being cynical." 

I wonder if DeLong will respond to that. I'm familiar with DeLong thanks to his being repeatedly mentioned by Krugman. Krugman has never mentioned Henwood.

Via Twitter I gave DeLong a heads-up about Henwood's low opinion of him and he responded:

What amazes me is that Pollitt refers to Henwood as a friend. Maybe this is a case of Pollitt refusing to see what she doesn't want to see. After all, as she herself admitted:

Observation is my weakness. I did not realize that my mother was a secret drinker. I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer, that the drab colleague he insinuated into our social life was his longstanding secret lover, or that the young art critic he mocked as silly and second-rate was being groomed as my replacement. 

Katha you are failing to observe that your friend Doug Henwood is a gigantic asshole.

More on Doug Henwood's hatred for the "bourgeois feminists"

It appears that Doug Henwood, hater of "bourgeois feminists" recently gained notoriety by attacking Hillary Clinton at Harper's.

But who actually cares what Doug Henwood thinks? He claims to be a Marxist, whatever that means these days - is he a card-carrying member of the Communist Party? Since I read the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, and his analysis of the Marxist-leaning school of anthropology I haven't been able to take Marxism seriously, influenced as it is by the airy-fairy Hegelian dialectic.

But as far as I can tell, what being a Marxist boils down to for Henwood is calling everybody you don't like "bourgeois" and especially feminists. So Henwood's economic analyses are completely useless - he's just a bitter ranting old man who has nothing helpful to add to any economic discussion.

This is from Jacobin (of the notorious Sarah Kendzior-instigated Jacobinghazi):

BKS: Accumulation and its discontents: is there a specifically Marxist understanding of the current economic crisis that you subscribe to?

DH: Mine, of course, which is that the bourgeoisie launched a successful war on a troublesome working class in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That assault – wage-cutting, speedup, deregulation, outsourcing, union-busting, cutbacks in the welfare state, all the familiar stuff gathered under the name of neoliberalism – created a problem for a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption both to maintain aggregate demand and to secure its political legitimacy. Why put up with the volatility and tsurris of American life if there’s no promise of plentiful gadgetry and upward mobility? So the answer was to counter the downdraft of falling wages with rising borrowing, via credit cards and mortgages. That model seemed to hit a wall in the recent economic crisis, but there’s no real recognition of that fact, and no new model for accumulation.
In orthodox terms, the U.S. would be ready for a serious austerity program, but our ruling class is afraid to push too hard on that, at least for now. So I think we’re going to stumble along for some time until some new economic and political model emerges. Or if one doesn’t emerge, maybe we’ll just fall apart.

Austerity program? Seriously? The thing right-wingers are always pushing for and Krugman is always objecting to? And Henwood claims to care so much about the poor, on whom all austerity programs would fall especially hard.

Now the "bourgeoisie" sound evil and Henwood's description of their activities would seem to identify them as Ronald Reagan and the Koch brothers, but the term's umbrella is very large, especially when it comes to feminists. As I noted yesterday, he blamed "bourgeois feminists" for exploiting workers in a t-shirt factory. He's referring to a Gawker article, but at least the article provides a link to the dastardly "bourgeois feminists" at The Fawcett Society, which has been working for women's rights since 1866. They say:

“Upon receiving samples of the range at our offices in early October we noted that the t-shirts had in fact been produced in Mauritius, upon which we queried (over email) the ethical credentials of the Mauritian factory, and the fabric used.
“We were assured by Whistles (over email) that the Mauritian factory:
‘is a fully audited, socially and ethical compliant factory which has the following accreditations.

So apparently these dastardly "bourgeois feminists" made a mistake. Which is all it takes for Henwood to attack them as heartless exploiters of the poor. Because of course over at the commune where he lives in Brooklyn, they vet every last consumer good they use, to ensure there is no exploitation anywhere in the production and distribution cycle. Which is why they only use artisinal cell phones.

But of course they don't - they just expect feminists (and unless you are in the Third World you are by definition a bourgeois feminist in Henwood's personal Marxist dictionary) to be perfect.

And then there's Henwood's lazy journalism.

I've been a fan of the work of Joe Conason and Gene Lyons since I read their "The Hunting of the President" and so was very pleased to see they both went after Henwood for his piece on Hillary Clinton.

Conason:

In short, Henwood simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about (and his reliance on former Fox News personality Dick Morris for guidance is mindboggling). What’s most disappointing is that a magazine of Harper’s’ reputation – which first exposed Whitewater as a political hoax – would provide a platform for his baseless speculations.

And based on Henwood's response to Lyons, I guess I shouldn't take his smearing and blocking me personally. Lyons writes:

...Then, after I wrote a column pointing out that almost everything he'd written about that phony scandal was nonsense, Henwood began calling me bad names on social media. "Clinton towel boy" was one.
So I posted the following on his Facebook page:
"I find it interesting that when confronted with several quite basic factual errors in his description of the great Whitewater scandal of legend and song, Doug Henwood's response is name-calling. That tells me pretty much all I need to know about him...

...Now if somebody took something of mine apart like that, I'd do my best to make them regret it. But Henwood can't, because he was blowing smoke to begin with.
"What I don't get," he answered "is why you're so invested in doing PR for these (bleeps)."
Sorry dude, not playing. Facts are facts.
Everybody makes mistakes. Professionals own them.

Apparently being nasty to his critics is just who Doug Henwood is. But at least we all know what the true meaning of "bourgeois" is now - if you make a living writing for the Nation, Harper's and your own blog, you are a righteous revolutionary. Pretty much everybody else in the First World is a member of the bourgeoisie. Especially those uppity feminists.

The mystery of why The Nation magazine loves Putin

I've been a subscriber to The Nation a few times in my life, but that's not happening again until they stop being such brocialist assholes. They have been consistently championing Putin and attempting to gaslight anybody who thinks the Trump-Putin connection is both plausible and worrisome. They call it neo-McCarthyism.

And of course Doug Henwood, the king of Hillary Clinton-hating brocialists is right there with them. The Daily Beast just published an article discussing the Nation-Putin connection and there was Henwood:

Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. 

Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches—Henwood annotating, Assange writing the foreword—transcripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, two of which concluded that this was done with the express purpose of helping Trump get elected. When I brought up this pending project, as detailed both on the book publisher’s website and in multiple articles, Henwood called me a “fucking idiot.” (Henwood’s publisher, when contacted for this story, noted that Henwood was no longer affiliated with the endeavor, saying that he had now grown “weary of chronicling Hillary Clinton’s boundless political shortcomings.”)

Yep, that's Henwood. Insulting or smearing anybody who disagrees with him - or even questions him.  My very first encounter with Henwood he did it to me - although he prefers to do it when you can't respond to, or even see the attack, as he did to me most recently, when a pal of his included him in his Twitter mentions and Henwood could see what I said about him. Henwood had blocked me back in 2014 on Twitter and so normally we can see each others' tweets.

Henwood did not fail to overreact, in his usual fashion, to my opinion of his political views with a smear against my character. It was only because I happened to create a separate Twitter account that I was able to see this smear.

The Nation is a disgrace. I'll either read Katha Pollitt's column there for free, or I'll wait until she publishes a collection of those columns.

I'm right in there with all the legitimate journalists whom
Henwood has insulted. I couldn't be more proud.

Misogyny and the Hillary-hating Left

NEW FOR 2017: THE DIRTBAG LEFT

I was onto Doug Henwood's misogyny over a year ago when I tangled with him via a friend of a Facebook friend, but it's very gratifying to see others making public statements about his utter derangement on the subject of Hillary Clinton.

Henwood is the leading leftist Hillary hater - he hates Clinton so much he's willing to dig up the debunked Whitewater charges to do it, while insulting any of his critics who call him out for being an unethical crank as Gene Lyons found out:

Because he finds her too close to Wall Street and too hawkish on foreign policy, Henwood evidently feels it his moral duty to blacken Hillary Clinton's character. It's not enough to say she voted for the Iraq War and favored bombing Syria. Henwood had to dig up "Whitewater" to prove her a liar and a cheat. 

Then, after I wrote a column pointing out that almost everything he'd written about that phony scandal was nonsense, Henwood began calling me bad names on social media. "Clinton towel boy" was one. 

So I posted the following on his Facebook page:
"I find it interesting that when confronted with several quite basic factual errors in his description of the great Whitewater scandal of legend and song, Doug Henwood's response is name-calling. That tells me pretty much all I need to know about him. 

"However, it's false to say that the late Jim McDougal's savings and loan financed the Clintons' Whitewater investment. He didn't buy it until five years later. Another bank made the loan, for which both Clintons were jointly and severally responsible — meaning they'd have to pay it off regardless of what happened to McDougal or his other investments. Which they did. Whitewater cost the S&L nothing.

Henwood, like many men on the far Left - and their enablers like Henwood's wife Liza Featherstone and their good buddy Amber A'Lee Frost - just don't like feminists generally, unless they are, I guess, members of the proletariat and/or Marxists.

I first heard of Doug Henwood when he attacked the Fawcett Society as "bourgeois feminists"  on Facebook.

Doug HenwoodYesterday at 8:47am ·
Man, isn't this bourgeois feminism for you? T-shirts cost a nickel apiece (presumably that's printing cost, not the entire t-shirt), sell for $70.
http://gawker.com/women-making-70-feminist-shirts-in-factory-paid-under-1653799400

The Society has been around since 1866 fighting for women's rights. And apparently the story was wrong anyway:

UPDATE: Much to our relief, The Fawcett Society has confirmed that the “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” tee was not produced in a factory with unethical work conditions, as reported by Dazed Digital. “We have been particularly pleased to receive evidence that 100% of workers are paid above the government-mandated minimum wage and all workers are paid according to their skills and years of service,” said Fawcett’s Eva Neitzert to Dazed of the factory in which the garments were made. “The standard working week is 45 hours, and workers are compensated (at a higher rate of pay) for any overtime worked."

If Henwood has apologized for smearing this venerable organization I have yet to discover any evidence. 

Henwood's attitude is described pretty well by this passage in Michelle Goldberg's piece in Slate, Men Explain Hillary to Me:

Of course, people of good faith are going to disagree about individual examples of sexism. What’s immensely frustrating, however, is to realize how many ostensibly enlightened men think that gender can ever be totally disaggregated from Clinton’s efforts to become the first female president. They seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously. They certainly don’t care about female leadership.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise; as long as feminism has existed, left-wing men have dismissed it as a bourgeois triviality. Now we know how little things have changed. For that, at least, we can thank these men for educating us.

Goldberg  doesn't mention Henwood by name, but Sady Doyle (whom I've admired for a long time) does in her piece in  Global Comment Hating Hillary: The One Thing Left and Right Men Can Agree On:

You know Hillary-hate. You’ve seen it before: It’s Tucker Carlson proclaiming that “when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” It’s Chris Matthews scolding Clinton, when she criticized Bush’s homeland security spending in 2005, by saying that “you look more witchy when you’re doing it like this.” It is sainted progressive icon Jon Stewart getting huge laughs, off a shot of Clinton smiling politely, with the line “that look is where boners go to die.”
And it goes on, and gets worse, until Hillary is not just portrayed as an ugly, mean old lady these dudes don’t want to fuck, but as an actual monster. Hillary-hate is the fact that, while Clinton was grieving the suicide of her friend Vince Foster, Republicans spread rumors that she had seduced and murdered him. Hillary-hate is Maureen Dowd calling Clinton “Godzilla” and “Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.” Hillary-hate is the not-remotely-subtle implication that Clinton abuses her husband, spread by the New York Post; next to a photo of Clinton with her mouth wide open at a Benghazi hearing, they ran the headline “NO WONDER BILL’S AFRAID.” Hillary-hate is the persistent, bizarre need for major media outlets to go along with Dowd’s calling Clinton the “50-Foot Woman” and to make Clinton look scary by portraying her as superhumanly huge: On the cover of TIME as a rampaging, pantsuited giantess the size of a skyscraper (photographed in the act of stepping on a powerless man, of course) or on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as some sort of Lovecraftian elder God the size of a planet.
Hillary-hate is Nation contributing editor Doug Henwood, greeting Clinton’s candidacy, this time around, with a book cover in which she is portrayed as a murderer aiming a gunat either (a) you, the reader, (b) the Democratic party, or quite possibly (c) Democracy itself.
Henwood turned out to be my breaking point, for this particular hate-wave. He provided the moment when I found out what happens on the other side of dread; when the anxiety of my internal monologue (they’re going to do it to her again; they’re going to do it to her again; they’re doing it to her again) broke, and clarified.
I don’t care if I have to end my career, end my friendships, or end my life with a Twitter-fight-induced heart attack, is what I thought, on the other side of fear. If there is anything I can do about this, they will not get away with doing it again.

Doug Henwood, as thin-skinned as they come, of course  has to jump on to attack Doyle:

She has no idea what Henwood thinks of Clinton if she's incapable of Googling "Henwood" and "Hillary" and finding the article in Harpers, mentioned by Lyons, entitled: Stop Hillary!

Amber A'Lee Frost also attacked Doyle in the Baffler in a piece meant primarily to hype the forthcoming hate-Hillary books of her good friends Henwood and Featherstone:

That so many established feminists appear to favor one exceptionally rich and powerful woman over the millions of women in dire need—many struggling as a direct result of horrifying policies of Bill’s that Hillary still supports to this day—is alarming to me. Sady Doyle, a self­-identified socialist who supports Clinton nonetheless, says that “the gendered nastiness coming unilaterally from Sanders’s camp doesn’t make me feel I can vote for him in any scenario.”

Established feminists are favoring Clinton as a presidential candidate. And I'm sure you could easily dig up objectionable actions on any other candidate, even Saint Bernie Sanders. 

The Nation's Liza Featherstone (wife of Doug Henwood) of course defends Trump against charges of collusion

And of course she hates Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Because any non-compliant woman, especially feminists are the enemies of Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood and their little Hillary-hating cult.

I wonder how many people are aware of this small New Yorker article about Henwood and Featherstone and their love of Russia and nostalgia for the old Soviet Union? I know about it because I occasionally check in to see what these two assholes are up to in the name of The Nation. It appeared in the March 20, 2017 issue of the New Yorker:

Liza Featherstone, an advice columnist for The Nation, arrived with her husband, the economics journalist Doug Henwood. They’d been coming here for seventeen years; it was “the site of our failed first date,” Henwood said. At a nearby table sat a young woman in a knitted pink pussy hat. “I should have worn my penis hat,” Henwood remarked, to no one in particular. The bar’s Communist-red walls are festooned with posters of Soviet triumphs: victory over Nazi Germany, the first woman cosmonaut in space, Cheburashka (the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Mickey Mouse). KGB carries three varieties of Baltika, a decent proletarian beer brewed in St. Petersburg. The leftist power couple ordered Lagunitas I.P.A.s. “At no point would I have enjoyed living in the Soviet Union,” Featherstone said. “The seventies were pretty comfortable,” Henwood rejoined, pulling out his iPhone to share a 1978 photograph of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev lounging in turquoise swimwear. Featherstone was summoned to the podium, where she delivered a meditation on the complexities at the intersection of B.D.S.M. and feminism. Forty-six hundred and sixty-three miles away, in Moscow, Vladimir Lenin rolled over in his mausoleum. 

And the rest of us are rolling our eyes.

It's important to note that Henwood's economic interests don't end in simply critiquing capitalism. Not only has capitalism been good to the Featherwoods via real estate, Henwood also offers advice to high-net-worth individuals via what used to be called The Liscio Report but which is now called TLRanalytics. I assume Henwood makes a decent living from this publication since it offers extremely pricey subscriptions.

Henwood & Featherstone have a bitter hatred for bourgeois feminists or the bourgeois in general (and feminists in general) - I wonder how many members of the working class can afford a subscription to Henwood's content.

I believe that when all the info has come out about Russia meddling in the US, not only is Trump going to be a proven Russian asset, so will Featherstone and Henwood.

Doug Henwood hates feminists more than the Koch brothers

UPDATE 3/10/2017: HELLO Twitter followers of Doug Henwood.

No doubt Henwood is talking shit about me, that's how he deals with non-compliant women - first he blocks them, then he talks shit about them with his equally cowardly shitty brocialist friends. I encountered this behavior from my very first run-in with Henwood, on Facebook. Before I even knew he was the king of the brocialists.

 He really got angry when I shared on Twitter his connection to the Liscio Report. Shameless hypocrites hate it when you present evidence for their shameless hypocrisy.

Henwood likes to call good people like Krugman and Steinem "elites" and attacks feminists as "bourgeois" but apparently he considers people who subscribe to the Liscio Report to be salt of the earth members of the proletariat.


(back to original blog post)

According to this blog:

Doug Henwood on Facebook 

In the last 10 minutes, courtesy of Facebook pals, I learned that the Koch Bros. are responsible for school segregation and the John Birch Society. Really, people, there are a lot of reactionaries, many of them with money, in this country. If only it were just two bad dudes.What bothers me is this single-minded obsession that’s taken over a bunch of the left. Their kind of politics has a long history in the U.S.

Well that's so sweet that self-declared Marxist Doug Henwood has decided to defend the Koch brothers against his Facebook pals.

Henwood is uncomfortable with targeting the Koch brothers:

Which is the more serious problem with that chain of reasoning? That corporations are people, or that money is a form of speech? I’m uncomfortable with the urge to treat the Koch brothers as the focus of evil in the modern world, to steal a phrase from Ronald Reagan, but they could spend tons of their personal money spreading their poison and the issue of corporate personhood wouldn’t figure at all. Rich people have a long history in this country of buying elections and politicians. They didn’t, and still don’t, need the dodge of corporate personhood to do that nasty work.

I found this very interesting - Henwood apparently doesn't have a real problem with Citizens United, but instead expresses what sounds like a parody of leftist thought, and notice how he seems to be defending the Kochs again by the ironic phrase "the Koch brothers, everyone's favorite emissaries of Satan":

The Citizens United decision means that corporations can spend money as freely as they want, without restrictions, if money is a form of speech and corporations are legally the same as individual persons. The problem with that to me is not so much that corporations have the same rights as people do, but that people have the right to spend as much money as they do and that's considered expressing their freedom of speech. That seems to be the problem. You could have the Koch brothers, everyone's favorite emissaries of Satan, free to spend their personal billions as they like to pursue their nasty agenda -- that seems to be the problem to me, not the corporate personhood.

I find it fascinating that Doug Henwood doesn't seem to have any criticisms of the Koch brothers on his blog but he hates Hillary Clinton with the fire of a thousand suns, and also is much more critical of Barbara Boxer and Gloria Steinem than the Koch brothers.

Here's Henwood apparently deliberately conflating climate change denial with promoting an energy source that not even Greenpeace is sure is worse than coal for promoting climate change. But it apparently offered Henwood a chance to defend the Kochs (and Republicans) while attacking Clinton.

And of course Henwood's wife Liza Featherstone seems to have a very comfortable relationship with the Koch brothers-funded Reason magazine.

Pollitt vs. Henwood: Round 2

Katha Pollitt comes back swinging at Doug Henwood after he responded to her review of his latest Hillary-hating screed, in a new piece in the Nation: The Book That Turns Hillary Clinton Into a Cartoon.

The reason that Doug Henwood turns Clinton into a cartoon is because Clinton is a "bourgeois feminist" and Henwood believes that bourgeois feminists are evil monsters out to deliberately exploit third-world workers. I am not kidding. And that was my very first introduction to Henwood - although I had actually read some of his tweets during the Twitter flurry known as Jacobinghazi.  But he didn't register there.

He sure did here:











The Fawcett Society, accused of exploiting workers, said they had not been aware of this situation - but Henwood and his gang would not consider the possibility that an organization which has been fighting for women's rights for 150 might have made a mistake. No, it was apparently much more believable to them that this organization, on behalf of "bourgeois feminists" were deliberately out to hurt women.

So that's what Doug Henwood thinks of "bourgeois feminists" in general and Hillary Clinton in particular: as pure evil. Which is why he presents Clinton as a murderer on the cover of his book.

So since Henwood thinks Clinton is pretty much the personification of evil it's no surprise that he can find nothing at all good to say about her, ever. As Pollitt notes:

 But even if every word he writes is completely accurate, it’s not the whole story. If he’s going to attack her for botching healthcare reform, Doug should at least have mentioned her role in establishing the SCHIP program, which gave healthcare to millions of low-income children. If he’s going to dismiss her as a “carpetbagger” and a “mediocre” “seat warmer” in the Senate, he should have noted that her voting record made her one of the more liberal Senate Democrats—70 percent more liberal than her fellow Senate Dems in her final term. And isn’t it relevant that Republicans controlled the Senate from 2001 to 2007? What Doug gives us is so partial—he mentions every negative (even her supposed breaking of a lamp in a fight with Bill)—he turns her into a cartoon.

Pollitt also hits back over Henwood's smearing of Brad DeLong. But of course as I've demonstrated on this blog, smearing defenders of Hillary Clinton is just what Henwood does. Which tells you about the mind of Doug Henwood - a center-left woman running for president is evil personified and anybody who says different is a lying opportunist or a "Clinton towel-boy."

And Henwood and his wife Liza Featherstone are both contributors to The Nation. No wonder The Nation has gone downhill.

Chapo Trap House: KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!

Felix Biederman is the Zod in the middle

Back in November 2014, on my very first encounter with Doug Henwood, I knew what a shithead he was.

And I found it bizarre that Katha Pollitt, who had written a column defending the Great Satan of brocialists, Sheryl Sandberg, considered herself a friend of his, in view of Henwood's contempt for "lean-in" feminism - code word for feminism which considers the actual lives of women - all women - important, rather than the kind of feminism Henwood considers appropriate:

“The side of feminism I’ve studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal [of a more peaceful, more egalitarian society], and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged.

The idea that putting women in high places is the same as "leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged" is typical addled-brain misogyny of the Dirtbag left, and one of the reasons why they hate Hillary Clinton so much. They don't accept that a woman as president means anything at all as far as the hierarchy of power. Because women's lives mean nothing to them - except the lives of their romanticized concept of the proletariat and 20-something Sanders-supporting earthmothers and of course brocialist helpmeets who have attended private colleges and never get their hands dirty doing anything except changing their laser printer cartridges.

Well I don't think Pollitt is friends with Henwood anymore - I found him attacking her on Twitter this past June.

Now the thing is, there is nothing in Pollitt's column that Henwood should have any problem with - but Henwood reflexively attacks any real feminists in favor of his Dirtbag left ladies auxiliary who claim to be the real feminists - you know the feminists who care about things that Dirtbag men care about, not that women shit.

The reference to Zod in the graphic at the top of this post is pretty funny. It's in reference to the article by Jeet Heer I talked about yesterday, which begins:

On a recent episode of the popular podcast Chapo Trap House, co-host Will Menaker used a memorable metaphor in addressing calls for unity on the left. “Republicans in control of politics, that’s the problem,” he began. “However, to the pragmatists out there and the people who don’t like purity in politics, yes, let’s come together. But get this through your fucking head: You must bend the knee to us. Not the other way around. You have been proven as failures, and your entire worldview has been discredited. You bend the knee to us and then let’s fucking work together to defeat these things, not with fucking means testing or market-based solutions but with a powerful social democratic message.”

LOL - you must bend the knee to us. KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!!

It's no surprise that Henwood would be involved with these people - his seething hatred for liberal women makes him a perfect fit.

No surprise, Henwood also attacks Joy Reid. 

Henwood and his gang are awful human beings. 

Unfortunately the screen cap at the bottom of this post doesn't show Henwood chiming in because of course he would, but Henwood had long since blocked me on Facebook for being too non-compliant and so when I'm logged into my Facebook account I can't see anything he writes. I only know he participated in the shit-fest because someone else posted their screen cap of the same thing on Twitter. 

I didn't know who Felix Biederman was at the time I took the screen cap, but now I do - he's one of the three Zods shown in the New Republic article about Chapo Trap House and the Dirtbag left. And Biederman's hatred for any liberal who does not kneel before Zod is crystal clear in his comment in support of the sniggering middle-aged mean-girls Amber A'Lee Frost and Liza Featherstone cackling over the possibility of one of their Dirtbag gang trolling Sady Doyle. Biederman says: "that's cool. she got really upset." 

David Duhalde, Deputy Director at Democratic Socialists of America also chimes in: "I want to troll her bad..."

Here is Biederman attacking a woman for talking about being raped. No doubt Amber A'Lee Frost, Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood and all the gang at Chapo thought this was hysterical.

Does anybody think that if these assholes managed to achieve the socialist regime of their dreams we'd be any better off than with capitalist misogynists and sociopaths?

For some reason, the blog post from January 2016 where I originally posted the image is getting lots of attention lately, based on my analytics statistics. It's possibly due to Frost being mentioned in the recent Jeet Heer article in the New Republic. 

The real disappointment in the image below is Corey Robin, whom Krugman has mentioned with approval on several occasions. Unlike the rest of them, Robin seems to have some things of value to say.

Krugman probably doesn't care, but most of Robin's friends hate Krugman as much as anybody else who refuses to KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.

"

With friends like them

Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone, writers for The Nation and Jacobin, and Henwood's blog, are nasty people, as I have demonstrated several times on this blog. Henwood is particularly thin-skinned and apparently decided to retaliate against Katha Pollitt for handing him his ass last month by trying to embarrass her on his blog - I missed it until just recently.

Last time I checked Pollitt considered Henwood her friend - but if a friend of mine went after me like that in public I wouldn't feel too friendly towards them. I just can't compartmentalize my feelings that well. Of course they're also work colleagues at The Nation, so maybe it's just a work friendship.

Bernie Sanders isn't projected to do nearly as well in upcoming state caucuses and primaries as he had been for the past month, and desperation doesn't tend to make nasty people any nicer. Naturally Henwood has to attack Krugman, who, as far as I know doesn't consider Henwood a friend:

The Sanders campaign has certainly sharpened the contradictions, hasn’t it? It’s been very clarifying to see Hillary Clinton and her surrogates running against single-payer and free college, with intellectual cover coming from Paul Krugman and Vox.

Doug Henwood is trying to present Krugman as being against single-payer and free college, because he's dishonest like that. But as Krugman noted:

What I and most of my wonk friends would like to see is what the late Robert Heilbroner used to call Slightly Imaginary Sweden — or these days, maybe Diversified Denmark. That is, a strong social safety net that protects everyone against avoidable misery, workers with substantial bargaining power, strong environmental policy; not an equalized society, not a Utopia, but someplace where basic decency is a fundamental principle. 

But nothing like that is going to happen in America any time soon. If we’re going to have any kind of radical change in the next few years and probably the next couple of decades, it will come from the right, not the left.

As Matt O’Brien rightly said recently, even the incremental changes Hillary Clinton is proposing are very unlikely to get through Congress; the radical changes Bernie Sanders is proposing wouldn’t happen even if Democrats retook the House. O’Brien says that the Democratic primary is “like arguing what’s more real: a magical unicorn or a regular unicorn. In either case, you’re still running on a unicorn platform.” This is, alas, probably true: the platforms of the candidates are better seen as aspirational than as programs at all likely to happen. 

But in that case, why not go for the magical unicorn? A couple of reasons.
One is that there are degrees of realism: a program that could be implemented in part if Democrats retake the House might turn out to be a useful guide relatively soon, while a program that requires a political revolution won’t.

Another is that, perhaps inevitably, the Sanders insistence on the need for magical unicorns has led to invocations of economic as well as political magic. I warned a while back that even Sanders wasn’t willing to level with voters about what his ideals would require — that, in particular, he was assuming unrealistic savings in order to gloss over the reality that quite a few middle-class Americans would be net losers from a transition to single payer. I’m not alone in raising such concerns, and not just about the health plan.

Naturally Doug Henwood refuses to admit the possibility that Krugman is speaking for himself - instead Henwood characterizes him as providing "intellectual cover" for Clinton.

What I can't figure out about Henwood and his wife Featherstone is who exactly they think they are and who they think they're speaking for. They like to use terms like "bourgeois" and "elites" when describing their political enemies. Here's Featherstone:

FEATHERSTONE: Well, faux feminism is a bit of hyperbole, because of course--of course all kinds of revolting ideologies are part of feminism. I can't say only my feminism is the real feminism. I'm kind of kidding about that, a little. But what I do think is that that sort of feminism is not actually serious about improving the vast majority of women's lives, that what Hillary represents--what I mean by faux feminism is that it's elite feminism, so it is only going to serve a few. So you know, elite women who may cheer, you know, the symbolic lifting of the glass ceiling that Hillary represents. But on the other hand what her record represents is, as I say in the piece, a contempt for the kind of social democratic policies that most women need.

Featherstone's kind of feminism is I'm sure the same as her husband's "feminism" - one that isn't about women so much as about peace and egalitarianism. Also Featherstone thinks the bitches at Ms. Magazine are idiots for talking about the universality of rape - apparently Featherstone doesn't think that rape is rape - by her way of thinking you shouldn't compare the rape of elite women to the rape of the non-elite. Elite in this case being women who attend Ivy League colleges.

But I don't see how either of them could be any more elite if they tried. I mean, not only did they both attend Ivy League schools - Featherstone went to Columbia, Henwood went to Yale - they both seem to make a living exclusively from opining in Academia and far-left periodicals - or in Featherstone's case, AM New York, and they can afford to live in a condo in Brooklyn, which, according to Zillow is worth $2 million.

It's amazing how much information you can learn based on real estate and other sites these days: Spokeo will tell you who lives/lived in buildings, whether there is a sex offender in the neighborhood, crime rate etc.; and Homemetry will even tell you what the owner/tenant occupation and education level is, or even their nationality or ethnicity. They aren't always accurate though - an ex-boyfriend of mine is listed as "English" but he's Korean.

According to online records Henwood bought his place three years ago for under a million, so if the property is worth $2M now that's quite an impressive gain. If these records are accurate then I have to admit, for somebody who hates capitalism so much Henwood does pretty well by it. 

Doug Henwood and the cowardly anti-feminist radical chic brigade

I had an unpleasant run-in on Facebook with Doug Henwood and his merry band of feminist-hating sycophants the other day.

Who is Doug Henwood, you may ask. Well not nearly as well-known as he feels he deserves to be, since Henwood apparently thinks that Paul Krugman stole all his best ideas.

Henwood is one of these radical chic types who thinks that Sheryl Sandberg is the Great Satan. Katha Pollitt addressed that idiocy in The Nation.

It's clear from Doug Henwood's personality that he is a true Social Justice Warrior, even if he is much older than your average SJW - he enjoys attacking actual feminists out of some bullshit holier-than-thou double standard and he cannot tolerate criticism - like any standard SJW he much prefers to smear and then censor critics as you can see him doing in the debate I had with him. He blocked me and then he and his gang continued the "debate" without me. Much like Clint Eastwood arguing with invisible Obama in the chair.

 He even posted the K. Tempest Bradford/Mikki Kendall smear against me to try to make me shut up about his idiocy concerning Sandberg and "bourgeois feminists."

What really bothers Doug Henwood and others who attacked Sheryl Sandberg is that Sandberg has the nerve to address female career aspirations, while radical chic purists like Henwood and some freelance Philistine named Abby Tallmer believe that women need to wait until all the problems of the third world are solved first before they worry about their own lives. You know, they should address important issues, not insignificant little women's issues.

UPDATE: Henwood appears to be part of the same cadre of self-important leftist quasi-anarchists as David Graeber, with whom I tangled some months ago. And Henwood was actually in on the Twitter war known as Jacobinghazi.

Other times Doug Henwood sided with Trump

It's well known that Doug Henwood, leading feminist-hating brocialist (with his own ladies auxiliary) and some time writer for The Nation (and friend, or I hope for her sake, former friend of Katha Pollitt) hates Hillary Rodham Clinton more than anybody on this earth.

So it's really no surprise that when it comes to anybody versus HRC, Henwood will pick anybody, every time.

And that includes Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. I already mentioned Henwood siding with Trump a few weeks ago. And here he is back in September.

A bizarre attempt at humor at HRC's expense by Henwood

But it isn't just his hatred of Clinton. Henwood appears to look for opportunities to hate all enemies of Trump. Like this.

And he certainly doesn't want you to think that Trump had any help from Putin. The Far Left apparently loves Putin just as much as the Far Right.

I had wondered how Henwood could live in an expensive place in Brooklyn when he and his wife Liza Featherstone seem to support themselves through careers that consist entirely of blogging, adjunct teaching and writing for Verso books, The Nation and Jacobin. Somebody emailed me recently to give me a heads-up on this - Henwood writes  something called the Liscio Report on the Economy, which charges a yearly subscription of $7500.

So now we know who counts as the real elites in Henwood/Featherstone world - not subscribers to the Liscio Report, not the Koch brothers, whom Henwood has defended, not Trump or Putin. No, the only elites in their world are feminists, Paul Krugman and Hillary Clinton. 

Doug Henwood vs. Sady Doyle

Sady Doyle posted an excellent piece on Tumblr three weeks ago - Progressive - I assume she hasn't seen my blog posts about Doug Henwood and his feminist-hating Ladies Auxiliary, so her using the term "Women's Auxiliary" in her piece is no doubt an example of great minds thinking alike:

You can use sexism to rally people for a “progressive” cause, but you can’t then claim that the sexism is invisible, that it doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t matter, or doesn’t compromise you. You can frame women and feminists as your Women’s Auxiliary, people to be tapped when you need their time and effort and platforms and organizing skill, and discarded or flat-out trashed in favor of better, more male politics whenever we step out of line or whenever it’s convenient. But you can’t do it and tell me that your gender politics are “progressive.” You can’t be a feminist on some days and a person screaming about Hillary Clinton’s vagina on the internet other days, as a wise man might say. So go ahead. Type about how Hillary Clinton is “pandering for votes with her vagina.” But don’t do it and then tell me your opposition to Hillary Clinton has nothing to do with her gender. There is a limit to precisely how many times you can feed me horseshit and call it chocolate frosting, and right now, the taste in my mouth says your time is up.

I also used the chocolate/shit metaphor for sexism ten years ago.

I was blocked on Twitter by Doug Henwood over a year ago, when I got a little too contrary for him - he's used to his Ladies Auxiliary who are compliant and deferential to him as a Great Man of the Left - but Doyle has had an ongoing and increasingly bitter war with Henwood for months now. Perhaps because they were once friendly Twitter colleagues it has become so bitter - I was never friendly with Henwood - my first introduction to him was him attacking the Fawcett Society as "bourgeois feminists" and me giving him shit about it.

I could tell Henwood was a misogynist Radical Chic type from the moment I encountered him. And his online interactions with Sady Doyle have only proven I actually underestimated his shitheadedness. From another article by Doyle: Beware of the angry white male public intellectual which justifiably links other infamous shitheads like Richard Dawkins to Bernie Bros like Henwood:

In many cases, online attacks are set in motion when well-bylined men publicly point their followers to the offenders in question. It’s hard to document every incidence of this, because it’s a bit like a fish documenting water. I called Doug Henwood’s anti-Hillary book cover sexist and blocked him. He began tweeting about how I’d blocked him and suggesting that I was lucky he wasn’t planning to sue. Soon enough, I was getting hundreds of angry tweets. 

Greenwald and similarly left-leaning writer Matt Taibbi, meanwhile, linked to an old article about left-wing sexism against Hillary Clinton by Rebecca Traister. “We got more or less the same argument about ‘Obama Boys’ years ago,’ Taibbi complained. Traister reported that a few hours later, her mentions now include “many suggestions that I am a paid shill hack who should suck a vinyl dick.”

Brad DeLong, colleague of the Mighty Krugman and who Henwood insinuated was saying good things about Clinton out of careerism has Sady's back.

Jason Grote's pal Doug Henwood keeps attacking Katha Pollitt

Brocialists like to support each other - bros before hoes!

Jason Grote, the straight white male playwright who thought I was ridiculous some years ago for suggesting that women are given fewer play productions than men  - and blocked me from his "Fortress" for disagreeing with him - is a big fan of the leading brocialist Doug Henwood. He likes to retweet him often.

Henwood of course also blocked me for disagreeing with him - on Facebook and Twitter. Brocialists don't like bitches who are non-compliant.

But how perfect a confluence is that? Two men I despised as misogynists  - separately - long before this current nomination process turn out to be brocialist comrades attacking a woman running for president - a prospect that fills them with rage and compels them to smear Clinton and supporters with easily-debunked bullshit - Whitewater in Henwood's case and unfounded attacks on progressive hero David Brock in Grote's case. 

And Doug Henwood just cannot stop attacking Katha Pollitt, his fellow writer at The Nation. I gave Pollitt a heads-up on this article on Facebook.

Henwood apparently thinks he's accomplished some kind of gotcha but I don't see anything written in this review of Clinton's "It Takes a Village" that sound different from Pollitt now. She never claimed that she thought Hillary Clinton was perfect. And the review starts out with a paragraph that is still very valid, especially with brocialists on the attack:

“Saint or Sinner?” asks the cover of Newsweek about Hillary Clinton. On the New York Times Op-Ed page, Maureen Dowd calls her a hybrid of Earth Mother and Mommie Dearest. I must say, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Don’t countless politicians (and their relatives) use their positions to make profitable contacts and advance their friends? And don’t they all talk about family, morals, responsibility, children and God?

Henwood attacks Gail Collins too.

It's always amusing to read the brocialists and their ladies auxiliary express deep concern for feminism - when they aren't attacking the vast majority of feminists as "bourgeois feminists."

And we know exactly what kind of feminism the brocialists believe in because Henwood explains:

As I wrote in My Turn (p. xiv): “The side of feminism I’ve studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal [of a more peaceful, more egalitarian society], and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged. It’s distressing to see feminism pressed into service to promote the career of a thoroughly orthodox politician—and the charge of sexism used to deflect critiques of her.

In other words, the side of feminism that Henwood admires isn't actually about WOMEN.

Can you imagine if someone wrote: "the side of civil rights I've studied and admired is about peace and egalitarianism, not about placing African Americans into high places." And civil rights activists being called "bourgeois" if they talk about advancing the careers of African Americans. It's only OK to attack women for having aspirations in the here and now - rather than waiting for the egalitarian peaceful socialist nirvana to render 9 to 5 jobs obsolete.

But of course Susan Sarandon demonstrates how women can never win in a world run by brocialist values - she supported John Kerry AND John Edwards who both voted to go into Iraq. But she "broke up" with HRC over the same thing. And the reason for that is clear in this recent New Yorker interview with her:

She talked about Clinton, whom she had earlier described as a good Republican candidate. “I hold women to a very high moral standard,” she said. “I was very disappointed when she voted for the war, so easily, especially as I was suffering so much, and my family was suffering”—pilloried for their opposition to the war.

Clearly there is a blatant and unapologetic double standard in the minds of brocialists: women must be purer than men. 

Brocialists like their women to be earth mothers who make sure to take care of everybody else and certainly not to try to have a place in the upper ends of the hierarchy like that pushy bitch HRC who thinks she's entitled to the nomination just by getting the most votes. Sanders and his enablers think that they can get the nomination by getting superdelegates to switch over to Sanders. Because they're assholes like that.

And that is why brocialists must be opposed every damn step of the way and their attempt to take over the American left at the expense of women must be called out as much as possible.

Have I ever mentioned what a misogynist POS Doug Henwood is?

Here is Doug Henwood attacking Gloria Steinem, as per usual because that's what he and brocialist scum like his wife Liza Featherstone and buddy asshole Amber A'Lee Frost do.






Steinem didn't work directly for the CIA. She asked for funds to help Americans go to India. And this was in 1962. Henwood shared this video on Twitter which says exactly that.

Henwood, ever the shameless brocialist hypocrite was himself once a conservative. But you are supposed to forgive him for that. Because the never-ending brocialist campaign to smear feminism means that they have a much lower bar for brocialist behavior than feminist behavior.

(Henwood) received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1975. As a youth Henwood was acquainted with Marxism, but for a period late in high school into his early years at Yale, he identified as a conservative, briefly joining the Party of the Right:[1]

And about his tender concern for poor Sigmund Freud - even other socialists recognize the problem of Freud:

Freud’s biological determinism contributed to the reaction. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he wrote, “The psychological premises on which the system [of communism] is based are an untenable illusion” because “nature, by endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy.”
While Marxists celebrate the social nature of human beings, Freud saw human beings as innately aggressive, so he feared mass democracy. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) he wrote that being in a crowd overrides the social constraints that keep animal instincts under control. And in The Future of an Illusion (1927) he warned, “These dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening.”
Virtually all research into childhood trauma ceased, and doctors were warned not to believe patient reports of childhood sexual assault. As late as 1975 the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (US) estimated the frequency of incest as one case per million.

If it turns out that Henwood is on the payroll of the Koch brothers or some other right-wing organization, I will not be one bit surprised. He is a cancer of the left.

You have to wonder why anybody cares what he has to say about anything at all, he's such a flagrant piece of shit.

Nancy McClernan vs. the Radical Chic Part 4

Continued from Part 3

The Radical Chic is more interested in making a statement, in posturing, than in actually making progress through the political system. Or as Gail Collins said:

That’s the bottom line of the whole contest. Vote for Bernie: Send a message. Vote for Hillary: She knows how to make things work.

As the NYTimes said in its endorsement of Clinton:

In the end, though, Mr. Sanders does not have the breadth of experience or policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers. His boldest proposals — to break up the banks and to start all over on health care reform with a Medicare-for-all system — have earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people. But his plans for achieving them aren’t realistic, while Mrs. Clinton has very good, and achievable, proposals in both areas.

The Radical Chic is not interested in actually making things work in the real world because making things work takes work. And compromise. Superkewl revolutionaries don't compromise, superkewl revolutionaries laugh at compromise, or rant at it, in Bernie Sanders' case as Gail Collins said in a different piece:

This is one of the problems with being Bernie Sanders. His whole point is to be outside the political norm. He’s the principled maverick whose most famous moment in the Senate was his eight-and-a-half-hour speech against the compromises President Obama made in 2010 to get a tax deal. We expect him to stick to his standards, even if they’re somewhat irrational.

The Radical Chic has no problem with irrationality. That's why someone like Doug Henwood, contributing editor at The Nation can say of positive change  "...would require a wholesale overhaul of the political economy ... and the Clintons weren't about to take that on."

The wholesale overhaul of the political economy is not achievable for two politicians, even the Clintons. So as far a Radical Chic guy like Henwood is concerned, political achievements mean nothing without a complete overhaul. That explains the Radical Chic view of ACA.

In order to believe that Sanders has the ability to make all their dreams come true, the Radical Chic have to dismiss the accomplishment of ACA - as if getting it into law past a scorched-earth obstructionist Republican Congress was utterly insignificant.  And so they must believe the only reason Obama couldn't accomplish more was because he just didn't want it badly enough, and Sanders wants it bad enough and so, they apparently imagine, he will simply waltz into Congress, demand that Medicaid cover all citizens and throw out all the insurance companies.

And because dismissing anything good coming out of the existing system while making bold statements about how things should be is what being Radical Chic is all about, the ultimate hero of the Radical Chic is not Doug Henwood, although he certainly hasn't accomplished anything of value as far as I can see which might qualify him. No, the ultimate hero of the Radical Chic is Kathy Chang.

As I've mentioned on my blog in the past couple of months, Chang hung out with my ex-husband and other lefties in Philadelphia, including future Nation copy editor Sandy McCroskey. I met her myself but barely exchanged more than a few sentences with her and I don't remember what was said.

When she died the NYTimes said:

In 1978, she had a vision that she could redeem her many perceived failures with an act of utmost ambition: saving the world.

But after nearly two decades of pamphlets and protests and stripping naked in public, if that was what it took, there came the realization that no one was listening and nothing had changed. 

She also ranted in public. And her friend Anita King created a web site which displays one of her rants, which begins:

I am running on a platform of complete social transformation. The problems we are faced with today: crime, unemployment, poverty, battered women, abused children, pollution, environmental degradation, national insolvency, and budget deficits, and so on, cannot be solved within the present economic and political framework, because that framework is in itself the fundamental problem and the cause of all the other problems. The present government is so corrupt and tied up with anti-democratic procedures that it cannot reform itself. The only way to reform the system is to simply dissolve the system and start all over with a great national conference to create a new society.

A "platform of complete social transformation" is what many Bernie Sanders partisans want. And the phrase reminds me of Doug Henwood's "wholesale overhaul of the political economy" which he was angry with the Clintons for failing to provide. 

Now Chang was mentally ill and so you can't expect worthwhile analysis of the world's problems from her, and what she mostly provided was a wish list of stuff like an end to crime, unemployment, poverty, etc. etc. - in other words, she wanted an end to the many torments that have comprised the human condition since the beginning of human civilization. And Chang reckoned this could be accomplished through "a great national conference to create a new society."

As Gene Lyons said in response to Henwood's expectation of the wholesale overhaul of the political economy:

Ah, yes. Wholesale overhaul. If only Hillary had been willing to wave her magic wand, wiping away 200 years of history, abolishing the legislature and converting Arkansas into Connecticut.

This belief in virtual magic unites both Henwood and Kathy Chang.

Until very recently I had assumed that my ex and his gang were extreme in their irrational beliefs, and surely people writing for Left establishment media outlets like The Nation, people with college degrees and reputations, if not fame, could be expected to have a more earth-based and nuanced understanding of the world of politics. Especially when, like Henwood, they make a living writing about politics. But now I realize I gave them too much credit. 

Chang's final, pre-pyrotechnic statement could easily be written by any member of the Radical Chic - as quoted in Joseph Shahadi's paper:

CALL ME A FLAMING RADICAL BURNING FOR ATTENTION, BUT MY REAL INTENTION IS TO SPARK A DISCUSSION OF HOW WE CAN PEACEFULLY TRANSFORM OUR WORLD. AMERICA, I OFFER MYSELF TO YOU AS AN ALARM AGAINST ARMAGEDDON AND A TORCH FOR LIBERTY.

Shahadi then quotes Ray Cairnes, identified as Chang's companion for the last 13 years (possibly the same boyfriend that King said to me was too cheap to pay for Chang's dental care): "I do not view it as a suicide, I view it as a sacrifice to save the world."

Chang did nothing to make the world a better place by her self-immolation, let alone save it, but she did make A STATEMENT which is everything to the Radical Chic.

I suppose we should be glad that most members of the Radical Chic are content to make a statement by merely rooting for Bernie Sanders.

However, Chang's death hurt nobody else. But if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination he would be trounced by a Republican once it was clear to voters exactly how much they would be paying in taxes to support his program proposals, among other things.

And then a Republican clown would be in the position to roll back women's rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, Wall Street regulations, ACA and so many other advances which are the result of the unglamorous, non-revolutionary, statement-free slow trudge of democratic politics. 

And we must not allow the Radical Chic's desire to make a statement about the wholesale overhaul of the political economy endanger hard-won liberties for rest of us.