In a recent column, Thomas Edsall offers up a variety of perspectives on the political consequences of the ongoing revolt against sexual harassment that’s swept Hollywood and is now beginning to take down elected officials. Academics who’ve been studying and polling women’s rights issues see a more complex dynamic than a simple assessment that the movement will hurt or help the chances of Democrats in upcoming elections.
Some sobering statistics suggest that even if we’re in the midst of a seismic shift in attitudes, sentiment around harassment and equal rights is still starkly divided between political parties and deeply tied to gender. Some observers also interpret some polling as suggesting that the #MeToo movement may create its own backlash. Given that this movement is itself arguably a backlash against the election of Donald Trump, whether this movement is provoking its own backlash or simply running into existing attitudes that helped elect Donald Trump seems an open and vital question. Within this question lurks the deeper question of how social change occurs, and what relationship it has to politics.
Politically, the boilerplate questions to ask are whether this social movement will bring undecided or persuadable voters from the Republican to the Democratic side of the ticket, whether it will inspire more Democratic or Republican partisans to vote, and whether it will energize the leadership and elected officials of either party. On the plus side for Democrats, a huge number of women are running for office in 2018, which would seem to bring a very real energy to the party, and to offer females incensed by harassment and other equality issues an obvious party and slate of candidates to support.
Against such optimistic signs we need to weigh recent history; for instance, white women voted for Donald Trump 52% to 43%. Is it realistic to think that many of these voters will change their minds because of the #MeToo movement and the revelations beyond Trump’s harassment that have driven it over the past year? Comments by Columbia University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi are worth reading carefully; she cautions that a larger framework of political and cultural sympathies shapes how some people might respond to arguments for female political empowerment:
If the idea is that Democrats can win over and mobilize people who did not vote for them last cycle by calling Trump a sexist, and Roy Moore a predator — even if many voters agree and are disturbed by Moore and Trump — many of them can also sympathize with Trump in a sense. The same people who are bashing Trump have also disparaged them (Trump supporters) as misogynistic, racist, homophobic, ignorant, etc. — to their minds, unfairly. So they don’t put a lot of stock in those messengers, and indeed, hearing Democrats sling these kinds of labels around will probably just stir up resentment against the left.
[P]rogressives have done a great job framing racial inequality, feminism and LGBTQ rights as part of the same basic struggle. However, this association works both ways. Accusations of misogyny, for instance, are often heard in the context of a fundamentally anti-white, anti-Christian culture war — a zero-sum campaign waged against ordinary hard-working Americans by condescending and politically-correct liberal elites.
What a recurrent theme this is!: people have preconceived interpretative frameworks that all too easily channel what could be disruptive new information into reinforcing an existing mindset. This, of course, is otherwise known as human nature, though amplified in this case by a conservative propaganda apparatus and a starting mindset that is particularly hostile to allowing in new facts. The fundamental difficulty of persuading people, in tandem with the fundamental importance of making a persuasive effort in a democracy, suggests that hitting on a strategy to maximize persuasion and minimize backlash is the key question if this movement is to achieve its broadest possible impact in our politics and society.
On this score, I’m drawn to the perspective of Stonybrook University political scientist Leonie Huddy, who notes how the two parties already have captured the loyalty of pro- and anti-feminists, and suggests that linking not only gender issues but race and immigration arguments into a broader economic framework is necessary. Her final point is key — she argues that doing so “reduces the sense that one group wins at another group’s expense.”
This zero-sum mindset sometimes feels like the key issue in contemporary U.S. politics. It’s a notion that haunts necessary coalition building within the Democratic Party, and it’s an essential part of the moral sickness of racism that poisons the legitimacy of the GOP. “That woman is accusing that man of sexual harassment because she wants his job.” “If we allow black people to vote with abandon, they will use their power to serve their own kind and punish white people.” “If we let immigrants into the country, they will take my job.” Appallingly absent is the idea that fellow citizens might cooperate, or might not place paramount importance on the dominance and submission of other groups.
The deeper reality that I’ve argued for repeatedly here at The Hot Screen is that most Americans have an overriding common interest: to secure themselves economically, politically, and socially from the ravages of our current state of predatory capitalism, in which most of us have been made to serve the needs of the economy rather than the economy made to serve the needs of Americans. Donald Trump’s faux populism and policy of massive tax breaks for the rich should have provided decisive evidence to many of his voters that he’s not on their side in this struggle — yet he’s still able to maintain their support in part by playing to their fears around race, immigration, and gender, implicitly suggesting that their lives and livelihoods are threatened by a usurping and wanton brown-tinged, female-led army whose goal above all else is to miscegenate whiteness into oblivion while spending your hard-earned money on tax breaks for anchor babies and chain migration (“anchors” and “chains” not coincidentally evoking the idea of retardant forces that would drag and muddle to a standstill the otherwise predestined progress of the SS America across white-capped seas into a glorious future). Make no mistake: the president's 1%-friendly policies are only going to worsen our collective economic prospects, increasing the right's interest in dividing Americans against each other to distract from the looting in plain view.
