Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani writer and columnist whose analysis is very much on point. She was on Democracy Now! recently:
Well, Amy, I don’t think it’s an aberration that Trump won. I think it’s an aberration that he lost in 2020. And I think anyone looking at the American elections for the last year, even longer, could see very clearly that the Democrats were speaking to a hall of mirrors. They ran an incredibly weak and actually macabre campaign. To see Kamala Harris describe her politics as one of joy as she promised the most lethal military in the world, talking about women’s rights in America, essentially focusing those rights on the right to termination, while the rest of the world has watched women slaughtered in Gaza for 13 months straight. It’s very curious to think that they thought a winning strategy was Beyoncé and Taylor Swift was going to defeat — who? — Trump, who was speaking to people, who was speaking against wars. Whether we believe him or not, it was a marked difference from what Kamala Harris was saying and was not saying.
We’ve seen over the last year that 70% of those slaughtered in Gaza by Israel and, let’s also be clear, by America, because it’s American bombs and American diplomatic cover that allows this slaughter to continue unabated — 70% of those victims are women and children. We have watched children with their heads blown off. We have watched children with no surviving family members, finding themselves in hospital with limbs missing. Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. And we have seen newborns left to die as Israel switches off electricity and fuel for hospitals.
So, for Kamala Harris to come out and talk repeatedly about abortion, and I say this as someone who is pro-choice, who has always been pro-choice, was not just macabre, but it’s obscene. It’s an absolute betrayal of feminism, because feminism is about liberation. It’s not about termination. And it’s about protecting women at their most vulnerable and at their most frightened. And there was no sign of that.
There was so much toxicity in Kamala Harris’s campaign. You know, I watched her laugh with Oprah as she spoke about shooting someone who might enter her house with a gun, and giggling and saying her PR team may not like that, but she would kill them. You don’t need to be a man to practice toxic masculinity, and you don’t need to be white to practice white supremacy, as we’ve seen very clearly from this election cycle. More here.