The American Dream Is Dead To Women

It was nothing but a mirage.

Elizabeth Lewis is a mother and an organizer from Michigan.

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Both of these women were a million times more qualified than the neanderthal in the middle.

I was raised by two radical leftists. My dad a product of Holocaust survivors, and my mom the child of working class Irish Detroiters. They spent the 1960s marching for civil rights and the end to the Vietnam War, working on political campaigns, and even running an underground newspaper at Wayne State University.

From the beginning, they instilled in me their values - equality, equity, and acceptance. We read books about heroes from the civil rights movement and feminist icons. They didn’t care if I used the “F” word, but would have lost their minds if they ever heard me say anything racist (I didn’t). Most kids learned about the Holocaust in sixth grade or so when they read Anne Frank. I learned about it around age five, when I asked about the tattoo on my grandpa’s arm. My dad knew what fascism was, and he made sure I did too. My parents taught me how to recognize injustice, and they taught me to speak out about it.

Because of my upbringing, I spent my childhood and teens thinking that racism and sexism were mostly a thing of the past. I thought the bigots in America were people who hung out in the dark pockets of rural Alabama. I didn’t know they were all around me. Obviously as I grew up, I learned that quite a few Americans weren’t raised with the same values as I was. But even when I encountered racism, it was always whispered. Even the bigots knew that their prejudices were to be spoken in hushed voices, that it was something to be embarrassed about.

And then Donald Trump happened. As he burst onto the scene promising a Muslim ban, I thought about my grandparents, and what I knew from a young age about fascism. I listened to the things he said about minorities and women - things I had only ever heard spoken in low voices behind closed doors - and I wondered how anyone could support him. As the 2016 campaign wound to a close, I realized that a good amount of my family and a few friends were voting for him, but I still never thought he could win. From the bottom of my heart, I really believed we were better than that in America.

2016 radicalized me. It opened my eyes to not only how much this country hates women, but how accepting it is of fascism. We all lived through the terror of Trump’s first term - his child separation policy, his rolling back of environmental protections, his cozying up to dictators and almost tweeting us into a war, the gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, setting the reversal of Roe in motion, his willingness to deploy soldiers on peaceful protesters, and his terrorist attack on the Capitol when he lost. For anyone who gave a shit about civil rights, environmental rights, immigrants, and democracy in general, it was four years of hell.

And then, in 2021, he was gone, and we all hoped he would skulk away with his tail between his legs never to be heard from again. But he didn’t. This time he came back as a convicted felon, sex offender, and more racist than ever. He ran on a platform of mass deportations, persecuting his political enemies, and scaling back protections for the LGBTQ+ population. His rallies and rhetoric were reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s - referring to immigrants as animals poisoning the blood of our country, promising to round them up and put them into camps, spreading lies about the transgender community and depicting late term abortions as Democrat-sanctioned murder taking place after the child was born and breathing. Surely, he could not win this time. America would recoil from this disgusting level of hatred.

Unfortunately, his opponent was a black woman.

Early this morning, it was made clear that the vision of this country my parents painted for me was wishful thinking. The America I was taught to love wasn’t really America at all— this country can accept a bully, a racist, a sexual predator, a liar, a felon, a dictator as its president—but it cannot, will not, accept a woman. I realized that the country that my grandparents had fled to as a safe haven from fascism, the country that my parents marched for, was more hate than love, more violence than peace. The American dream, the idea that anyone can achieve anything, really was just a dream, and that we are irreparably and irretrievably broken.