Gender, race and the 2016 psychodrama

I recently read a collection of essays entitled NASTY WOMEN AND BAD HOMBRES: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election edited by Christine A. Kray, Tamar W. Carroll and Hinda Mendell (2018).

The question the book seeks to answer is how such an ignorant and misogynistic man such as Donald Trump could have defeated such an intelligent and well-qualified woman as Hillary Clinton.

The answers are sought in rhetoric, psychology and popular culture, not public policy. Clinton and Trump are treated as symbols, not as individuals with public records.  The election is treated as a psychodrama, not as a struggle for power.

The common theme was the need to overcome prevailing male attitudes toward women (“the patriarchy”) and prevailing white attitudes toward people of color (“white supremacy”).

I have reservations about this approach, which I’ll get to in due course..  But I first want to acknowledge the book’s merits.

One chapter discussed the obscene and vicious abuse directed at Hillary Clinton based on her gender, in the form of postcards, posters and Internet memes.  She was caricatured as a witch, a Medusa, a hag, a lesbian and a transgender man.  Unlike with Trump and Bernie Sanders, her age was held against her; she was depicted as a hag.  No human being should be subjected to this.

This unfortunately is not unusual nowadays for women who successfully compete with men.  They are subject to harassment via the Internet, up to and including threats of rape and death..

Donald Trump got his share of abuse, too—for example the widespread meme, including a video distributed by the New York Times, showing Trump and Vladimir Putin as gay lovers—the unstated assumption being that gays are weak and disgusting.

But I don’t think Trump, Sanders or any other male candidate was subjected to anything comparable to what Clinton had to endure because of her sex, and that Barack Obama had to endure because of his race.

I’d be interested about the experience of conservative woman in politics, such as Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley,  Do they get the same level of vicious and obscene abuse as white women?  My guess is, probably not, but I don’t know.

Another of the essays was about images of the women’s suffrage movement of a century ago.  The suffragists were mocked for presuming to assume male roles.  The mockery was extremely condescending, but it wasn’t threatening or obscene.

Is the viciousness of attacks on women nowadays due to a lowering of standards of public discourse?  Or do anti-feminist men today feel more threatened than than anti-suffragist men did back then?

But then there also are women, quoted in another chapter, who think that Hillary Clinton does not behave as a woman should.  Many of these same women excused Donald Trump’s bad behavior.

Indeed, the 2016 Presidential campaign illustrated the double standard for personal morality for men and women.  It is not just that Hillary Clinton could not have gotten away with trash-talking like Donald Trump.  Neither she or any of the current crop of female Presidential candidates could have been forgiven for infidelity in their marriages, as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have been.

Various writers highlighted this double standard and speculated as to the cultural and psychological reasons why it exists.  Others dealt with a range of topics, from the myth of immigrant crime to religious freedom for Muslims.

There is much to be learned by isolating a single factor in politics, as this book does, and analyzing its impact.  The danger of this approach is in assuming the factor being analyzed is the only thing that matters.

in the introduction, the editors remark how Trump appealed to white working men whose “masculine pride” was wounded by unemployment in manufacturing industry.

But the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that almost 30 percent of American factory workers are women. That comment rendered those women invisible.

A number of contributors use the phrase “white working class.”  That language negates the existence of millions of wage-earning women and men of color.

There is one essay by a women about her mother who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and Donald Trump in the general election, in hope that Trump might do something about her economic plight.  But in general, little is said in these essays about struggling wage-earning women and people of color.

One essay is devoted to the role of Tim Kaine as husband, father and Democratic vice-presidential candidate.  The two authors concluded that he is unobjectionable in the way he supports his spouse, children and running-mate.

But simply by virtue of being an exemplary traditional husband and father, they wrote, he implicitly supports “systems of gender domination” and “masculine hegemony.”

It’s noteworthy that they can assume that it is possible and desirable to abolish the traditional family and not have to give any arguments to justify that assumption.

The reason that kind of thinking can be taken for granted is that it in no way whatever threatens the wealth and power of the corporate elite.

A number of essays explore the troubled friendship between the famous suffragist, Susan B. Anthony, a native of Rochester, N.Y., and the famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, a long-time resident of this city.   The editors of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres are on the faculty of Rochester Institute of Technology and the book is published by the University of Rochester press.

Douglass, a black man, advocated women’s right to vote.  Anthony, a white woman, the rights of citizenship for black people.  Both are buried in Rochester’s Mt. Hope Cemetery, and Anthony’s grave has become a feminist shrine, where feminists on Election Day leave their “I voted today” stickers on Anthony’s tombstone.  I did not realize, until I read this book, what a big deal this is.

Anthony wanted Douglass to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbid denial of the right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude, because it was silent on denial of rights based on gender.  Douglass refused.

Later Anthony accepted support for women’s suffrage of white racists, who argued that it was wrong that educated white women be denied a right that was given to ignorant black people and immigrants.

All this foreshadowed the Clinton-Obama contest in 2008 Democratic presidential primary.  Once again there was a conflict over whether the white woman or the black man should have priority.

Clinton in 2008 was not above mentioning her appeal to “hard-working people, white people.”  Later, in 2016, her supporters accused Bernie Sanders of doing the same thing.

Shirley Chisholm

Black women are caught at the intersection of the tension between women’s rights and the rights of people of color.

Several chapters mention Shirley Chisholm, a courageous black woman who served in Congress from 1969 to 1983.  She ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, the first woman to do so.  .

She was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Women’s Political Caucus.  She was an opponent of militarism and an advocate for African-Americans, for women and for working people.  Her slogan was “unbossed and unbought.”

She encountered opposition by black men as well as white people, and once said that she encountered more prejudice as a woman than as a black person

I think of her as a forerunner of insurgent women in Congress such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tulsi Gabbard, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

I do not see Chisholm as a forerunner of Hillary Clinton, the personal friend of Henry Kissinger and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Clinton chose a different path from Chisholm.  She chose to downplay her feminism and femininity in order to be accepted as equal competitors in a man’s world.

I’m thinking of her decision to cease practicing law under her maiden name, her support for her husband’s harsh anti-crime measures, her effort to ingratiate herself with conservative Senators and the fact that she was the fiercest war hawk in the Obama Cabinet.

And after a adult lifetime of self-discipline and conformity, she was defeated by the dissolute Donald Trump, a rich man’s son who always did exactly as he pleased, flouted the written law and the norms of human decency and always got away with it.

I think there are millions of professional women who identify with Clinton’s experience.  They learned how to function in a man’s world and do everything that men can do, and yet are passed over in favor of less-qualified men.  All they can do is put stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s tombstone.

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Afterthought [Added 7/1/2019]

Gender and race are fundamental dividing lines in U.S. politics. If only men voted or only white people voted, Republicans would almost always win. If only women voted or only people of color voted, Democrats would almost always win.

A Democratic victory depends on getting more than 90 percent of the votes of African Americans, a solid majority of the votes of Hispanics and a sufficient number of white votes to add up to an overall majority.

Although Republicans get a majority of the votes of white women, it is a smaller majority than they get from white men. If they get as high a percentage of vote of white women as they do of white men, they would win.

The 2016 election was not a re-aligning election. Donald Trump got basically the same number of votes from the same groups as Mitt Romney or John McCain. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton ran very much ahead or very much behind other Republican and Democratic candidates.

What the 2016 election showed was a falling-off of the Democratic vote among all its core constituencies, which is the continuation of a trend seen in 2010, 2012 and 2014.

The tipping point was targeted social media messages sent to African Americans, students and labor union members in swing states, attacking Hillary Clinton’s record and encouraging them to stay home.

The 2018 election, which was held after publication of this book, revealed a rallying of the Democratic coalition—possibly inspired by revulsion against Donald Trump, possibly resulting from the emergence of new voices in the Democratic Party. I’m not so bold as to say whether this trend will carry over into 2020.

Tags: Donald Trump, Election 2016, Feminism, HIllary Clinton, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres, Susan B. Anthony