In today’s sharply divided political atmosphere, where a
huge and widening gulf exists between the right and the
left, it is both surprising and refreshing when someone identified with the
left renders ideas that are objective and balanced. Such an occasion occurred
earlier this month when Jonathan V. Last published an interview on
weeklystandard.com he had conducted by email with left-leaning feminist, author
and college professor Camille Paglia.
While characterizing herself as a libertarian she confesses
that she is a registered Democrat, but not always a supporter of Democrats,
noting about the 2000 presidential election she voted for Green Party candidate
Ralph Nader because “I detest the arrogant, corrupt superstructure of the
Democrat Party, with which I remain stubbornly registered.”
Beginning the interview with a statement of her political
affiliations, Paglia noted that she voted for Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the
2016 primary and for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the general election.
She now has her eye on newly elected Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Cal., hoping to vote
for her in the next presidential primary.
The Paglia-Last interview focused on three topics: the
election and early presidency of Donald Trump, Islamic/Islamist terrorism, and
feminism vs. transgenderism.
Like millions of others, she did not take Trump’s candidacy
seriously, but attributes his win to “the startling incompetence and mediocrity
of his GOP opponents.”
She was no more kind to some Democrats, noting that, Hillary
Clinton, “with her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement, was a
disastrously wrong candidate for 2016 and that she secured the nomination only
through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee…” And, “Despite
his history of embarrassing gaffes, the affable, plain-spoken Joe Biden, in my
view, could … have defeated Trump, but he was blocked from running at literally
the last moment by President Barack Obama, for reasons that the major media
refused to explore.”
While criticizing the Trump Administration’s handling of the
temporary ban of travelers from predominantly Muslim countries tied to
terrorism on the one hand, she then defended the administration, saying, “I
fail to see the ‘chaos’ in the White House that the mainstream media (as well
as conservative Never Trumpers) keep harping on—or rather, I see no more chaos
than was abundantly present during the first six months of both the Clinton and
Obama administrations.” She also noted that Trump was “going about his
business” while the media was “consumed with their preposterous Russian
fantasies…”
A 1950s-60s liberal, she contrasted the exalted civil
liberties, individualism, and dissident thought and speech of that time with
what she termed the “grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian” nature of
liberalism today. “It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine,
parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates,” she said.
Turning to how today’s liberals regard terrorism, she
explained, “The contortions to which so many liberals resort to avoid
connecting bombings, massacres, persecutions, and cultural vandalism to Islamic
jihadism is remarkable, given their usual animosity to religion, above all
Christianity.” Paglia also suggested that some liberals have a racial
perspective and therefore “Islam remains beyond criticism because it is largely
a religion of non-whites whose two holy cities occupy territory once oppressed
by Western imperialism.”
She criticizes liberals “paternalistic condescension” toward
Islam, which she said is done from a distance, without really engaging in its
“intricate mixed messages, which can inspire toward good or spur acts of
devastating impact…”
When Jonathan Last posited an expected showdown in the U.S.
between feminism and transgenderism that has not developed, Paglia responded
that this occurs more publicly in the United Kingdom than in the U.S. She cited
two instances where public programs featuring opponents of transgenderism as a
legitimate concept drew spirited protests from activists.
Both programs eventually went forward against the same sort
of opposition that conservative speakers experience on American college
campuses. In the U.S, transgenderism is one of many things that are off limits
for public discussion, and such programs would likely have produced riotous
behavior.
She called attention to American liberals’ interesting
contradictory views of science. When it comes to their acceptance of climate
change theory, science is just fine, although Paglia described it as “a
sentimental myth unsupported by evidence.” Where transgenderism is concerned,
however, liberals “flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender.”
“The cold biological truth is that sex changes are
impossible,” Paglia stated. “Every single cell of the human body remains coded
with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are
developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.”
Paglia takes a common sense stand on the treatment of
transgender folks, seeking to protect them from harassment and abuse that may
be aimed at them just because they are “nonconformist or eccentric.” But she
said that whether the rest of us must identify a transgender person as a man or
a woman based solely on that person’s “subjective feeling” does not fly: “it is
our choice alone,” she concluded.
Such a logical and objective approach to controversial
subjects is rare from left-leaning folk, but is certainly refreshing and
productive. Let us hope for an outbreak of this sort of thinking that reaches
epidemic proportions.
