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gyrlversion · 6 years ago

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GOP Extremism Was Powerful Before Trump, and It Will Outlive Him

The oh-so-respectable Mitt Romney embraced some seriously extremist positions in 2012. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

One of the latent questions in American politics for both parties is whether Donald J. Trump is some sort of horror-movie version of a unicorn, who after this term, and perhaps another one, will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, leaving the Republican Party — and the United States — scarred but not fundamentally changed. For obvious reasons, Republicans don’t discuss this view of their own future very openly, lest their master resent the suggestion that he’s a man whose moment is rapidly slipping away. You hear the subject discussed more among Democrats, particularly those who are running for president to consign Trump to the ash bin of history. Joe Biden, for example, has made it clear he considers the 45th president an aberration, whose evil spell over Republicans will dissipate once he’s out of office.

But Trump’s undoubtedly strange and outlandish personality should not make us forget that the party he took by force in 2016 was already exhibiting an alarming extremism on multiple issues. Here’s Barack Obama being hopeful about Republicans in 2012:

President Obama told supporters that he expected the gridlock to end after the election, when Republicans can stop worrying about voting him out of office.

“My expectation is that if we can break this fever, that we can invest in clean energy and energy efficiency because that’s not a partisan issue,” Obama said, speaking to supporters in Minneapolis.

Obama pointed to deficit reduction, a transportation bill, and immigration reform as initiatives that could well pass in November.

None of that happened, of course. And instead of getting over their “fever” of policy extremism and tactical obstructionism, what did Republicans do? They nominated Donald Trump as their next presidential candidate.

Yes, there were more moderate strains in the GOP pre-Trump that have largely been silenced since his election. But it’s important to remember that such sensible-sounding themes (like the inclusiveness urged upon the party in the famously rejected 2013 “autopsy report”) were mostly tactical cosmetics designed to give a lighter touch to a political machine devoted to radical policy goals: the demolition of the New Deal and Great Society programs; the re-criminalization of abortion; the reversal of progress toward treating LGBTQ people as equals; stuffing as much money into a bloated Pentagon as possible; all but outlawing unions and collective bargaining; and restricting the franchise.

Mitt Romney, one of the GOP’s most respectable figures, advocated immigration policies arguably to the right of Trump’s in his pursuit of the 2012 presidential nomination. He also endorsed the Ryan budgets (reflecting the party’s hard-core commitment to “entitlement reform” and an end to decades of anti-poverty measures), and supported the cut, cap, balance pledge to permanently shrink the size of the federal government. And most famously, he embraced one of the foundational myths of conservative extremism in his remarks that the votes of “47 percent” of Americans had been corruptly bought by welfare-state benefits, thus implicitly making those votes illegitimate.

For the ninth consecutive time, the GOP platform on which Romney ran in 2012 called not just for the reversal of reproductive rights in Roe v. Wade but the constitutional enshrinement of fetal (even embryonic) rights in a Human Life Amendment that would ban states from allowing abortions from the moment of conception.

All that was mainstream Republican policy pre-Trump. In the ever-more-militant conservative wing of the party, the big fashion in the early years of this decade was to call oneself a “constitutional conservative.” As I tried to explain at the time, this meant something genuinely alarming:

I do worry that the still-emerging ideology of “constitutional conservatism” is something new and dangerous, at least in its growing respectability. It’s always been there in the background, among the Birchers and in the Christian Right, and as as emotional and intellectual force within Movement Conservatism. It basically holds that a governing model of strictly limited (domestic) government that is at the same time devoted to the preservation of “traditional culture” is the only legitimate governing model for this country, now and forever, via the divinely inspired agency of the Founders. That means democratic elections, the will of the majority, the need to take collective action to meet big national challenges, the rights of women and minorities, the empirical data on what works and what doesn’t — all of those considerations and more are so much satanic or “foreign” delusions that can and must be swept aside in the pursuit of a Righteous and Exceptional America.

A first cousin to, or perhaps just a corollary of, constitutional conservatism is the belief, which has spread rapidly through the GOP ranks, that the Second Amendment is the most important element of the Bill of Rights and includes an implicit right to armed revolution against “tyranny,” as defined by, well, constitutional conservatives. It wasn’t Donald Trump who espoused that point of view during the 2016 Republican presidential nominating process, but his rivals Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson.

Constitutional conservatism has more or less been absorbed into “America First” Trumpism, but the way of thinking hasn’t gone away — as evidenced by Trump’s tendency to disregard those aspects of the Constitution that don’t suit his needs, while deifying those that do. When it comes to extremist goals like banning abortion entirely, or defending an absolutist view of gun rights, or sealing the borders, or making freedom of religion contingent upon its consistency with “Judeo-Christian heritage,” Trump is a louder champion of extremism, but hardly novel. And even where Trump has departed from hard-core conservative orthodoxy, he seems to have coarsened it more than anything else, viz the open pro-corporate mercantilism of his trade policy, and the supposed “non-interventionism” that is accompanied by constant threats of military violence.

Yes, there are long-term demographic trends that could make Republican extremism no longer practicable, but you have to figure the GOP will have to lose a few more presidential elections before that lesson sinks in; extremism does, if nothing else, help mobilize the party “base” and attract highly motivated donors. For every Democrat baffled by Trump’s win in 2016, there’s a Republican who believes the formula will work forever. For the legions of younger Republicans who have probably never met a genuinely “moderate” GOP leader in their lives, the “fever” could be especially persistent.

Practical politics aside, progressives need to take seriously the possibility that their counterparts on the right feel just as passionately about fetal life, the alleged threat of immigrants to civilization, and the decline of religious affiliation and 1950s-style patriarchal “family values” as those on the left feel about climate change or equality. Those who doubt the staying power of conservative extremism beyond its relationship to Trump should take another look at Michael Anton’s 2016 essay arguing that the condition of liberal-dominated American society is so catastrophically dire that voting for Trump is a survival impulse like that of the terrorism victims who stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93 on 9/11. Trump’s 2016 victory was in no small part the product of that brand of extremism, not its cause.

It’s fine for Democrats to appeal to the tiny band of remaining swing voters by arguing that Donald Trump is an outlier who, despite his aggressive Americanism, finds his closest spiritual allies in menacing overseas figures like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the Philippines’s Rodrigo Duterte, and of course, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But they should not embrace the illusion that once Trump — or his sycophantic subordinate Mike Pence — is gone, politics will return to normal. The GOP hasn’t been normal for a good while.

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zhouwerthoughts · 8 years ago

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Shosta-HardAsFuck-Ovich

2/9/17

Starting the day off with the el classico stats snorefest, then orch which was actually quite fun playing stuff and seeing cello and peter playing violin shenanigans, rest of the day quite uneventful until after chem XD

Awkward awkward awkward omfg that feel when the worst possible situation could’ve happened i swear like what am i in a movie or somethin sorry bout that claire LOL

I actually don’t have to do any work right now just got back from oyo where we’re playing Shostakovitch which is frickin crazy but I have two nice solos as a concertmaster which is fun. Me having time? lets do this

Marxism. hey, I warned you i get weird when I have time. The Late Karl Marx believed in humans being formed by their environment, almost like they are just clay and fully a product of nurture. Which is kind of an interesting, yet I think safe to assume incorrect ideology. it’s an interesting conversation when you dive into nature vs nurture, however. I haven’t taken AP Psych YET, but I look forwards to this kind of conversation. So to the far far far left, they believe in 100% nurture and human beings are totally shaped by society/culture, and as a result of that there is the belief that humans can be molded to completely ignore greed and selfishness where you can hone the race to perfection."From Each according to his ability, To each according to his need.” Communism - work what you can and take what you need. Assuming a utopian setting where people are truly altruistic, this in theory should be a perfect system. However, I’m sure we can agree that people are not molds of clay, hence the failure of communism around the world. The far far far right position, however, is the nazi ideology in which a certain kind of human is by far superior, and others (Jews) are seen as by definition as lesser beings, hence Fully nature and nurture is irrelevant. When I would think about this to a lesser extent not having taken a psychology, I had assumed that the common sense position is that things are mostly nurture with nature poking at it, hence people are mostly affected by environment yet there is an element of difference at birth naturally. However, I’ve come to another realization in which I have come to believe, now, that the debate between nurture and nature is actually quite irrelevant. Truly, though, humans are neither one or the other. I think it must be a giant mix, in which some things can be fully nurture and culture, and some things are completely nature and are hardwired into you, and other things are a mix of either or in differing amounts. Humans are so insanely complex, that you can’t possibly conclude and confine humans into nature/nurture with a broad brush, and rather case by case. As a follow-up, I think that if this statement is correct, then we require such a governmental system that can foster the truly complex human, hence my belief in social democracy. You have socialism to create the floor for people where the basics are met and there is no debate for necessities because we’re a civilized nation. Then the competition/capitalist aspect because a free market is simply the most efficient plan in most cases in the market. But you have to establish basic requirements for survival for all people before jumping to the money and capitalist part, lest you condemn the downtrodden to suffering and death.

If you don’t believe in free speech for those you disagree with most, you don’t believe in free speech at all. Let them speak, whether you’re on the right or left and whether the speaker is on the right or left. Once you block your opposition from having the power of voice, you admit defeat on an ideological level.

If you’re so against Sharia law when it’s islam, it is contradictory to then be for christian theocracy. This is a secular country, no matter what religion it is it should be left and kept for the church, not the state.

Jeff Sessions is now the attorney general. horrible. This guy was up for federal judge position in the late 1980s and was rejected by republicans because they said he was too shady and had a bad record with race. His voting record: against stem cell research, against abortion, ban women from crossing state lines for abortions, 0% rating from abortion groups, so he has literally never been for reproductive rights. This means even things like birth control pills are considered by him as killing babies or something. No on the stimulus package to help the people during the recession, but yes to the wall street bailout during the same time for the same reason. NO ON THE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT (Bill that attempts to prevent domestic abuse and such), like what the actual fuck so you’re FOR violence against women? really now.. .the bill has saved so many lives at this point that its a vital bill. Just seriously, who DOES that. Yes on banning flag burning, AND punishment for those who burn flags, so he’s anti-free speech. Even Justice Scalia of the supreme court, the most notoriously far right judge ever, was against that because its obviously protected by the US Constitution. Now Jeff Sessions will be the top lawyer in the country, a man who does not understand the first amendment of the constitution. Yes on a constitutional Ban of gay marriage. Now look here. This is very different from simply wanting to make gay marriage illegal. HE LITERALLY WANTS TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES TO SPECIFICALLY INHIBIT GAY MARRIAGE. what is this, American Sharia Law? get your christian extremism the fuck outta here. A grade of 20% from the ACLU, so he opposes civil rights 80% of the time, and a 7% from the NAACP... so he’s anti black 93% of the time. He has a GRADE OF 0% from the human rights campaign, so against LGBTQ community 100% of the time. rated 14% and 0% by two big union groups, so he sides almost completely with CEO’s and corporations over the people, 20% by the NEA, so he’s 80% of the time against public education. Voted yes on barring the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. This is literally so stupid I can barely wrap my head around it. BAR THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY FROM PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT. yes on lobbyist gifts to congress oh yes nice corruption MMMMM tasty welp thats quite self explanatory. A+ Nra, so never voted on anything even remotely regulatory for guns. 100% voting record on anti-immigration, Yes on privatizing social security, yes on tax cuts to rich, and yes to end estate tax, which is literally the greatest and most efficient tax in existence, as it taxes the ultra-rich dead people that used to own estates. then republicans go out and lie to the public and twist it around and call it a “death tax” so the public thinks the government is going to take money from them when they die and they cant give to their kids. Nonnononon this taxes about 0.1% of the country, and the only negative it has is that the deceased billionaires’s children simply will get a slightly lower inheritance that will make no difference in the grand scope of their wealth. horrid pick after horrid pick things are getting scary.

“So much has happened. And I’m sure it’s only the beginning. Through the smiles and tears, through the anger… …and the laughter that follows… I know that I’ll keep changing. This is my story. It’ll be a good one.”

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moriahdyfportfolio · 8 years ago

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HWIC | Head Women In Charge

These Are the Women Organizing the Women’s March on Washington

Vogue.com JANUARY 10, 2017 8:00 AM by JULIA FELSENTHAL

Top row (left to right): Ting Ting Cheng, Tabitha St. Bernard, Janaye Ingram, Paola Mendoza, Cassady Fendlay, Linda Sarsour, Bob Bland, Nantasha Williams, Breanne Butler, Ginny Suss, Sarah Sophie Flicker. Bottom row (left to right): Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Vanessa Wruble Photographed by Cass Bird | Sittings Editor: Jorden Bickham

One very cold New York City morning just before Christmas, a group of women showed up to have their picture taken by photographer Cass Bird at a warehouse turned studio in the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, a chunky little peninsula that reaches out into the East River toward Rikers Island.

Those who made the trek were among those responsible for organizing the Women’s March on Washington, a mass mobilization of activists and protestors that will descend on the capital on January 21, the day after we inaugurate into office a man who ran the most brazenly misogynistic presidential campaign in recent history, and whose victory has emboldened a Republican-led Congress to wage an epic war on women’s rights.

Perhaps you’re planning to be there? Perhaps you’re bringing your mother, your grandmother, your daughter, your sister? You’ll be in good company. Per the event’s Facebook page at press time, 176,000 people are planning to attend, with another 250,000 still on the fence. It seems likely, said Linda Sarsour, one of four national cochairs acting as spokeswomen for the movement, that it will be “the largest mass mobilization that any new administration has seen on its first day.”

Ahead of our shoot, emails flew back and forth about just how many organizers we could expect to show for the portrait. First it was 10. Then 15. Fourteen women materialized, but several of them informed me that it might have been more like 20.

That fluidity says something about the Women’s March and how it functions; it’s an organic, grassroots effort that prides itself on being inclusive, intersectional, and nonhierarchical, on taking what Bob Bland (one of the movement’s cofounders, now serving as a national cochair) called “a horizontal approach to leadership.”

It’s also an all-hands-on-deck, eleventh-hour, race-to-the-finish-line kind of endeavor, which has required all 10, or 15, or 16, or 20 of its chief orchestrators to work around the clock since the week of the election. This is the type of national effort that the group’s communications czar, Cassady Fendlay, told me could take “six months to a year to plan.” These women had just over two months to pull it off.

“We don’t sleep much, as you can probably tell from all our faces,” Sarsour said drily, her own face framed by a fuchsia head scarf. She’s Brooklyn born and bred (with the accent to prove it), the Muslim daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and a veteran activist who heads up the march’s fundraising efforts. She juggles that with, among other things, her job as executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.

Sarsour was sitting with me during a bit of downtime before the shoot. “Hey, sweetie; hey, sweetie,” she greeted a couple of her fellow organizers, wandering in late. Nearby, Bland’s infant daughter, Chloe, born just after the election, began wailing.

“I couldn’t get it together this morning to have her at home,” announced Bland, her red hair tied up in Harajuku-style double topknots. “So I just brought her along.” Later, Sarsour, in her mid-30s and the mother of three teenagers, would go over and use a baby blanket to swaddle the crying newborn tightly into what the activist called “a cigar” as a couple other women looked on admiringly. It takes a village, I thought to myself.

But that impression of cozy familiarity was not the whole picture. The day of our shoot, I later learned, was only the second time that this particular group of women had ever been in the same room. Some members of the team had worked together before: Sarsour and two of her fellow national cochairs, Tamika D. Mallory, an African-American civil rights activist and gun control advocate, and Carmen Perez, executive director of Harry Belafonte’s Gathering for Justice, had collaborated on previous marches against police brutality, for example. But many of these women were newly acquainted strangers who communicated mostly by email and phone. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Sarsour said. “When I started this process, more than half the women I’d never met in my life.”

“It’s a bunch of people who have no idea who each other is, creating something massive,” Vanessa Wruble, in charge of campaign operations, added later. “If you think about how hard it is to trust people normally, on a day-to-day basis,” she said, “try to do that within the span of a month and a half.” The activist smiled, in some mélange of frustration and awe, and gave her head a little shake.

Left to right: Nantasha Williams, Breanne Butler, Ting Ting Cheng, Ginny Suss, Bob Bland, Janaye Ingram, Paola Mendoza, Carmen Perez, Sarah Sophie Flicker, Tamika Mallory, Tabitha St. Bernard Photographed by Cass Bird | Sittings Editor: Jorden Bickham

The story of how the Women’s March on Washington came into being has already been codified into lore. As the returns rolled in on November 8, a Hawaiian grandmother and retired attorney named Teresa Shook created a Facebook page suggesting that women gather to protest in D.C. on inauguration weekend. Then she went to bed. By the time she woke up, 10,000 people had affirmed the plan.

Simultaneously, Bland, founder of the fashion incubator Manufacture New York and an advocate for domestic manufacturing, had a similar idea. She also posted about it on Facebook, where her followership had ballooned after she raised $20,000 for Planned Parenthood by selling Nasty Woman and Bad Hombre T-shirts. “We need to form a resistance movement that’s about what is positive,” she remembered thinking. “Something that will help empower us to wake up in the morning and feel that women still matter.”

It wasn’t long before Shook and Bland caught wind of each other and consolidated their efforts. Soon Wruble became aware of their plan. In her real life she runs Okayafrica, a media platform seeking to change Western perceptions of Africa that she cofounded with her business partner, Ginny Suss (also the march’s production director) and The Roots drummer Questlove. Having worked for years as a white person in a black space, Wruble quickly recognized that Shook and Bland, both white, could not be the sole faces of the protest they were starting to organize. “I think I wrote, ‘You need to make sure this is led or centered around women of color, or it will be a bunch of white women marching on Washington,’” she paraphrased. “‘That’s not okay right now, especially after 53 percent of white women who voted, voted for Donald Trump.’”

Bland agreed, and Wruble reached out to a friend, activist Michael Skolnik, who recommended she and Bland talk to Mallory and Perez. The latter two activists brought Sarsour to the table shortly thereafter.

Somewhere in there, controversy bloomed over the name Shook had floated: the Million Women March, which threatened to overwrite the history of a same-name protest by thousands of African-American women in Philadelphia in 1997. It was Wruble who proposed that they call it the Women’s March on Washington instead, locating their protest in direct lineage with the 1963 March on Washington, the occasion for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The new coordinators even reached out to the civil rights leader’s daughter, Bernice King, who offered her blessing and shared with them a quote from her mother, Coretta Scott King. Perez read it to me when we followed up by phone a couple weeks after the shoot: “Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.’”

“It gave us all chills,” she remembered. “It assured us that we were moving in the right direction.”

What I think she meant is this: Where past waves of feminism, led principally by white women, have focused predominantly on a few familiar concerns—equal pay, reproductive rights—this movement, led by a majority of women of color, aspires to be truly intersectional. So though the Women’s March has partnered with organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America—and though second-wave feminist icon Gloria Steinem is now an honorary cochair—the march’s purview is far more sweeping. Women are not a monolith, solely defined by gender; we are diverse, we represent half of this country, and any social justice movement—for the rights of immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans, the LGBTQ community, for law enforcement accountability, for gun control, for environmental justice—should count as a “women’s issue.”

If you’re a woman in America, you probably feel personally affected by at least a couple of those struggles. “Women are Muslims,” Sarsour offered. “Women could be black Muslims. Women could be black Muslims and African and undocumented.” Personally, she said, she might care about immigration, “but I also understand that if I don’t have a planet to live on in 30 years, my civil liberties are quite moot.”

“Yes, it’s about feminism,” Wruble elaborated. “But it’s about more than that: It’s about basic equality for all people.” Women’s rights, in other words, are human rights, a turn of phrase that march leaders, several of them self-identified Bernie Sanders supporters, have reclaimed from a 1995 speech by Hillary Clinton. And if you believe Coretta Scott King (and can look past the results of the presidential election), where women lead, men will eventually follow.

“I think it has been the downfall of the progressive movement in the United States,” Sarsour told me, “that we have not figured out how to organize all the different progressive social justice movements into one intersectional movement.” Pluralism is a sacred principle. Identity politics is important, but so is winning elections: What makes a pluralistic electorate, with its deep rifts, its tensions, its conflicting agendas, cohere into an actual voting block? If the women behind the march pull this off on the scale they’re hoping for, their success at communicating a message that resonates with a wide array of communities, that activates the formerly politically complacent across racial and cultural lines, could offer a blueprint to the flailing Democratic Party.

Those may be the unspoken stakes, but the organizers are insistent that the march be treated as a nonpartisan protest. It will surely send a message to Trump, but the coordinators explicitly want to leave his name out of it. “He’s a narcissist,” Sarsour pointed out. “He wants us to make this all about him.”

It’s bigger than him. “Racism, misogyny is in the fabric of this country,” insisted Perez. “I think Trump was just an individual who was able to ignite a spark, awaken a sleeping giant.”

She meant the racist, misogynistic minority of voters who tipped the balance in the president-elect’s favor (along with those who looked the other way so that they could cling to his promises of simple fixes to complex problems). But I couldn’t help but think that the sleeping giant might also refer to the masses of women who seem suddenly eager to get political in the face of a president who offends and frightens them to their core, the women who, after a long campaign cycle in which they saw their candidate forced into a perpetual defensive crouch, would like to mobilize for something and not just against something.

“This is absolutely not just about us having a symbolic march in Washington and that’s it,” said Bland. “It can’t be that way. We’ve helped facilitate the self-activation of so many people. Because when you think about it, especially those first 48 hours when people were just saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes’—that’s them self-selecting into a movement. When we get together, who knows what we can do.”

Mallory, who grew up in the projects of Harlem in the ’90s, in a family directly affected by Bill Clinton’s omnibus crime bill, who has spent the past two decades on the front lines fighting for her community’s civil rights, shared a slightly more cynical, world-weary view. “Maybe it took your own pain to realize that we’re all bound up in this thing together,” she said. “For me, success for this march doesn’t happen on January 21. It happens after.”

*** You’ve probably already guessed: All has not been seamless or simple in the organization of the march. Many of its leaders were quick to speak to how difficult it has been to align so many different agendas into a single movement. “We never shy away from history, from the difficulty of where this started,” I was told by Paola Mendoza, a Colombia-born filmmaker serving as artistic director for the rally portion of the program. (She and Suss are wrangling high-profile talent like actress America Ferrera, who is chairing a group called the Artist Table that includes, among others, Scarlett Johansson, Margo Jefferson, Frances McDormand, Amy Schumer, and Zendaya.) “It goes to show how inclusive we’re trying to make this movement,” Mendoza said. Muddling through differences of opinion and experience has required what Perez referred to as “real, courageous conversations”; what Wruble called “really uncomfortable discussions.” (For more on that dialog, check out this piece from the New York Times about the tensions that permeate the march at every level).

Mallory told me that the friction came as no surprise. “There’s always conflict, even when all black folks are organizing,” she said. “Because it’s discussions that people shy away from. They don’t want to talk about issues of race, of white privilege. It’s, ‘Woo! Why do we have to talk about that?’ There are those, particularly in this movement, who want to have an ‘all women matter’ conversation. Our position”—and by this, I assumed she was speaking for her community, not for all her fellow organizers—“is that all women do matter. But black women are particularly suffering. And therefore the black women’s voices will be heard. Not just heard, but leading the charge.”

Any internecine struggles were well below the surface on the day of the shoot, where I watched this loose confederation of women, dressed in a uniform of black jeans and crisp white shirts, goofing off on set as they awaited further instructions.

The women were getting a little cabin-feverish after a long day of waiting around. Music played on the sound system, girl power anthems like Diana Ross’s disco hit “I’m Coming Out.” Wruble danced with Nantasha Williams, a 28-year-old from Queens who’d recently lost her run for New York State Assembly and was now volunteering as Mallory’s right-hand woman. Several women took selfies. Perez emerged from a makeshift changing area in a sharply tailored black coat. “Okay, Neo!” crowed Janaye Ingram, the woman in charge of on-the-ground logistics.

Earlier, Sarsour had pointed Ingram out to me as “the poor lady who had to get asked about the permit,” referring to a series of news stories speculating that the organizers had either failed to apply for the correct clearances or might yet be rejected by federal agencies. Those concerns have been allayed, and per Ingram, the permits were never actually in doubt—the hubbub surrounding them had been an annoying distraction. Perez later pointed out the underlying sexism at play in the media: “Was Dr. King being asked if he had a permit?” she asked. “Is it because we’re women, and people think we’re incapable of organizing and mobilizing such a major event?”

Bird was ready to shoot. She instructed her subjects to arrange themselves in two rows. “The back goes high,” she said, “and the front goes low.”

“When they go low, we go high,” Ingram quipped, quoting the line from Michelle Obama’s rousing DNC speech that became Hillary Clinton’s rallying cry. But when Bird started snapping photos, the women of the Women’s March channeled a different woman’s words. Fists raised, they followed Perez in a call and response chant cribbed from Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army member controversially convicted of murder in the ’70s, who escaped prison and has lived for decades in exile in Cuba. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom,” Perez shouted, the rest of the group echoing her. “It is our duty to win. We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

Later, the women put on coats—a mismatched assortment in shades of purple inspired by the suffragists—and assembled outside in the middle of Lafayette Avenue. It was bitterly cold, and pedestrians were few and far between, but those who scurried by did a double take. A couple cars crept up and honked at the road-blockers, and the activists, Wayne’s World–style, cleared the way.

During a long pause in traffic, they returned to the middle of the street, arranged themselves in a semicircle, and began stalking toward Bird as she walked backward, camera raised. But each woman moved at her own pace and within seconds the “u” had become a squiggly line.

It suddenly occurred to me that the women in charge of the Women’s March were good at a lot of things, but marching wasn’t yet one of them. A photo assistant tried to help. “Right, left, right, left,” he called out. “Too slow!” some of the women retorted.

Then Sarah Sophie Flicker chimed in. An activist with a background in political theater and media production—she worked extensively with the Clinton campaign—she had described her role to me as “trying to fill vacuums and show up where I’m needed.”

Here was a need for her kind of stagecraft, and an illustration of the flexibility of horizontal leadership in action. “The ends go, the middle stays,” Flicker suggested, as the semicircle reconstituted itself for another try. And that, at least for a few crucial moments, seemed to do the trick: Fourteen individuals melted into a single organism. Bird glided backward, finger on the shutter. And the women of the Women’s March lurched forward, in tenuous formation, as one.

Set Design: Nick des Jardins Hair by Ilker Akyol and Makeup by Mariko Arai

#whyimarch #vogue #revolutionarywomen

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