CARRIE LUKAS: CHECK YOUR PROGRESSIVE PRIVILEGE.
Progressives are constantly checking their “white privilege,” but what about ideological privilege? Particularly for women, the prevailing assumption is that you aren’t normal unless you’re a liberal Democrat. Conservative women aren’t only left out, but increasingly stigmatized.
Women’s magazines and news outlets depict women who vote Republican as deviants. Vogue headlined a postelection commentary “Why Do White Women Keep Voting for the GOP and Against Their Own Interests?” The Guardian asked: “Half of White Women Continue to Vote Republican. What’s Wrong with Them?” The latter article asserted that “white women vote for Republicans for the same reason that white men do: because they are racist.” Barbra Streisand claimed “a lot of women vote the way their husbands vote; they don’t believe enough in their own thoughts.” Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Madeleine Albright have all expressed similar sentiments in public.
Progressive women see their intellectual and political leaders glamorized in glossy magazine photo spreads and celebrated on daytime TV talk shows. Conservative female policy makers are invisible, if they’re lucky. Glamour’s 2018 Women of the Year included gun-control activists and anti-Trump celebrities, along with California Sen. Kamala Harris. No recognizably conservative woman made the cut.
Progressive women enjoy the benefit of the doubt when they say insensitive or prejudiced things. Mrs. Clinton recently joked that two black men “look alike.” No conservative could get away with such a remark.
College administrators tout the value of diversity. Yet the National Association of Scholars “could not find a single Republican with an exclusive appointment to fields like gender studies” among 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 top liberal-arts colleges.
Far-left activists next month march on Washington again under the banner “the Women’s March.” The media will present them as simply “women”—as if women with other views don’t exist.
Rooting out bigotry isn’t easy. The first step is to recognize the prejudiced messages that make their way into the public square. A truly fair and inclusive society would include positive, aspirational images of conservative and libertarian women as well as liberal ones. It wouldn’t marginalize women for their ideology or politics any more than it would exclude women based on race, age, looks or sexual orientation.
Indeed, but “a truly fair and inclusive society” is not the actual goal, nor has it ever been.