A mini-‘Me Too’: On sexism and democracy | Will Bunch Newsletter

If you truly felt you had nothing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend, then you aren’t a Philadelphia Eagles fan and didn’t last until around 8 p.m. Sunday, when Jake Elliott, Jack Driscoll, and finally Jalen Hurts blessed a long holiday where, in the end, it was the Birds who did the carving Indeed, four hours with these Eagles is just like your family’s feast — a lot of dysfunction, but joy in the end.

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A casual watcher of the news over the last few weeks might have caught the headlines coming out of New York about sometimes lurid sex-abuse allegations involving the rich, famous, and powerful — from New York City Mayor Eric Adams to hip-hop entrepreneur Sean “Diddy” Combs — and wondered what was going on up there.

This spate of abuse allegations — one could call it a mini-”Me Too” moment, an echo from the wave of takedowns and female empowerment that swept the nation in 2017, not long after Donald Trump became our 45th president — is happening for two reasons. One of them is highly specific to the Empire State, but the other, I’d argue, says a lot about the ongoing fight for democracy.

Specifically, the flurry of civil lawsuits — which also targeted a former governor, Andrew Cuomo, entertainer Bill Cosby, and key local institutions like New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail — is the result of New York State legislators enacting a law that gave past abuse victims a one-year window to file civil cases, even after the normal statute of limitations had expired. More than 3,000 such suits were filed before that window established under the Adult Survivors Act officially closed on Thanksgiving Day.

The law was passed in May 2022 by New York’s Democratic-led and progressive-minded legislature to help past victims. Yet coming six years after the social revolution that brought down powerful men like now-imprisoned filmmaker Harvey Weinstein or Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, this month’s lawsuits felt like part aftershock and part nostalgia.

Consider the man at the bottom of this inverted pyramid of power and sexual misconduct: Trump. In 2016, the Access Hollywood tape in which the future president boasted about grabbing women’s private parts, amplified in allegations by now up to 26 women, didn’t block his road to the White House. Now, Trump has been found liable by a jury for sexually abusing a New York woman, writer E. Jean Carroll, in a case the judge described as a rape. And his poll numbers in the Republican 2024 primaries have only risen since that civil trial.

Not surprisingly, Trump has surrounded himself with others accused of serious sexual misconduct, including his former lawyer (and former New York mayor) Rudy Giuliani. Now, a key lieutenant in his 2024 race, longtime aide Jason Miller, who’d been briefly exiled for impregnating fellow Trump staffer A.J. Delgado and accused of not paying child support, is facing a new lawsuit (not part of the New York flurry.) Delgado now charges that the then-married Miller raped her in a Las Vegas hotel room as part of “a cycle of sexual coercion, rape, sexual assault, abuse, battery, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking.” Miller — like the other men mentioned here — is denying the allegations.

And yet Miller remains at the right hand of Trump — and it’s becoming increasingly clear that a culture of sexual abuse and domination is not a bug in America’s rising right-wing authoritarian movement, but a feature. In defending the patriarchy from what they allege is an onslaught from radical feminism on the left, Trump and his posse present themselves as macho strongmen not bound by any rules. That may excite followers who live vicariously through these high-profile transgressions. Indeed, this has been a hallmark of fascism for a full century.

With calls for an American autocracy on the rise, I’m currently listening to the audiobook of NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and one of the more striking sections shows how many fascist tyrants practically spent more time pursuing female conquests than actually governing their country. None more so than the inventor of the modern dictatorship, Benito Mussolini, who sometimes wooed and sometimes assaulted thousands of women while ruling Italy from 1922-45, and employed his secret police to keep them quiet.

Ben-Ghiat notes how Mussolini invented the bare-chested virility pose long before Russia’s Vladimir Putin copied it. Trump’s boasts of sexual prowess mimic strongmen from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Writes Ben-Ghiat: “Far from being a private affair, the sex life of the strongman reveals how corruption, propaganda, violence, and virility work together and how personalist rulers use state resources to fulfill their desires.”

This brand of autocracy is a direct backlash to the intermittent gains by women seeking to assert control of their bodies and their lives. The 11th-hour justice offered by New York’s Adult Survivors Act is exactly what the Trumps and the Jason Millers and their acolytes are fighting to obliterate in 2024 and beyond.

Ending sexual abuse is no sideshow. It is central to saving democracy and stopping fascism.

Question: COP28 [a major world confab on global warming] begins this week. Do you think significant progress on climate change will be made? — Via Better Path Coalition (@BetterPathPA) on X/Twitter

Answer: I’m grateful for this question, because the COP28 climate gathering in, of all places, Dubai — the capital of a Persian Gulf oil dictatorship — is such an important story, sure to get lost amid a war in Gaza and political chaos here at home. Big picture, I am not a “doomer” but cautiously optimistic even in Planet Earth’s hottest year on record; we are seeing more electric cars increasingly powered by clean energy, and we need to speed up that momentum. But in the moment, I’m annoyed that the Persian Gulf is trying to greenwash its toxic fossil-fuel legacy. Everyone should read two recent scoops in The Guardian — about Saudi Arabia’s new scheme to hook poorer nations on fossil fuels, and COP28 host UAE’s efforts to cut new oil-and-gas deals during the climate conference. This is no time for oil-soaked petro-politics as usual.

Last week’s question about the slow death of the humanities at U.S. universities and the purpose of college education was maybe a bit too academic, but those who did respond agreed with me that it’s wrong to see higher ed only as a pathway to a job. Ron Irving (a retired professor and administrator) wrote, “maybe offer the opportunity for them to gain wisdom, live richer lives, and thereby develop into better human beings?” Added Daniel Hoffman: “Businesses have forever found it difficult to generate profits from enlightening people about moral dilemmas of the good life or asking them to consider whether good leadership rests upon being loved or being feared.”

📮 This week’s question: With still almost a year to go, the onslaught of polls about the 2024 election have generated both headlines and frustration from some voters who question their importance and accuracy. Are there too many polls, and what should we do about it? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

The new conventional wisdom on Donald Trump, as he continues to rise in the pre-2024 polls, is that there’s a method to his madness. Take dictatorship, for example. The old thinking was that a candidate for president of the United States probably shouldn’t mimic or quote Mussolini or Hitler — especially when that candidate is also promising to jail his political enemies and place untold thousands of migrants in sprawling camps. But it turns out there are millions of U.S. voters who actually want a strongman who promises to fix everything and is willing to bend the rules.

But does Trump’s ability to call American leftists “vermin” and get away with it mean he can go out there and say anything? Or did he just shock himself on the third rail of U.S. politics by promising to renew his failed bid to undo 2010′s Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” which has meant health insurance for millions of middle-class voters the GOP frontrunner is trying to woo?

“The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. “I’m seriously looking at alternatives. We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it. It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”

Really? Polls show about 60% of Americans really like Obamacare, with the biggest gains in coverage among the Black and brown middle-class voters that Trump hopes to win over in 2024. This feels like Trump trying to exact revenge against John McCain, the GOP Senate vote that saved Obamacare, more than five years after McCain died of brain cancer. And Republicans have never come up with a better idea. If the Democrats can’t make any headway attacking Trump’s opposition to this popular program, then America has truly lost its mind.

I look back at November 2016 as a month dominated by throngs in the street chanting “Not my president!” and the grim specter of a looming Trump White House, but other stuff happened. For one thing, Fidel Castro died. I tried to reconcile the Cuban dictator’s brutal record of repression against journalists and his political enemies with the fact that his nation actually outperformed the United States in areas like literacy and infant mortality. I wrote: “There were much better nations to study and emulate: Scandinavian democracies that manage to value personal liberty and the essential nature of learning and good health at the same time. Fidel outlived his enemies, but he did so as a relic of a past that’s best forgotten.” Read the rest from Nov. 28, 2016: “The good, the bad and the ugly of Fidel’s revolutionary life.”

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