There is absolutely no solace, none, to be derived from Tuesday’s primary result in New Hampshire. It came as only a further confirmation of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party and it is delusional to think that Nikki Haley has any shot at upending that now.

My hope had been that Haley would have taken a large enough bite out of Trump’s vote to establish some real momentum, but it didn’t happen. I was flirting with the notion that if Haley got the GOP nod, then if Biden stepped aside it would be Haley versus Kamala Harris, two women duking it out.

But while that isn’t going to happen, it was also a deficient fantasy for two reasons. First, Haley is really not a nice person and would be a disaster as president. Second, I am sad to learn that, really, Democrats don’t think Harris is presidential material. That latter one is for reasons that still baffle me, except when taking into consideration the usual often subtle sexist factors.

It seems clear that up to this point, Democratic strategists have deemed to put two factors in the background of the Biden re-election effort, and they are Obama and Harris, factors of race and gender that evoke the racist preferences of Trump supporters. If true, that is a losing formula.

But it looks like Biden is getting the right idea, however, by holding a big rally with Harris in Virginia this week focused on women’s reproductive rights. Truly, on top of continuing to hammer away at the objective achievements of his work on economic recovery, Biden must hammer away relentlessly on this woman’s issue.

Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I remain mystified by how blind even progressive men and decision makers are to how central this issue is for this election.

If ever the polls are deceiving us, it is on this issue, too, because too many women are conditioned to allow this issue to take a back seat to other factors.

But what Trump and the GOP are doing on this question is setting our society back literally hundreds of years, to a form of servitude for half of the voting electorate that is downright outrageous. These guys are overplaying their hand so much on this that they don’t have any clue how a well-organized reaction against it would blow them out of the water. There are so far only hints to this effect.

Back half a century ago, when modern feminism was on the rise, there was a male corollary to it called Effeminism. I was actually a cofounder of that nascent movement in that saucy era when counter-culturalists like my friends and me in the streets and cafes of Berkeley, Calif., were freely advancing new social paradigm models all the time and had lively alternative newspapers and other “people’s” fora in which to espouse them.

But to be clear, our cause grew, developed and launched by my friend the late Rev. Jim Rankin and me and expressed through two editions of our self-initiated newspaper in 1971, The Effeminist, sold on Telegraph Avenue and adjacent Union Square (in San Francisco) street corners by yours truly and others.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, it was swiftly picked up by activists in New York who adopted the name and ran with their own version of the cause. One of those, now a friend, Steven F. Dansky, wrote that the Effeminist cause was “more accurately a moment in an historical frame rather than a movement” even though feminist Jill Johnson wrote in 1972 in the Village Voice that “Effeminists are the first western male revolutionaries.”

I allude to this because in 2024, over 50 years later, the movement sparked then remains alive and well, although not by its original name, and there is no more important time than the present for it to rise up again, no matter under what name, to stand for the liberation of women and against the kind of crude male supremacy that is at the heart of everything that Trump and his followers represent.

This is the key to saving democracy in the world today and to returning Biden to the White House.