Renowned feminist Camille Paglia says the Democratic Party’s leaders are in “a nationwide orgy of rage and spite” that prevents them from connecting with millions of potential voters.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Weekly Standard, the author and professor, who supported Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders in the 2016 primary election and Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the general election, said Democrats are widening an unnecessary political chasm with voters.
“In an abject failure of leadership that may be one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the modern Democratic party, Chuck Schumer, who had risen to become the Senate Democratic leader after the retirement of Harry Reid, asserted absolutely no moral authority as the party spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite,” she said in the interview published Thursday. “Nor were there statesmanlike words of caution and restraint from two seasoned politicians whom I have admired for decades and believe should have run for president long ago — Senator Dianne Feinstein and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
“How do Democrats imagine they can ever expand their electoral support if they go on and on in this self-destructive way, impugning half the nation as vile racists and homophobes?” she said.
Ms. Paglia said President Trump can be accused of “fanning the flames” of opposition, but in general he “seems to be methodically trying to fulfill his campaign promises.”
“There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left,” she said. “Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of ‘compassion’ (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers.
“These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language,” she said. “But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily focus was the barnyard. It’s no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge ‘barnyard language’ out of English.”
Ms. Paglia concluded the interview by advising Democrats to get “off their high horse” if they plan to retake the White House in 2020.
The author’s latest book, “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism” is on sale now.
