We're Living in Phyllis Schlafly's America

[Hortensis]

21. :) I agree that inimical RW forces have gained dangerous power

and that Margaret Atwood's dystopian fantasy is shockingly relevant to their efforts today. And, yes, there are very strongly socially conservative women who believe passionately that omen's equality is the work of the devil or otherwise just resent the hell out of empowered women. I've clashed with many over the decades, both observing and being the recipient of their spiteful resentment of women who take "men's" jobs. And of course of the men.

But that's them. Those who want to smash women back into the 19th century are a minority even on the right. They've only succeeded as much as they have because too many complacent people across the political spectrum couldn't imagine that they could. On the left they didn't get off their lazy asses to vote and on the right voted with them for other purposes with the notion that the majority would prevail in the end.

Agree that hat's happening politically on the right is very dangerous because socioreligious extremists rightly believe they could use modern technology and severe oppression to control the many if they could control government. They've focused their zealotry on making that happen, funded and used by the new plutocrat classes who foolishly imagine they can control them, although most presumably didn't foresee their flooding into governments via Trump.

But sensible awareness and fear of that danger shouldn't make us forget that they're the ones battling enormously powerful tides of progress. They've been losing for centuries; and in this century alone, advances for humanity that they see as losses have accelerated enormously, with degrees of change that once took millennia now occurring over a couple of decades.

Of course they're fighting it. That's their nature. And a great advantage to them is that the nature of too many happily riding the great tides has been to wonder what on earth their problem is. Phyllis Schlafley and her admirers were already freaks in her time, a reality TV show watched with fascinated amusement and contempt by the majority, and a little fear by those less complacent.

That fear's been borne out, of course, and I agree the men who allowed Schlafley to become a big voice for them could still win. Temporarily but dreadfully. If everyone else lets them. For sure, the author's right that it is a tragedy for Schlafley, long ago kicked to the political gutter by RW men, that she didn't live to be newly thrilled by today's disasters.