LONDONDERRY — A welcome phenomenon is sweeping the country: a long-oppressed group is coming to the fore and shaping more progressive contours in the political landscape.
And I'm not talking about African-Americans, whose women in the deep-red state of Alabama unexpectedly elected a progressive senator over a traditional, morally tarnished right-winger.
I'm talking about women of every color and age across America who are supporting their progressive sisters, putting many of them in office while running themselves, e.g., Cynthia Nixon, Zephyr Teachout, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren - and the list goes on. In upper New York state, a congressional seat is being fought over for the first time by two women.
This should not surprise anyone; it is always the oppressed who rally and redirect history, whether it's storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace, or beating back the British at Bunker Hill.
Our women of today assume that role - and they are not using guns, but the political power of their numbers to reverse the economic and social oppression long-enforced by the male elite.
Today, that elite is led by those such as the obscenely wealthy Koch brothers and our government itself, currently controlled by a desperate, right-wing GOP and a rich, compulsively deceitful, grandiose, and mentally impaired president.
It seems that our American women will have no more of them - while our American males totter ambivalently on a fragile fence.
I suspect that the politically-expressed attitudinal differences between men and women today derive from the roles they traditionally filled: Men as the breadwinners supported the system that they and their families depended upon; women resented their subservient roles, exclusion from power, and utter dependence upon males.
Currently emancipated women come into the workplace and bring with them the history of their oppression, along with questions about the system that enforced it. Apparently, the answers lead to liberating, progressive solutions.
Support or rejection of this thesis will come with the November midterms. If progressives emerge victorious, it will be because of the heightened consciousness of women and their determination to have their voices heard.
At the risk of being unduly optimistic, my money is on the women, and the turnabout from the socially and environmentally destructive right-wing control that their more progressive agendas will effect.