A slightly adapted/compacted version of this Brit’s Substack commentary.
July 24
In our heart of hearts we all know what will decide this election. It won’t be debates or speeches or experience or fitness to serve. Saving external catastrophe it’ll be whether a critical part of the US electorate can really imagine — even almost a quarter of the way into the 21st century — a woman being president. If they manage that hurdle, Harris ought to win. But if they can’t and find enough excuses for not liking her, then she may well lose.
There’s a reason why there has been no woman president in the 104 years since the ratification of the constitutional amendment enshrining female suffrage in the US. It took 60 years for the first major party woman vice presidential candidate, another 24 years before the second and a further 12 years before the third — and the first to be elected — Kamala Harris. In 2016 Hillary Clinton became the first ever major party candidate for the presidency.
It isn’t because they have been insufficiently qualified — Clinton must have been one of the best qualified presidential candidates in US history, but was passed over by the Democrats in 2008 and defeated (despite winning 2 million more votes) by Donald Trump eight years later. There have been some impressive women state governors (one of my favourites was Ann Richards, Texas governor from 1991 to 1995, who liked to repeat the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards, wearing high heels), senators and congresswomen. All overlooked. In my journalistic lifetime vice presidents and vice president candidates have included such male liabilities as Dan Quayle and Spiro Agnew and nonentities such as Paul Ryan.
So how come? Partly, I think, because of the calculation that Americans were less likely elect a woman than a man or that a man as VP candidate would be an asset that a woman would not. Not that people will own up to such a prejudice directly. Almost everyone will tell pollsters that the sex of a candidate makes no difference to them. But at the end of 2022 USA TODAY commissioned a poll from Suffolk University asking respondents about the characteristics of their ideal president. 55% said that gender was of no account. But for that large percentage for whom there was a preference, a man was preferred to woman by more than 2 to 1 — 28% to 12%. The ideal president would be male, according to 50% of Republicans (2% female), Democrats chose a woman by 24% to 11%. Among independents those men expressing a preference chose a male president by 32% to 4% and women also backed a male president by 25% to 19%.
But that’s just the what. How about the why?…
II
This year’s Republican National Convention featured an appearance by the legendary retired wrestler Hulk Hogan. He roared, yelled and ripped off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance sleeveless tighty-reddy underneath. It was the essence of what you might call performative hyper-masculinity. It is hard to imagine a woman of 70 addressing a national convention by roaring at the top of her voice and ripping her blouse in two and being wildly applauded (as opposed to arrested) for it.
At the same time quite a lot has been made of the idea that Trump has recently made significant inroads into the Black and Latino votes, most specifically among men. When he was convicted recently in New York Trump used the moment to suggest that the very fact of his conviction gave him some kind of bond with Black guys.
This is an exaggerated form of a still prevailing psychology that you might call “who’s the Daddy?” in which authority is still understood to be a masculine trait, with the male as protector of his national family as he should be of his biological one. This should not be confused, I think, with being “fatherly” as in being present and available for your children. Indeed that can look like weakness. When you play “who’s the Daddy?” it’s not tenderness that is being examined but male toughness. It’s Grrr, not aaah.
This is a trait that I think is more pronounced in the US, with its Wild West and Manifest Destiny mythologies, than it is in – say – Western Europe. But even so it’s worth looking at the way in which the commentating classes discuss women as opposed to male leaders. For example barely minutes into Joe Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris earlier this week The Economist had passed the judgment on her in a headline that she “lacks charisma”. Lacks charisma because why? Lacks charisma compared to who? Biden? J.D. Vance? Compared to Donald Trump? Well, who doesn’t lack a fascinating shamelessness compared to him?…
III
In parliamentary systems the männliches Prinzip is less determinant than in a presidential one. There have been 13 presidents of France since the war, none of them women; it’s an irony that the first might be Marine Le Pen. Over the channel and we have managed three women prime ministers in the same period,
I was struck when Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2008 and again in 2016 by how men of my acquaintance would find essentially gender-based arguments to use against her, usually without even noticing. In 2008 it struck me that while racism at the time seemed an obvious danger to them and so they assiduously avoided it (and loved Obama), their deep-down assumptions about gender roles were far more insidious. I recall for example one left-winger (an American) telling me that, never mind her obvious capacity to do the job, that Clinton was “dislikable”.
Women never quite deserve success. There’s always something slightly wrong about them. In the US right now some of the memes being deployed by Republicans and their allies are blatant (though disowned), suggesting that Harris – a seasoned prosecutor, a state attorney general and a US senator, slept her way to success. More overtly Republican congressmen have described her as a “DEI hire”, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion being a straightforward term of abuse in right-wing circles (and sometimes beyond). She’s Black, she’s a woman, she’s only there because of those attributes.
Nigel Farage managed to find outlets to let him tell Britons that she was only picked by Biden because she was “African American” (she isn’t). And a more recent if less reliable member of the new transatlantic far right, Russell Brand, delivered himself of this determination concerning Harris:
She’s a socially inept and empty instrument of intransigent, institutional power, solely offering cutaneous and genetic novelty to a famished pack of secularist devotees so bewildered that melatonin and an ‘X’ chromosome’ could represent to them some kind of pyrrhic victory.
Brand, you’ll recall, was baptised and born again as a Christian this spring (having been a Buddhist in a previous incarnation). After a week he felt he had “transitioned” spiritually, but whatever he had transitioned to, it was not “judge not, lest ye be judged”. Because to translate from Brand-burble, “Kamala is a shell, only there because she’s black and a woman.” I suspect he meant genital when he wrote genetic because otherwise the sentence is tautological. And I think he means melanin, not melatonin, which is a hormone associated with sleep and wakefulness. I done;t want to depress readers but I have to remind them that the man has a big and lucrative following.
IV
These are, if you like, the sly drive-bys of sexism. They don’t actually frontally attack Harris as a woman. Trump’s new running mate J.D.Vance is much less demure, perhaps because he has become much more old-time religious. So in an interview three years ago with his big supporter Tucker Carlson (Carlson still worked for Fox News back then), Vance delivered himself of this:
We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats…a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too…You have Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does that make any sense when we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t have a direct stake in it?
Buttigieg is gay, of course, and he and his husband have since adopted twins, and Harris is a stepmom. Now, my worry about this is not that it is “offensive” (it is, of course), but that it is so ideological and deeply felt. It arises from a place that angrily believes that the job of women is to have lots of babies and that those who don’t are deficient. This is consistent with Vance’s belief that abortion should be made illegal, including in the cases of rape and incest, because the right to life of the foetus trumps all other concerns — and that divorces should be harder to obtain.
And here I just want to express a degree of irritation with those commentators who, in giving Vance a pass on racism (he is married to a woman of Indian origin), entirely skate over his sexual fundamentalism. It is almost as though they see it — male as they almost always are — as insignificant (though it is, of course, his isolationism that is most threatening to us over here in Europe) — fortunately, however, Vance lacks charisma. I mean, he genuinely lacks charisma. Perhaps The Economist will get round to that.
UPDATE: I’ve only just seen Vance’s 2021 interview here he says that he would like an abortion ban to be nationwide. The reason: “let’s say Ohio bans abortion and then in 2024, you know every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up predominately Black women to get them to go and have abortions in California”. The mind that could concoct such a scenario is a bit terrifying, whoever its owner is married to.
Finally, of course, you have the straightforward “locker room”, wolf-whistle, no-means-yes, I wouldn’t sleep with that sexism of Donald Trump and parts of his movement. Trump this week managed to tell a camera that Harris wouldn’t be the first woman president of the US, nor yet the first socialist president and “especially not the first woman, socialist president”. Harris will not win a single vote by reminding voters that according to Stormy Daniels Trump is genitally unaesthetic and lacks athleticism in the sack.
So let’s not pretend here. If Kamala Harris is elected the first woman president in November, she will have bust a ceiling which is all the more invulnerable for being sometimes so subtle. Kamala, we who do not have a vote, salute you!