WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2026
It's time for Kelly to go: What might a "politics of meaning" look like? What does the term even mean?
Yesterday, we linked you to the speech in which first lady Hillary Clinton first employed that term. That said, the term had originated with someone else—with someone whose view of the world the first lady admired.
Shortly after the first lady's address, Daniel Schorr discussed the matter in the Christian Science Monitor:
Behind the 'Politics of Meaning'
On April 6, in Austin, Texas, Mrs. Clinton delivered what some are already calling "THE speech." It was a passionate appeal for Americans to develop a sense of community. She spoke of "cities that are filled with hopeless girls with babies and angry boys with guns." She spoke of a "crisis of meaning" and urged the remolding of society by "defining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into the new millenium." What is needed, she said, is a new kind of politics, "the politics of meaning."
The "politics of meaning" is a concept of Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a liberal Jewish monthly. Did Mrs. Clinton get the phrase from him? Indeed she did. At a subsequent White House reception she said to him, "Am I your mouthpiece or what?" And, "It's amazing how we seem to be on the same wavelength." In a meeting in her office, she told Mr. Lerner that she and her husband had been reading him since 1988.
And so on from there. In 1996, Lerner published a book on this theme: The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.
More on Lerner tomorrow. As for Hillary Clinton, some people felt she'd (unwisely) gotten out beyond the traditional role of an (unelected) first lady by offering such a sweeping reassessment of the American scene in just her third month in the East Wing.
We can't necessarily say they were wrong, at least as a political matter. Sensibly or otherwise, the first lady absorbed some major body blows in the wake of her speech.
Last week, that famous old term, "the politics of meaning," began to dance in our heads. Can any serious person really believe that our nation can continue in the current way, with poisonous podcasts from the left and the right—with every flyweight a king?
The rise of those various new technologies has given every furious flyweight the chance to spread misinformation and fury and venom all around the town square. For an example of what we mean, check the part of this opinion piece at Mediaite which describes Megyn Kelly is mainlining venom about the Obamas' daughters—two young women whose views and feelings the routinely poisonous Kelly seems to know nothing about.
Yes, we agree—it gets worse! That said, no nation can survive as a Babel, especially if the competing voices come from people behaving like this.
Wo what's an intelligent nation to do? An intelligent nation will seek a way to get back out of all this mess. They'll start looking for a way "back out of all this now too much for us."
Is it time for Megyn Kelly to go? A nation can't run on angry inanity. A nation can't run on paired venom.
Boycott Nolan’s Odyssey. He filmed some scenes in Western Sahara, which is illegally occupied by Morocco.
ReplyDeleteThis dispute has nothing to do with this blog or Nolan's film.
Delete2:46: what is wrong with you?
Delete2:46 has to act stupid as Lord Elon didn't like them casting a black lady in a fucking fictional movie. Jaggoffs and weirdos, the whole lot of them.
DeleteMorocco is ethnically cleansing black people. Nolan had a chance to extend solidarity to Western Sahara, but he declined. Now the movie-going public can do the right thing.
Delete"In a meeting in her office, she told Mr. Lerner that she and her husband had been reading him since 1988. "
ReplyDeleteIt makes a huge difference when a President and his First Lady can read and spend their spare time on books exploring worthwhile ideas. Ivana said that Trump kept a volume of Hitler's speeches on his night stand, but that doesn't mean he ever read it. There is no evidence that Trump has ever read any book, not even My Antonia. It shows in Trump's ignorance but also his failure to hold and examine anything abstract, such as what constitutes a community and what a politics of meaning might be.
Trump has no ability to empathize. The ability to visualize in the mind a scene described in words, coupled with the ability to identify with a character described in a book, are needed to enjoy fiction or biography. Lacking empathy, Trump has no ability to know what others feel or how they might react to his actions. It makes him unable to manipulate others except via greed or force. He doesn't know how else to get what he wants, misunderstands other people's motives, and has no clue how society works except that he wants everything for himself, wants to always be the center of attention, and thinks he can just take whatever others have that he wants. This is Trunp's mental illness -- a cognitive deficit from childhood that arises from a lack of cognitive processes, not child abuse as Somerby has suggested. It is closer to autism, except that many autistic people have more empathy and more ability to abstract and visualize than Trump has. I would call it lack of imagination, extreme concreteness, inability to feel anything for others or to introspect on his own consciousness, and no understanding that others are people too (typical of psychopaths).
This may be a birth defect and brain disorder, but it doesn't excuse Trump's evil acts. Somerby has Trump all wrong and his bleating pleas for pity for Trump are misguided. A man like Trump needs to be stopped from continuing to hurt other people. Somerby never calls for that.
Megyn Kelly expressed herself in a hateful manner, but if you listen to the actual content of her rant, she’s right.
ReplyDeleteSometimes we learn more from our enemies than from our friends.
The problem with that woman is you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her -- wherever. She needs to fix that. Get back to renouncing the orange child rapist. But she can't, she loves the money too much.
Delete"As for Hillary Clinton, some people felt she'd (unwisely) gotten out beyond the traditional role of an (unelected) first lady by offering such a sweeping reassessment of the American scene in just her third month in the East Wing.
ReplyDeleteWe can't necessarily say they were wrong, at least as a political matter. Sensibly or otherwise, the first lady absorbed some major body blows in the wake of her speech."
One way to identify sexism is to notice the "blame the victim" theme being expressed when it occurs. If a woman is beaten by her husband, she must have been a bad wife or angered him in some way. It is her fault. In Hillary's case, as Somerby notes, she is described using the language of violence, as having taken major body blows, and Somerby says he can't disagree that it is her fault for saying something possibly true, in the role of First Lady. It is thus her fault for having opinions and expressing them in a speech. When everyone knows that women are supposed to sit down and shut up, not give speeches in public with ideas in them. That is men's work.
DG thinks it is unfair to refer to Others as sexist, but here is a prime example of sexism from Bob Somerby, out loud and in print for all to read. Somerby says others criticized Hillary for this speech, but he also says he cannot disagree with them, when it should be obvious that HE should disagree if he actually thinks women have the right to a voice, even as First Lady, whose job is to help inspire the country toward positive goals, like getting along and forming community.
This is why Somerby is a sexist asshole. It is also why his animosity toward women who achieve things, such as Hillary has done, is obvious to anyone with half a brain, and especially to women.
Criticizing a speech as politically unwise is not sexist, but you be you.
DeleteWhy is it politically unwise -- that is the sexist part. That Somerby thinks it is unwise. Somerby just loves to shove his own opinions off onto others -- he is never the one saying Hillary was unwise, amirite? Except that these are Somerby's words when he types them because he chose them, no matter who else might have thought the same back in the day. Somerby is dumping on Hillary today, just as it is Somerby dumping on a Gutfeld target when Somerby chooses to repeat an ugly Gutfeld non-joke about her. And when Trump chooses to retweet a Nazi sentiment, yes, a Nazi said it originally, but when Trump retweets it, he owns it too.
DeleteHow can a speech be "politically unwise" when Hillary is supposedly not a politician and has no elected political position, according to Somerby?
Your defense of Somerby is pretty sexist too. Just so you know.
Here is where Somerby endorses the opinion he just chose to restate:
Delete"We can't necessarily say they were wrong, at least as a political matter."
If he cannot say they were wrong, even as a matter of belief that women are capable people, then he is saying they were right.
If there is a self-fulfilling prophecy that women cannot be elected president, because men will not permit it, then that is not the same as saying that women are incapable of being good presidents or do not have the preparation and ability to serve. It means MEN are victimizing capable women by refusing to consider them in that role. That is what is happening here and it is not Hillary's fault. It is Somerby''s and the fault of any man who refused to give her the same consideration as a man who is running for that office. Hillary jumped through every hoop. Today Somerby blames her, not sexism, for the refusal to consider her qualifications fairly and elect her to an office she deserved to hold. How do we know she deserved it? Because Trump was elected instead -- the most unqualified president and the biggest failure in that job that our country has ever had. That says the most qualified woman is passed over for the least qualified man, and if that isn't sexism, you are a moron.
They want me to care about their country, but they wouldn't wear a face mask or get a vaccine during a worldwide airborne global epidemic.
ReplyDeleteThey can shove it up their pro-life asses.
"gotten out beyond the traditional role of an (unelected) first lady"
ReplyDeleteHow is it that Trump has gone so far beyond the traditional role of an elected president without anyone stopping him? Is it OK when he tears down the East Wing without involving the planners or Congress? Isn't that overstepping? Yet Somerby never bothered to write an essay calling that possibly not in step with tradition. Was putting that stupid UFC cage match on the White House lawn beyond his role as President? Somerby has nothing to say about that. Just about Hillary giving a pretty innocuous speech, implying that she just doesn't know her place as First Lady, which is behind all the men, ten paces behind, with her mouth shut.
Somerby not only has a huge amount of nerve to say this today, but he makes himself sound ridiculous. But look at the shit Melania took when she decorated the White House Christmas trees using a bizarre color scheme. That WAS within her traditional purview as First Lady, yet Trump has co-opted all of the decorating tasks in the White House, abolished her office and staff and relegated her to a separate bedroom. We have an illiterate, uneducated First Lady who can barely speak English, plagiarized her first speech, and participates as little as possible in any social event, much less official activities -- arguably the worst First Lady in our country's history, and she gets much less criticism than Hillary, who Somerby today revives to attack, because why?
And shouldn't the role of First Lady have changed with the gradual inclusion of women into all other spheres of modern life? Women are astronauts for fuck's sake! Somerby emphasizes the "unelected" part, as if the wife of a presidential candidate were not part of the package -- Bill Clinton said that explicitly, so voters knew ahead what they were getting. And look how many times Hillary was elected after the presidency -- she has as many years of elected public service as Bill Clinton when he was elected president, plus a term as Secretary of State, which Bill did not have. Calling her unelected is snide under the circumstances, a way of rubbing it in that women have a more difficult time getting elected president, even when over-qualified, and implying that unless someone is elected president they have nothing to say -- a standard never applied to men, who get to give speeches and are quoted when they are Joe Rogans, not even in congress or the administration. Who is Somerby fooling with this sexist shit? Besides DG, I mean.
That pulsing rush of moral superiority feels amazing, doesn't it?
DeleteI mean, it must feel like you're typing your comments from the Birmingham jail, right?
DeleteAgain, attacking the commenter instead of the argument. We women are being attacked for having the nerve to give a speech but DG thinks it is our fault for complaining because we may or may not feel morally superior to those who are abusing us? This is still victim blaming. I express an opinion about why Hillary was treated in a sexist way and DG attacks ME for feelings he only imagines, and then he makes a gratuitous put-down of civil rights marchers to seal the deal.
DeleteIt has to seem ridiculous for Somerby to be saying that Hillary showed a lack of political acumen because she tried to push boundaries that shouldn't have existed because of sexism. Didn't she know that men wouldn't like her doing that? It is her fault if she took body blows. And if I complain, I am expressing moral superiority not telling my own truth. DG, examine your conscience and realize that what you term "moral superiority" may actually by your rudimentary sense of guilt about what was done to Hillary.
Most women find it natural when another woman expresses a point of view. It is men who find that jarring or surprising, or "nontraditional" (Somerby's word). Women tend to listen to each other. Men don't listen to women. That may be why it has taken Somerby so long to quote something Hillary said that he may possibly not quite agree with.
But notice how Hillary said it, but Somerby has made it his own now:
"Last week, that famous old term, "the politics of meaning," began to dance in our heads."
Kudos to Somerby for quoting the sources. I'll bet Hillary expressed Lerner's ideas in her own words. Note that Somerby quotes Schorr about her speech. Why not quote Hillary? After all, she is the one who got beaten up for what she said. I'd like to see why.
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ReplyDeleteGood.
Delete"with poisonous podcasts from the left and the right"
ReplyDeleteStill waiting to hear which podcasts on the left Somerby considers "poisonous".
I don’t know much about podcasts, but The Daily Howler is a poisonous blog.
Delete