Tag: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In my post on the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I criticized her for not resigning while Obama was President, when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2009. A few people were mightily offended, as I had anticipated. She was a great person, and it was too soon, and so on. One person told me that every professional woman he knew was crying.

I don’t have that reverence, and neither do many others. I think it’s worth teasing out why. The best short explanation is this one.

The death of RBG has again revealed a class-based split between those who see political figures as aspirational heroes or people who make decisions that have cataclysmic consequences in their lives.

I don’t view leaders, and RBG, since she made decisions which impacted the entire country, was one, as people to emulate. Many people do. This is similar to how many professional women identify with Hillary and felt her defeats as a personal rebuke. To me, Hillary is an incompetent evil fool. She voted for Iraq, convinced Obama to invade Libya, ballsed up universal health care when her husband trusted her with it, lost two elections where she was the favorite and her only significant accomplishment, being Senator from New York is because she rode her husband’s coat-tails.

A monster and an incompetent.

RBG was better (though not as great as the hagiography), but the reason people were so upset at criticism of her is that they identified with her. They saw her as someone who they admired and wanted to be. An “aspirational model.”

What I see, however, is that right now before she died there was a 5/4 majority for reproductive rights, and when Trump appoints his fundamental Christian judge, Roe’s on the table. All Ginsburg had to do was retire when she got sick (and was old already.) She didn’t, and now something she worked hard for all her life and that is important to millions of women, may well be lost.

This may be a result of bad judgment on her part, it may be selfishness (she seems to have loved the job and thought she was indispensable), but either way she failed the people she served.

And that’s the core thing. To me leaders are servants: they are there to serve the people, to make decisions for their betterment. Every leader has a constituency, RBG sure did, and letting them down is betrayal of their duty.

It’s nice that Ginsburg had such a great career, and was an aspirational model, but that’s nothing compared to the question of how much good and evil she did as a very important person. No one denies she did a lot of good (and a fair bit of evil, ask a native American what they think of her), but it’s also true that she let people down when she failed to make sure she was replaced by someone who would uphold abortion rights and so on.

This is a widespread problem. I remember a friend practically crying about Obama winning the primary in 2008, because she had marched for civil rights, and his victory was the culmination, to her, of both her and her cohort’s (boomers) history. That he failed African Americans terribly, did almost nothing to improve their situation, was forgivable, because he was a symbol.

I don’t view leaders thru this lens. I’ve seen good men and good women leaders, and bad men and bad women leaders. Thatcher was the first great neoliberal leader: woman. Reagan the second: male. Up where I live in Ontario we had a very bad (neoliberal) lesbian, who won the leadership of her party over a man who spent his entire life working at a food bank, helping the poor. It’s nice that lesbians got to see one of them as Premier, and watch her fuck things up and make the rich, richer, but I’d have liked the guy who cared about the poor, myself, since your sexual preferences make you neither a good nor bad leader.

Leaders are servants. We give them rights so they can do things for us. They make decisions which determine whether people live or die and whether they live happy healthy lives or miserable sick lives.

Identifying with them as role-models of success is, to me, ludicrous.

Choose your leaders because you trust them to serve you and demand that they do so. When they fail, don’t say “oh, it doesn’t matter because they were such a model of success or they did some other good things.”

They serve you. They hurt or help people on a mass scale.

That’s what matters.