Are women suddenly running rampant?

[struggle4progress]

18. One Republican strategy, used increasingly in the last thirty years or so, has been to force us

to repel attacks against ground we considered long ago secured

Sometimes they might really hope to re-conquer the territory; and sometimes they might just be throwing red meat to rightwing wacko ideologues in order to keep them in the Republican camp

But there's another possibility that might explain some of the proposals: if they can keep us fighting on the rear, our efforts are split, and fewer people notice the rightwing successes elsewhere

The Reagan administration was very good at something like this: Reagan would stand up and say this incredibly ignorant stuff, and we'd all mobilize against what he said -- but it was often a distraction, that had us paying close attention to the Empty Suit At The Podium while all this other ugly stuff happening in the background went unnoticed

Here in my state in the 1990s, the Republicans introduced bills (say) to sell off state parks to developers and to eliminate zoning laws. There's no doubt some developers would have liked to have the state park land or that some libertarians would have been delighted to see zoning laws perish. There was also no doubt that we could win these fights if we organized -- so we organized and won. But it still sucked up a lot of time and effort that could have been spent making real progress, instead of holding onto prior gains -- and I started to wonder if that weren't their real point

The anti-feminist ideologues, of course, are still out there and still eager to rollback past advances in women's rights. And IMO these are fights we can win -- so we must fight back when the attacks are serious. But it's also worth pausing a moment to ask what exactly motivates this particular attack? because there's always the possibility that it's a strategic distraction

Let me add that I have very little use for Naomi Wolf, who seems to me more an opportunist than a feminist: she rather disgusted me, for example, with her claim that the sexual assault charges, against Assange, were politically motivated. I don't know whether the charges would stand up in Swedish court -- but neither does Wolf. My ultimate impression was she made her claim simply to get attention