The 2024 Election Is A Gender War

Commentator

Dear Friends,

I have a piece out in Compact arguing that — thanks largely to Substack! — we are in a writing renaissance (although not talking about it) and I have a piece in The Brooklyn Rail on the playwright Mike Bartlett.

Best,

Sam

THE 2024 ELECTION IS A GENDER WAR

This is a provocative piece. Many of you will hate it. I’m sure you’ll be able to pick apart all kinds of things in it. But it feels to me that there is inarguably some truth in what I’m saying here — and it seems important to make this point because nobody else is doing so explicitly.

My underlying thesis here is that the history of feminism and the history of American electoral politics have converged in such a way that not only are the parties splintering heavily along gender lines but that a great deal of what is at stake in the election (if implicitly, subliminally) is a conception of male leadership as opposed to female leadership.

So what do I mean by ‘feminism’? I mean, the age-old war of the sexes moving clearly into the public sphere in the late-middle of the 20th century. The war of the sexes is the oldest division we have and the most profound. Euripides wrote about it, and Alexander Pope, but a few literary texts don’t even begin to touch the extent to which the gender war has always, and will always, run through all of our psyches. This story is much more complicated than written history can ever make it out to be — since written history tends to touch only a very narrow sector of the public sphere and much of the conflict occurs in the day-to-day jockeying for power within family units. But, suffice it to say, that for large stretches of history and in many parts of the world, an idea of radically bifurcated gender roles had taken hold. In many conceptions, this didn’t necessarily play out as male domination — “women vote indirect,” Thornton Wilder wrote in Our Town, meaning that pre-1920 women just dispatched their husbands to vote for them; “you’ll come to see that women actually have all the power,” an alcoholic German told me once when I was at an impressionable age — but there is no question that the public sphere was overwhelmingly a male domain. The premise of 20th century feminism (somebody like Shulamith Firestone articulates this very clearly) is that the older gender roles represent a bad and unequal social contract — at best, ill-suited for an era of declining birth rates and of a prevalence of skilled, brain-y modes of work; at worst, a form of brutal male domination — and that that social contract needs to be torn up and rewritten, above all by women through their own efforts securing access to wealth and political power.

Shulamith Firestone in 1969

Now that we’re about sixty years into the feminist revolution, we can make — tepidly — a few observations about what female power looks like in the public sphere. This is where you would be able to start picking apart what I’m saying and to argue that it’s all generalities — which is, yes, true, but having worked both in male-dominated offices and female-dominated offices, there are some patterns that come through that I suspect will feel familiar to many of you.

What hasn’t happened is that top-down leadership structures have disappeared, to be replaced by the kind of blissfully egalitarian structures that Marija Gimbutas described in her theory of a pre-historic matriarchy. You can argue that that’s because women in positions of leadership in the capitalist West are being slotted into institutions that were previously constructed by men, and that may be, but what I’ve encountered are different leadership tendencies each with their own challenges.

In the female-dominated offices, there has tended to be more of an emphasis on consensus, more of an interest that even those at the bottom of the totem pole are comfortable and feel part of the mission. This can certainly be preferable to antagonism-driven offices dominated by males, but it has its dark side as well — it can feel as if there is less space for those with divergent but viable visions of how the organization should operate; and those who fall outside a reigning consensus can find themselves more completely ostracized.

In the female-dominated offices, there has tended to be more of an emphasis on perfection — on doing the work really well, without sloppiness, and with ‘deliverables’ immaculate. This has its obvious benefits but its own dark side. The virtue of the ‘old boy network’ was that it had a high tolerance for weirdos and misfits who might have abundant shortcomings but could compensate for them with vision or a stroke of out-of-the-box thinking. In some cases, weirdos like that could be protected throughout their careers with — this has become a real sticking-point in the culture wars — their personal failings deemed irrelevant to the value they offered to the company or organization.

In the female-dominated offices, there has tended to be slightly less vertical integration and slightly more of a communicative process towards reaching decisions. It seems to be important for male leaders to clear out rivals and have an established chain of command, while in the female-dominated offices I’ve worked in, there has been more of a feeling of a ‘brain trust,’ of a handful of trusted advisors regularly talking and the decision emerging out of that deliberative process. The result has been to have more consensus going into an ultimate decision but with the dark side that it is not always so clear who takes responsibility for the decision when something goes wrong.

You will find all sorts of exceptions to the patterns I am describing — and I can certainly think of exceptions too — but I have observed the above patterns enough to feel that the American workplace, well into the feminist era, is dividing into different styles of leadership, and sometimes with whole industries leaning towards one gendered conception at the expense of the other.

Where this intersects with politics is that now — much more distinctly than in the past — the Republicans and Democrats have, both in their voting constituency and in their branding, divided up into something surprisingly approaching a ‘boys team’ and a ‘girls team.’

This wasn’t so much the case in Hillary Clinton’s presidential runs where she was at pains to steer clear of gender politics — the “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” line appeared only after she’d lost the 2008 primary — although questions about gender and misogyny circulated constantly in the background of her campaigns. But, with Trump and Harris and with the more general trajectory of feminism, gender has become, really, the centerpiece of the 2024 election.

Hillary Clinton in 2008

I was very struck at the Democratic Convention by how little attempt the party was making to court the male vote. When it came to substantive issues, virtually all the talking points were about abortion rights and IVF. The Dems seemed to nod in the direction of male voters by emphasizing Harris and Walz’s gun ownership, as well as Walz’s ability to change a tire, but there was precious little on manufacturing jobs, opioid addiction, or what’s increasingly being called the male ‘education crisis’ — or any of the issues that might be expected to appeal to male swing voters in battleground states.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the talking points have become unabashedly gendered. JD Vance’s line that the Democrats are a party of “childless cat ladies” was followed up by Sarah Huckabee Sanders implying that Harris’ lack of biological children meant she had nothing “keeping her humble.” At a revealing moment, the presidential debate devolved into an argument about ‘strong men,’ with Trump saying, “Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart.”

That split is borne out by a striking divergence in voting preferences. The most recent NYT/Siena poll shows Harris with a 14% advantage among female voters and Trump with a 12% advantage among male voters. That discrepancy is particularly strong among younger voters, with Harris enjoying a 27% lead among young women in swing states, which is balanced out by Trump’s 24% edge with young men. As a New York Times analysis puts it, discussing young women’s liberal turn, “It’s unusual for shifts in political ideology to be so pronounced.” In attempting to understand the change, Claire Cain Miller, writing for The Times, put it, “For a generation of women who were raised being told they could do anything, the triple punch of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Mr. Trump, the #MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade forcefully shaped their political views.”

Which is fair enough but doesn’t quite explain the parallel advantage that’s opening up for Trump among men, at least among swing state voters. Because, on the issues, men and women wouldn’t necessarily seem to be quite as divergent as they are in their party affiliation: men and women are actually very closely aligned in their views of abortion, with 61% of men holding that abortion should be legal in all/most cases, only a shade off the 64% of women with the same view.

So what seems to be happening in the gendered swing goes beyond political issues. Much of it is Trump, of course — with Trump’s blatant misogyny alienating women —but, as recent Gallup findings show, the swing extends to party affiliation and a broad range of views, not just the choice of individual candidates.

What I believe it’s fundamentally about is a divide over male or female styles of leadership — in other words, that feminism is on the ballot. This has to be caveated by saying that Trump is such a bizarre, unique figure, that he throws off all kinds of analysis. Even conservative-leaning men of, say, the Jordan Peterson variety would tend to say that Trump represents a narrow type of male leadership — which is bullying, which is humiliating rivals and pushing them out of the way — and that there is a very different type of male leadership, based on earned merit, that can be had.

But in the swing of males towards the Trump camp — even if they may have their own problems with Trump — there is a deep discontent with the female style of leadership that males increasingly feel the Democratic Party represents. That comes through in a dislike of ‘cancel culture’ and ‘political correctness’ — in the idea that, in a consensus-driven public sphere, divergent points of view are increasingly not tolerated. That comes through in a split on issues like the environment, where solutions would seem to emerge from a consensus-driven, society-wide approach and where men and women find themselves strikingly at loggerheads. That comes through in a belief that in a female-dominated public sphere emphasis tends to fall on ‘harms’ rather than ‘norms,’ that public figures can be canceled or have their careers destroyed for damage they have caused, even if they haven’t technically violated any laws (the recent dust-up over Andrew Huberman would be an example of this). And that comes through, maybe most simply of all, in the sense that, in the public sphere, the sexes have split into tribes which override institutional allegiances. “Believe women” was the rallying cry at the height of #MeToo — a value that was meant to supersede everything else.

The sense of a division into a ‘boys’ side’ and a ‘girls’ side’ extends not just to the presidential election but to core questions of the legitimacy of the body politic. In the Dobbs decision, which broke largely on gender lines within the Court, the majority adopted an originalist position — holding that Roe v. Wade could not be protected by the 14th Amendment given that, at the time of the 14th Amendment’s adoption, “abortion was largely prohibited in most American states.” This argument did not sit well with the Court’s liberals, who, in their dissent, responded: “Of course, ‘people’ did not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Men did. Those responsible for the original Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment, did not perceive women as equals, and did not recognize women’s rights.” A similar argument appeared a couple of weeks ago in Jennifer Szalai’s New York Times piece, ‘The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?’ in which Szalai argues that the Constitution is fatally flawed by the “framers’ inability to conceive of a future when women and Black people would have a right to vote.” In other words, for a number of very powerful people within the civic discourse, the line in the sand is being drawn at an extremely dangerous place — conservatives arguing that jurisprudence must stem from divining the intentions of the all-male Constitutional framers; and liberals contending that the lack of gender representation in the Constitution’s framing makes it close to a dead letter of a document, or at the very least in need of drastic reform.

Writing as a commentator on politics, I can only deplore the sharp division by gender. Donald Trump — whom I believe to be a misogynist to the bone — apparently can’t help himself but turn the Republican Party into a stereotypically ‘male’ party, celebrating a ‘strong man’ style of leadership. Less understandable is Democrats’ apparent unwillingness to reach out to males as a core part of their party platform, to take on for instance the male ‘education crisis’ as a plank. Elections rely on coalition-building, and if the Democrats can squeak out a victory in 2024, they nonetheless will need to do better with young men in the future.

But the schism of the body politic into a ‘boys’ camp’ and ‘girls’ camp’ is more profound than just a divide within electoral politics. It really is the war of the sexes playing out all across the public sphere — and, in many cases, with very different conceptions of authority and styles of leadership in play. I don’t know how any of that unfolds. I believe strongly, though, that it’s worth talking about openly — and recognizing that, for many swing voters, it’s likely this set of gender issues that will be the crux of the election.