#manarchist

Yesterday night I was in a café that prides itself in being a haven for people of the far-left with my beloved sister in law.

Van Badham’s recent Guardian piece, “Time to hail Hillary Clinton – and face down the testosterone left”, goes well beyond the usual defence of Clinton as a lesser evil, characterising her not only as committed to social equality, but as the literal embodiment of it. It is not hyperbolic to say that the piece could have been written by any of the lead spokespeople for the Clinton campaign. The only reason something so offensively right wing is being responded to by the left is because of Badham’s reputation and claim to be some sort of raging leftist (the descriptions of herself vary from anarchist to feminist to “explicitly socialist” – as she says in the article.) It’s impossible for the claim to be an “explicit socialist” to have any legitimacy when you’re fawning over one of the most notorious neoliberal war hawks of the international ruling class. So Badham pre-empts criticism by accusing everyone who disagrees with her of being “brocialist” or “manarchist” bullies. Supposedly all of the men who oppose Clinton on a principled left wing basis or disagree with Badham on Twitter or Facebook are just terrible misogynists, while women who do likewise have just been duped by the “Bernie bros” and got caught up in the popular testosterone fuelled sport of tormenting Van Badham. That Badham thinks of herself as some sort of anti-establishment martyr for women is laughable, especially in the context of her latest piece. It’s also insulting. It’s an insult – to the victims of US imperialism, workers fighting for minimum wage (including those at the corporation Clinton helped defend, Walmart), African Americans being brutalised by the police, and many others – to suggest that their reality is just “propaganda” in a nasty anti-woman crusade against Clinton and Badham.