“They’ll walk all over her… She’ll be so easy for them. She’ll be like a play toy. They look at her and they say, ‘We can’t believe we got so lucky.’”
Donald Trump Fox News interview, July 30th, targeting Kamala Harris, after fellow strongman and MAGA ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, seemed to have implemented the execution of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, tanking Biden’s effort at securing a ceasefire.
The most visible gender schism between the Democratic and Republican Parties focuses of the normalization of LGBTQ+ Americans and reproductive healthcare drilling down on abortion. But there’s a bigger and deeper schism building that you may have thought was resolved a long time ago. Sure, you may have noticed that there are more women than men in law school or that men no longer “wear the pants” in society. More women work today. Back in the 1960s, women elected to Congress (and there were only a few) were required to wear dresses and skirts to the Capitol floor. It’s true that the Equal Rights Amendment, though it ultimately generated enough votes, expired under its own timeline. We’re still battling equal pay and women on major boards of directors and in senior management of large companies… but that’s changing.
Yet the 2024 election – the very retro notion of “make America great again” – is very much about returning women to traditional roles and men to being the principal breadwinners… versus an underlying Democratic tide towards equalizing women in every way. Nobody articulates that notion better than Trump’s VP choice, JD Vance. Although his wife has a Yale Law degree and has worked at prestigious corporate law firms, Vance is focused on restoring the family unit with a woman staying at home.
No abortion. No fault divorce is an abomination that has torn families apart in his mind… even in abusive relationships. Even as the cost of living usually requires two incomes, Vance opposes childcare, because it encourages women to leave their kids while they go to work. Even though estimates tell us that by 2030, half of all adult women will be childless, Vance advances the notion that childless voters should have less political say. That a woman has the temerity to run for president, particularly a woman of color and one who has not borne any children (she has been an effective stepmother), is a slap in the face of Vance’s and MAGA’s vision of women and family. He calls Kamala Harris a “childless cat lady.”
As Noah Bierman, writing for the July 30th Los Angeles Times puts it, “In reframed election, Harris leans hard into her vision of female empowerment as Trump stresses physical strength… That night, former President Trump’s [post-Convention] rally in Charlotte, N.C., was full of testosterone as he recalled ‘the Hulkster’ and Kid Rock speaking at his party convention and the night he overcame bullets ‘flying’ at him during this month’s assassination attempt. ‘They said, ‘Sir, we have a stretcher for you,’ ’ Trump recounted. ‘I said, ‘That’s not going to look very good if I get carried out on a stretcher.’ ’
“Just over a week into a reframed general election, it is clear that the race between Trump and Harris is not just between a man and a woman, but about competing notions of gender roles… Trump has built his image on hyper-masculinity from an era where men sought to present themselves as physically strong and might dismiss allegations of sexual assault by claiming ‘she’s not my type,’ as he did before losing a civil case against E. Jean Carroll. Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White lauded Trump’s toughness as they introduced his convention speech.”
Lest you think this is an affront to younger “modern” voters, this little statistical survey by Aaron Zitner and Andrew Restuccia in the July 28th Wall Street Journal just might surprise you: “A majority of men under 30 support former President Trump and Republican control of Congress, a sharp reversal from the 2020 race; young women strongly favor Democrats… Lauren Starrett, a 28-year-old engineer in Cincinnati, feels a personal threat from conservatives seeking to scale back access to abortion and other rights… ‘It’s kind of terrifying, really,’ said Starrett, who backs Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The forces of American culture and politics are pushing men and women under age 30 into opposing camps, creating a new fault line in the electorate and adding an unexpected wild card into the 2024 presidential election… Voters under 30 have been a pillar of the Democratic coalition since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989. That pillar is showing cracks, with young men defecting from the party… Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and Trump for president after backing President Biden and Democratic lawmakers in 2020…. Women under 30 remain strongly behind Democrats for Congress and the White House. They are also far more likely to call themselves liberal than two decades ago.” The survey numbers support these conclusions.
Times writer Bierman notes that while more women than not support Harris by a significant margin, for some who define themselves as liberal, old values die hard: “The 2022 Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights affects both men and women, as did the pandemic, Butler said… ‘We have seen our children struggle to recover, which impacts mothers and fathers,’ [said US Sen. Laphonza Butler, a Democrat from Los Angeles and a longtime political ally to Harris] ‘And so to make a gender story — or to try to somehow, I think, minimize the totality of what it’s going to [take to] win this election — even if it’s going to be close, is not telling the whole story.’
“That hasn’t stopped Harris from leaning hard into her vision of female empowerment. Her first official campaign video launched Thursday [7/25] used the Beyoncé power anthem ‘Freedom,’ which she also plays at campaign events. In the video and speeches, Harris has put ‘freedom to make decisions about your own body’ at the center of her message, along with gun violence, healthcare, child poverty and Trump’s legal problems… ‘In this moment, we are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms,’ she said at an American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston. ‘And to this room of leaders, I say: Bring it on.’
“Harris’ message so far seems especially resonant with women, who have filled online events. Rochelle Allen said Harris is ‘our only hope right now’ as she waited for her to speak in Houston… But the 74-year-old from Detroit, who teaches at Wayne State University, is also worried and would have preferred that Biden stay in the race. She came of age when women were taught to put men first and allow them to lead, even in her church where she now serves as a pastor, she said… ‘There are some people who just won’t vote for a female to be the leader. That’s backwards thinking, but it is the truth,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s really important that everybody else get out to vote.’”
The Trump ticket makes no secret of its antipathy for a woman president – that foreign leaders, particularly in the Middle East will never takes Kamala Harris seriously – as the above quote clearly illustrates. Even the “guns vs gun control” issue is a masculine/feminine divergence of values. The array of gender role undercurrents in this coming election are both fascinating and terrifying. Culture war or not, America is in a period of profound social transformation in the roles of men and women.
I’m Peter Dekom, and in the world of understanding the big and obvious election issues, even a political system that seems to be teetering, sometimes it’s worth digging deeper at the undercurrents of change that just be the most threatening of all.
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