IMPORTANT READS

GELFAND’S WORLD--Americans are justly puzzled at the behavior of Donald Trump and his crowds of followers. Episodes of people being expelled from Trump rallies just for looking or dressing differently are common. References to violence, or at least threats of violence, appear with regularity.

NANCY REAGAN REMEMBERED--At 8:50 this Sunday morning I received a call to tell me I'd just lost a friend. Nancy Reagan had died.

GUEST COMMENTARY--Apologies to those of you understandably all Trumped out. But Holy Mother of God, this shall not pass. At a snarling, jabbing, invective-laden "rally" in Louisville, a mob of Trump supporters - following The Donald's vicious lead - jostled and heaved a black college student out of the building, calling her "nigger" and "cunt" as she passed. 

EDITOR’S PICK--It all began with a college football game, a well-known, talented female sportscaster and a costly lapse of judgment on the part of the Nashville Marriott staff. You see, none of the emotional and psychological wounds that Erin Andrews has suffered over the past 80 or so months had to have happened. All she did was check into a generic chain hotel for a work event. 

EDITOR’S PICK--A self-proclaimed socialist decides to run for high office. And, for practical political reasons, he becomes a Democrat to do so. Soon he attracts enthusiastic supporters to his cause with his unconventional ideas for transforming the economy.

EASTSIDER-Usually I stay away from national hot button topics, figuring that there’s already plenty of coverage from the pundits and TV’s talking heads. However… 

EDITOR’S PICK--In my experience, good public policy is best shaped by the dispassionate analysis of what in practice has worked, or not. Policy based on common assumptions and popular sentiments can become a recipe for mistaken prescriptions and misguided interventions.

EDITOR’S PICK--The government wants our data, whether it’s sitting on our iPhones or in transit across the Internet.

GUEST WORDS--One fact that has received little attention in the current encryption debate is that many categories of individuals rely on strong encryption for their own security.

MUSING WITH MIRISCH-After the news that Republican Senate leaders will not even consider any Supreme Court nominee until a new president is in office, President Obama is taking it to the streets in an effort to get his yet unnamed pick approved. Or at least to make some much-needed political hay. 

NEW DEMOGRAPHY-Until now, the presidential campaign has largely been dominated by issues of class, driving the improbable rise of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But as we head toward Super Tuesday – which will focus largely on Southern states – racial issues may assume greater importance. 

CALBUZZ--Kamala Harris simply crushed U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez at the California Democratic Party state convention over the weekend: the state Attorney General had a bigger, fancier, livelier reception for delegates; more energized and organized volunteers; an infinitely more polished and compelling speech to the general assembly, and a landslide 78% vote for the CDP’s endorsement for the U.S. Senate.

REPORT--Here are some other euphemisms for "racism" the Times used: ""deeply rooted racial attitudes," "explicit appeals to ethnocentrism." Ethan Miller/Getty Images

The New York Times took a dive into whether Donald Trump's supporters are unusually racist — or, in the newspaper's delicate phrasing, "responsive to religious, social and racial intolerance." And they came up with a stunning statistic: Nearly one in five Trump supporters didn't approve of freeing slaves in the Confederacy.

A YouGov/Economist poll in January asked respondents if they approved or disapproved of "the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government."  

That executive order is better known as the Emancipation Proclamation. Thirteen percent of respondents — and "nearly 20 percent of Trump supporters," the Times reports, compared with 5 percent of Marco Rubio's — said they disapproved of it.

It gets even worse. An additional 17 percent of respondents said they weren't sure.

Before asking about slavery, YouGov first asked two broader poll questions about executive orders: Do you approve of them, and do you think they're constitutional? Then they asked about specific presidential actions, including freeing the slaves, desegregating the military, interning Japanese Americans during World War II, and deferring deportation for some unauthorized immigrants.

Framing the question this way is a reminder that one of Lincoln's greatest acts, and a turning point in American history, was also a controversial exercise of presidential power. And it's stunning how many people can't bring themselves to say they approve of it.

(Libby Nelson is education reporter at Vox.com … where this piece originated.)

-cw

TRUTHDIG--In a May 2011 Newsweek column, the late film critic Roger Ebert exposed the bottom line behind Hollywood’s unquenchable appetite for remakes and sequels. “No movie executive has ever been fired for greenlighting a sequel,” he wrote. “Once a brand has been established in the marketplace, it makes sound business sense to repeat the formula. … [N]othing is harder to get financed than an original idea, or easier than a retread.”

POLITICS--Lending credence to the momentum behind Bernie Sanders' grassroots campaign, a poll (pdf) released on Monday finds that Democratic primary voters prefer socialism to capitalism by a wide margin. Nearly two-thirds of those polled also believed that socialism has a beneficial impact on society.

The right-wing group American Action Network, funded by a Super PAC that supports House Republicans, conducted the poll. The conservative organization, among others, feigned surprise regarding its findings:

One might argue that the poll was intended to underscore how, as one conservative Super PAC official noted, far left Democratic voters have moved.

The poll was careful to avoid mention of the current election—and the candidate who is running as a "democratic socialist"—focusing instead on the differences between ideologies. "Which of the following statements do you agree with most?" the poll question was phrased, and went on to define the two systems. 

People who support free market capitalism, the poll told respondents, "say it's not the government's job to pick winners and losers and that government intervention only leads to inefficiency. They say that capitalism produces the greatest amount of personal and economic freedom" and the best outcome for society, "even if some people are left behind because they can't compete."

The poll stated that people who support socialism, on the other hand, believe that "corporations have too much control and that the capitalist system is set to favor the rich and powerful," and the government should "take a larger role in managing the economy to make sure that every individual has equal access to basic necessities and public goods, even if that means that some people have to transfer their wealth to others."

In response, 40 percent of those polled said they preferred socialism while only 25 percent chose capitalism. The preference for socialism held true for all demographic groups.

A new poll finds that most Democratic voters prefer socialism over capitalism. (Image: AAN/OnMessage Inc.)

By significant margins, a majority of poll respondents also supported a public, government-run healthcare system, free tuition at public colleges and universities, and more government regulation of private corporations.

While Bernie Sanders was not specifically mentioned, his running for president on a platform of democratic socialism prompted the poll, Politico reported. “Now you finally have someone who’s running for president — not just running, but doing very well, is very competitive, may very well be the nominee — who calls himself a socialist,” said Mike Shields, a veteran GOP operative and former Republican National Committee chief of staff. “So we thought it would be worth going past the leadership of the party to see what the primary electorate itself thinks."

The overarching concept of democratic socialism and such issues as free tuition for public universities and a single-payer healthcare system have defined Sanders' campaign. The senator's swift ascent among Democratic voters further supports the poll's findings, and such results also point to the potential for Sanders' momentum to build ahead of Super Tuesday.

(Nika Knight writes for the excellent Common Dreams  … where this report was first posted.)

-cw

AT LENGTH-Antonin Scalia wasn’t dead for more than 24 hours before the political rancor in Washington D.C. started up in the press. Of course, there were praises from both conservatives and liberals regarding his 30 years of service on the U.S. Supreme Court. Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor of the conservative court majority, which subscribes to an originalist and textualist view of the U.S. Constitution. He and Justice Anthony Kennedy are also the last of President Ronald Reagan’s legacy appointments to the Supreme Court. 

The political uproar was launched initially by U.S. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), challenging whether President Barack Obama should rightly appoint a replacement justice to the court before he is termed out of office 11 months from now -- essentially a lame duck nomination by the president. 

McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party are just aghast that Obama will exercise his constitutional duty and send to the Senate a judicial nominee that could turn the 5-4 conservative majority into a more liberal one -- a majority that could continue for the next three decades. 

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” said McConnell in a released statement. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” 

I doubt that Scalia would support such an objection from beyond the grave. 

You see, Scalia’s mark on the law comes from his originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, which basically argues that the meaning of the Constitution and its amendments are and should remain fixed and unchanging over time. 

This interpretation is contrary to the school of thought that the Constitution is a “living” document that evolves over time. 

Textualism on the other hand is a theory of the interpretation of law, holding that a legal text’s ordinary meaning should govern its interpretation, as opposed to inquiries into non-textual sources such as the intention of the legislature in passing the law. 

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841-March 6, 1935,) although not a textualist himself, well-captured the philosophy, when he said: 

We ask, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used… We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statutes mean. 

In other words, make sure that what is written means what you think it means and don’t expect anyone to understand your intention for writing a law unless it’s clearly in the law. 

However, I’m drifting off my main point here trying to explain the peculiarity of Scalia’s legal position. He probably would have argued that Obama has the absolute right and duty to nominate his replacement on the Supreme Court, as written in the Constitution, and that the U.S. Senate has the right to review and confirm it. 

So let the battle begin. 

Why any of this matters and what the death of Scalia really means comes at the end of Reagan’s legacy -- a legacy that began when he was California’s governor during the Vietnam War and college campuses were erupting in protests and uprisings. 

Reagan’s influence stretches from the crackdown on University of California demonstrations to the Iran-Contra scandal to the trickle-down economics theory, to his wife Nancy’s popular, if not delusional, “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign. All have had a lasting negative effect over the past 30 to 40 years. 

To this day, we still can’t say that the war on drugs is over, or who won. 

Some argue, and I agree, that Reagan was one of least prepared persons to sit in the Oval Office over the course of the last 100 years and to some extent we’re still paying for it. 

Conservatives like to defend Reagan as a model of fiscal conservatism: he is clearly one of the leaders of debt creation in terms of total increase in “federal debt to GDP.” Looking at U.S. presidents in the post-World War II era, Republican presidents during terms have contributed far more to the debt load of the nation than Democrats. 

Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all added to the federal debt significantly on a percent-of-GDP basis. 

On the Democratic side, only Obama -- who inherited the worst financial crisis in this era from his predecessor -- also ranks high in terms of contributing to the federal debt. 

Antonin Scalia’s death -- as he was a significant actor in the Reagan era -- turns the page to a new chapter of American politics. It is one that pivots away from the Cold War politics and conservatism of my parents’ generation to one in which someone like Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic-socialist, might actually have a shot at the Oval Office without people crying out that “the sky is falling.” 

America has changed culturally since the time Reagan was in office and we are only now beginning to realize what this means politically.

(James Preston Allen is the Publisher of Random Lengths News, the Los Angeles Harbor Area's only independent newspaper. He is also a guest columnist for the California Courts Monitor and is the author of "Silence Is Not Democracy - Don't listen to that man with the white cap - he might say something that you agree with!" He was elected to the presidency of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council in 2014 and has been engaged in the civic affairs of CD 15 for more than 35 years. More of Allen … and other views and news at: randomlengthsnews.com )  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

STYMIED SECURITY-The FBI reportedly asked San Bernardino County officials to tamper with the iCloud account of one of the suspected shooters in last December's attack, in an effort that ultimately failed -- making it impossible to know if there were other ways of recovering encrypted information without taking Apple to court. 

Late Saturday night, San Bernardino officials contradicted the FBI's claims as to who was at fault for a bungled effort at recovering Syed Farook's private data from six weeks before the attack, stating that it complied with the agency's orders to reset Farook's iCloud password. 

That effort only worked to prevent an auto-backup of the data the FBI sought, rendering the information "permanently inaccessible." 

Apple executives said that means there may have been a way to avoid the momentous privacy battle currently underway between the tech company and the government. 

The Washington Post reports: 

In the chaotic aftermath of the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., in December, FBI investigators seeking to recover data from the iPhone of one of the shooters asked a technician in the California county to reset the phone’s iCloud password. 

But that action foreclosed the possibility of an automatic backup to the Apple iCloud servers that might have turned up more clues to the origins of the terrorist attack that killed 14 people. 

“The county and the FBI were working together cooperatively to obtain data, and at the point when it became clear the only way to accomplish the task at hand was to reset the iCloud password, the FBI asked the county to do so, and the county complied,” David Wert, a spokesman for San Bernardino County, said in an email. 

The FBI admitted this mistake in a legal filing late Friday night, but deflected blame away from the agency, stating, "the owner [San Bernardino County], in an attempt to gain access to some information in the hours after the attack, was able to reset the password remotely, but that had the effect of eliminating the possibility of an auto-backup..." 

But a Twitter account associated with San Bernardino County said otherwise. 

"The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request." 

Wert added, "[t]he county said we could get to the information on the cloud if we changed the password or had Apple change the password." 

"The FBI asked us to do that, and we did," he said. 

(Nadia Prupis writes for Common Dreams where this report was posted earlier.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

TRADE WINDS--Is America great now? The answer in the presidential campaign is a resounding “Hell no!” And, surprisingly, there seems to be bipartisan consensus on this misguided assessment. (Spoiler alert: America still rocks.) 

CALWATCHDOG-The movement to emblazon state legislators with the logos of their donors has collected tens of thousands of signatures for its would-be ballot initiative. “The measure, formally called the ‘Name All Sponsors California Accountability Reform Initiative,’ (or NASCAR. Get it?) would require all state legislators to wear the emblems or names of their 10 top donors every time they attend an official function,” the Los Angeles Daily News explained.  “The measure’s sponsor, Rancho Santa Fe businessman John Cox, takes delight in the idea and has already done some touring around California with 120 life-size photographic cutouts of politicians dressed up as they might have to under his plan.” 

Populists Wanted--Cox’s group announced it has already gathered 40,000 signatures out of the 365,880 valid ones necessary to make November’s ballot, telling the Huffington Post they “are confident they can muster enough support.” In an interview with U.S. News, Cox spoke expansively — noting the historically low threshold for signatures based on last election cycle’s low turnout, and banking on a high-energy California electorate in a year when political insurgents have shaken up national politics and captivated Golden State voters: 

“Cox says he’s seeking the endorsements of GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom have rallied passionate supporters in part by denouncing their rivals as indentured servants to corporations and other wealthy donors.” 

Cox’s grand vision may resonate especially with Sanders, whose fundraising has been driven almost entirely by small donations, and whose digital strategist is a 24-year-old Eagle Scout from California named Kenneth Pennington. (“Pennington began as a press aide to the senator, where he grew accustomed to typing out the Facebook posts that his boss would think of in the shower and dictate once he arrived in the office,” according to the Associated Press.) 

Although a somewhat related measure, Prop. 89, previously went down to defeat because voters didn’t want to foot the bill for its public financing regime — which “would also have required every privately financed political ad, whether on television or in newspapers or mailed fliers, to list its three biggest financiers in type as large as the biggest print anywhere else in the ad,” as the Daily News noted, adding that Cox, once a Chicago Republican, has pledged to foot $1 million of the bill for NASCAR.

Dem Dollars--In that same 2014 election cycle with historically low turnout, analysts noted that Democrats made out better than Republicans in California, overturning the conventional wisdom that big business interests tip the scales in favor of the GOP. “The biggest donors to statewide races in California for the 2014 election cycle were Kaiser Permanente and Anthem Blue Cross of California, pulling $23 million and $19 million, respectively,” as Al Jazeera America reported. “For the state races, Democrats actually received almost three times as much ($145 million) as Republicans ($52 million). Much of the health care lobbying was around Proposition 45, which would have required insurance companies to provide public notice when raising rates.” 

Despite contempt among some for those perceived to be buying influence, few have raised objections to a twist on the formula. Some high-profile California candidates have begun raffling off perks gained through privileged access in exchange for small donations. Although presidential hopefuls have indulged in the strategy for years, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has gained notice for taking the idea to new heights. Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, he dangled special seats at the Super Bowl before constituents willing to send at least $5 to the gun-control package he has been touting as part of his early-bird run for the governorship. 

“This isn’t Newsom’s first venture into online raffles. In May, for example, the former San Francisco mayor offered the chance to win a pair of tickets to a Giants-Dodgers game to people donating to his 2018 campaign for governor. And in October, that $5 contribution could have turned into seats at a private concert by the band Train and the chance to hang out backstage with Newsom, his family and the band.”

(James Poulos writes for CalWatchdog  … where this perspective was originally published.) Photo courtesy of California is Not for Sale. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

LATINO PERSPECTIVE-In the next few months, citizens in Los Angeles will face the very important responsibility of choosing a presidential candidate to represent them in the general election this coming November. This election is particularly important for Latinos in Los Angeles because of the Supreme Court vacancy. With the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, President Obama is on his way to nominate his replacement. But it seems like Republicans in the Senate will block the nomination process and will leave it to the next President to choose a replacement. 

Last week the Latino Victory Project contacted me to ask me a few very important questions regarding the Latino participation in our communities -- about how the vacancy of Scalia will influence my vote, what this vacancy means to the Latino community, and a little bit about my immigrant experience. 

As the primary election approaches, I’d like to share with you three questions they asked me. Latinos who will be voting should answer these questions about the Supreme Court as part of their decision making process. 

I hope these questions and my answers to them will help the Latino community in LA to start thinking about who, of all the candidates running for President, will best represent and protect their interests for many years to come -- not only here in Los Angeles but all over our country. 

1. Based on your experiences, why do you think it is important for Latinos to be civically active in the community? 

The government can only do so much. That is why I believe that if Latinos want to improve their quality of life and their political clout, they must get involved in their communities, give back and do all they can to change things for the better.  

2. How have your experiences influenced your civic participation? 

Our Declaration of Independence says that we have certain unalienable Rights and among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This is what has made America great. As an openly gay man, a Latino and an immigrant, I’m driven and influenced by the desire to fight and protect the rights of all citizens. This is important if we are all to have true liberty, live life to the fullest, and pursue the happiness and fulfillment as we want and not just what some politicians would want us for us. 

3. With Justice Scalia's seat open in SCOTUS, how do you think this will impact your vote? What do you think this means for the Latino community? 

Because Supreme Court rulings impact our country for generations to come, picking a Supreme Court Justice is the most important decision a President can make. 

I’d like our President to pick someone who will not get mired in religion-based moral quandaries like Scalia did. I’m going to vote for a candidate who will nominate someone who understands that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the U.S. Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy.  

This year the Supreme Court will rule on issues affecting Latinos in a very meaningful way. Therefore, the implications for the Latino community are huge, like President Obama’s executive action on immigration, or Evenwel v. Abbott (One Person, One Vote.) The Court will also vote on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (affirmative action), and on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (Public Union Dues) as well as many other important cases. Latinos need to be informed and choose carefully.

(Fred Mariscal came to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 1992 to study at the University of Southern California and has been in LA ever since. He is a community leader who serves as Vice Chair of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition and sits on the board of the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council representing Larchmont Village. He was a candidate for Los Angeles City Council in District 4. Fred writes Latino Perspective for CityWatch and can be reached at: [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

EDITOR’S PICK--In 1905, Eugene V. Debs, the popular labor activist and Socialist Party leader, had a speaking engagement in Rochester, New York and went to visit the aging women’s rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony at her home there. They exchanged memories of their previous meeting; then Anthony took Debs’s hand and, with good humor, said, “Give us suffrage and we’ll give you socialism.” Debs’s good-natured reply was: “Give us socialism and we’ll give you the vote.” 

The exchange crystallized what has often been a less good-natured debate on the American left. Over the course of this year’s Democratic primary, arguments between socialists and feminists have again come to the fore—never more so than in recent weeks, after the feminist icon Gloria Steinem claimed that young women were flocking to support democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, instead of Hillary Clinton, in order to meet young men. “When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys?” Steinem said during an interview on Bill Maher’s TV show. “The boys are with Bernie.” 

Clinton has been counting on women’s votes to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Unlike in her 2008 campaign, when she downplayed the breakthrough possibility of becoming America’s first woman president, this year she’s made it a centerpiece of her stump speeches. 

But polls and election results reveal that the strategy isn’t quite working. In the New Hampshire primary, for example, Sanders won 53 percent of the female vote compared to Clinton’s 46 percent, according to ABC News’s exit poll. Among women under forty-five, 69 percent of Democratic women backed Sanders. National polls have found similar trends. And Steinem’s remarks triggered a backlash from women, especially younger women, who quickly spread the hashtag #NotHereForBoys across social media. (“Women for Bernie” signs were already a fixture at the candidate’s rallies.) Steinem soon apologized for her intemperate comment, but the controversy hasn’t died down. 

It is easy to understand Steinem’s consternation. She was born in 1934 and came of age in the 1950s when women were treated like inferiors and second-class citizens in almost every aspect of society. She had to overcome many gender barriers to make her way in the world of journalism, which helped trigger her evolution as a feminist. Her work as a writer and activist catalyzed the “second wave” of the women’s rights movement that began in the late 1960s. She helped popularize feminist ideas. Her frequent articles, speeches, and appearances on TV made her feminism’s most prominent public figure. 

In 1969, there were only ten women in the House of Representatives (there are eighty-eight today) and one in the Senate (compared with twenty today). At the time, the idea of a woman president felt like a distant dream. In fact, in 1969, only 53 percent of Americans said they would vote for a woman for president “if she were qualified in every other respect,” according to the Gallup Poll. By last year, that figure had increased to 92 percent.  Now that it is finally possible to envision a woman in the White House, many veteran feminists like Steinem are eager for Hillary Clinton to turn that dream into a reality. 

Many young women, who have benefited from the work of Steinem’s generation of feminists, take the accomplishments of the women’s movement for granted. Though much remains to be done to defend abortion, redress the gender pay gap, and stop domestic violence, millennial women don’t think that their gender limits their ability to enter most professions (including law, medicine, journalism, and engineering); they play sports in high school, college, and professionally; they count on male partners to do their fair share of housework; and they feel empowered to run for any office. Thanks to feminism, attitudes about gender have changed dramatically over the past few decades among Americans of all ages, women and men. But differences remain. For example, among Steinem’s generation (sixty-five and older), only 88 percent are willing to vote for a woman for president. Among those under thirty, 96 percent are willing to do so. 

In that context, Steinem’s comment about Sanders’s female supporters seemed at best stuck in a time warp. Many young women activists resented Steinem’s implication that they had to support a mainstream liberal woman candidate over a progressive male candidate. Indeed, many of them believed that, based on his policy ideas, Sanders was not only more of an economic radical than Clinton but also as much of a feminist, as a longtime advocate for women’s right to an abortion, paid family leave, and LGBT rights, including support for same-sex marriage years before Clinton came around on the issue. 

Both socialists and feminists—and, of course, the socialist-feminists who refuse this split altogether—recognize that the nation’s widening wealth and income gap, and the persistent difference between men and women in terms of pay and promotion, are part of the same problem and can’t be solved in isolation. 

Indeed, despite what Debs and Anthony’s 1905 exchange might suggest, radicals of many stripes have long understood issues of class and gender as intertwined. In 1912, Charlotte Perkins Gilman—a writer, editor, lecturer, and activist who could be called the Gloria Steinem of her day—captured this attitude in her poem “The Socialist and the Suffragist.” Published in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason (which reached a paid circulation of more than half a million people), it is perhaps the most well-known testimonial to the ongoing debate about the relative importance of workers’ rights and women’s rights—class and gender—in the struggle for human emancipation. 

In the poem, Gilman imagines a conversation between a socialist and a feminist. Its final verses offer a reconciliation between the two: 

“A lifted world lifts women up,”
The Socialist explained.
“You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,”
The suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
“Your work is all the same:
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart—
Just get into the game!” 

Around the time that Gilman composed that poem, feminism was making significant headway. In 1910, emulating the mass protests of the burgeoning labor movement, the Women’s Political Union organized the nation’s first large-scale suffrage parade in New York City. That year, Washington granted women the right to vote followed by California in 1911. By 1912, nine states had granted women the vote. In 1913, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized the Congressional Union, later known as the National Woman’s Party, which published a weekly paper and staged demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, hunger strikes, and lobbying vigils to push for women’s suffrage and women’s rights at the federal level. 

On March 4, 1913, the duo organized an elaborate parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration. About 8,000 women marched with banners and floats down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. The crowd watching the march was estimated at half a million people. Many onlookers harassed the marchers while the police stood by. Troops were called to restore order and to help the suffragists get to their destination—six hours after the parade started. The melee generated headlines, making the issue of women’s suffrage a topic of conversation around the country. 

Simultaneously, the Socialist Party was gaining momentum. In 1912, about 1,200 Socialist Party members held public office, including seventy-nine mayors in cities including Milwaukee, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Reading, and Schenectady as well as state legislators and even two members of Congress. That year, Debs, the party’s presidential candidate, garnered nearly 1 million votes for president—6 percent of the total in a four-person race that included Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican William Howard Taft, and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt. In the early 1900s, some of the nation’s most influential activists and thinkers—including philosopher John Dewey, settlement house founder Jane Addams, novelist Jack London, women’s suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, public health pioneer Alice Hamilton, workplace reformer Frances Perkins, working women’s rights activist Florence Kelley, crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, labor leaders “Big Bill” Haywood and Rose Schneiderman, birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, and the blind visionary Helen Keller—embraced socialism. 

Many socialists were involved in the struggle for women’s rights, and vice versa, but each movement had its own organizations, publications, and legislative agendas. 

Gloria Steinem’s grandmother, Pauline Steinem, was a prominent women’s rights activist, president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. In a testimonial to her grandmother, Gloria Steinem noted that in her campaign for the school board, “she was elected on a coalition ticket with the socialists and the anarchists.” 

Given that feminist pedigree, Steinem must surely be familiar with Gilman’s poem and her book, The Man-Made World, published in 1911, which advocated for women’s economic equality, social freedom, and a new approach to family and gender roles. 

Like Gilman, Steinem is both a feminist and a socialist. She was a cofounder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and of Ms. magazine and is a longtime honorary co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). 

In her 1971 speech at the founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Steinem insisted that feminism had to embrace issues of racism and class. Feminism, she said, “is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.” 

One of Steinem’s great achievements was pushing the women’s movement to address the concerns of working-class women and women of color. Steinem is not only a member of DSA but also a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, helping find common ground between the women’s and labor movements. She was also a consistent bridge between the predominantly white middle-class women’s movement and African-American feminists. As a founder of Ms., she made sure that the pioneering feminist magazine regularly reported on issues of poverty, inequality, and racism as well as sexism. Under her leadership, the magazine published investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the gender wage gap, the glass ceiling, women’s health (and the medical establishment’s sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape, and fought to address the race and class differences within the women’s movement. 

Steinem was an early advocate of what today’s young activists call “intersectionality”—the overlapping problems of race, class, gender, and sexual preference. 

So it couldn’t have been easy for her to endorse Hillary over Bernie. Perhaps she thought Clinton had a better shot at winning the White House or perhaps she simply believed that the time had come for a woman to be president. (Since she planted her flag in Clinton’s camp, she’s been all in, urging women to rally behind the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State.) 

A century ago, Charlotte Perkins Gilman understood the importance of forging unity among socialists and feminists, radicals and reformers. And, throughout her four decades as a public figure, so has Gloria Steinem. Her recent remarks about Sanders’s female supporters was an unfortunate misstep in a lifetime otherwise devoted to building bridges between activists for economic, racial, and gender justice. 

We can’t address issues like women’s access to abortion and health care, domestic violence, and paid family leave, as well as declining living standards, persistent poverty, and abusive corporate practices, without a coalition of Occupy Wall Street-like radicals, feminists, unionists, and racial justice activists. No matter who’s in the White House, it will be up to social movements to carry the momentum for real change.

(Peter Dreier is professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His latest book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books, 2012). This piece first appeared in Dissent Magazine, reposted in CommonDreams.  Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.