Socio-political, economic, academic and media elites love to throw the word “disruption” around with such abandon one would think they actually know what it means. Reality has shown that it’s more an all-encompassing catchphrase employed by those who either failed to predict the tectonic changes that have swept across contemporary society or, having missed the boat, are now trying desperately to sound “in” and by so doing regain a measure of lost credibility.
Putting lipstick on a pig has always been a futile gesture. It’s still always going to be a pig. And using buzzwords does nothing than to confirm that, after thousands of years of what passes as human civilization, we are still really talking about managing, staying ahead, or keeping up with change.
In that sense, the twenty first century has seen tectonic shifts in what was once an ossified global polity: Taiwan has its first female president, Angela Merkel and Theresa May lead G8 nations, France has its first female Defense Minister, and newly minted South Korean President Moon Jae-in has tapped Kang Kyung-wha to serve as his Foreign Minister. Add to this the fact that traditionally conservative Japan has former beauty queen (and part Taiwanese) Renho as Opposition leader, Tomomi Inada in charge of the military and Yuriko Koike as Tokyo Governor and one has a plausible scenario whereby a woman could very well succeed Shinzo Abe as PM. After all, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, when queried as to how he composed his widely praised cabinet (50% of which are female, with a Somalian, and Sikh serving as heads of Immigration and Defence), “It’s 2015.” The US elected Barack Obama president, Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal (both of Indian origins) governors and, just recently, Leo Varadkar, the 38-year-old son of an Indian immigrant who openly announced his sexual orientation as gay in 2015 has been voted leader of the country’s main governing party, and by extension, prime minister.
Change is as inevitable and relentless as the tides.
So then, how to fully explain America's recurrent inability to elect a female commander-in-chief?
In May 2017, when Hillary Clinton spoke about the role that sexism played in her defeat, there was a fierce backlash from unfriendly pundits, disgusted that she was not accepting complete responsibility for her campaign’s failure. While no one actually thinks that sexism is the sole reason Clinton lost (she really did run an ineffective, soulless, themeless electoral effort), there’s an abundance of polling data to suggest that it was at least was a contributing factor. A January study found that 30% of men as well as 25% of women who voted for Donald Trump, said that men generally make better political leaders than women. By 10 points, Republican men said they thought women are better off in America than men are.
There is justification to how fears of emasculation affected men’s political preferences. In a growing number of households, women earn more than men -- in about a quarter of households, but in most surveys, only 10 percent of men will say that’s true of their own families. Declining male power plays into increased certainty about previously held gender clichés where men were the primary breadwinner.
Asked about a matchup between Clinton and Trump, men who’d been queried about earning power were 8 percentage points less likely to support Clinton and 16 points more likely to support Trump, a total swing of 24 points. Support for Bernie Sanders versus Trump was unaffected by the question.
The economic trends underlying male panic aren’t changing anytime soon.
Just as large numbers of white middle class voters felt increasingly disenfranchised from the Obama “rainbow” mainstream which seemed to revel in not being classified as such, men began to bridle at the perception that they were being too harshly treated; it led to a seven-point shift toward Trump among men. This may also be due to Clinton in particular, as her long and controversial tenure in public life, is uniquely threatening to many men but it is a possible harbinger that other female candidates could easily evoke similar masculine anxieties.
In short, a woman running for office may represent some sort of threat to men’s roles.
What’s more, the economic trends underlying male panic aren’t changing anytime soon. Most of the current state “disruptive” changes sweeping industries are impacting sectors which are predominantly male populated. At the same time women are outstripping men in educational attainment.
In such an environment, any woman running for president is at a disadvantage. An increasing number of men who feel they’re being discriminated against are heavily prevalent in swing states such as Ohio and Michigan, former sites of the traditional economy’s industrial jobs that used to offer middle-class wages to men without college degrees.
1) The Obvious Candidate
It would be nice to believe that Elizabeth Warren could speak to some of these economically anxious men. She has a compelling backstory: daughter of a janitor and "self-made," the Massachusetts senator is a passionate economic populist whom no one would ever accuse of being chummy with Wall Street. To Clinton’s liberal critics, Warren is Clinton’s opposite: steadfast where Clinton was prevaricating, authentic where Clinton is calculating, principled where Clinton bends the truth. Unlike Clinton, Warren is not attached to a controversial spouse whose reputation has at times overshadowed (and, by association, sullied) her own. She hasn’t spent decades in the public eye serving as an avatar for unseemly female ambition.
Yet Warren is not invulnerable to some of the attacks that undermined Clinton. In April, she appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher to promote her book,and was asked to explain why so many in the white working class prefer Trump to her, a profound disconnect that does not bode well for her future aspirations. The moment recalled the countless times Clinton has been asked to account for people’s dislike of her, a question with no good answer.
It was hardly the first time Warren had been hit with the “unlikeable” charge. When she ran for Senate in 2012, she faced a stream of stories about how much more congenial people found her opponent, then-incumbent Scott Brown. While voters admired Warren, with her relatable life and a resume chock full of impressive accomplishments, they want to hang out -- or have a beer -- with Brown. Worse, while demographically she’s from the ranks of millions middle class American women, some of them in Massachusetts found her vocal, policy wonk style annoying.
Recent trial polls found a generic Democrat trouncing Trump in 2020 but the president beating Warren by six points. Was this because the party is perceived as shuddering too far left, or is it more an indication of a “nanny effect” where a number of voters can’t stand to feel lectured by a wonkish older woman?
In politics, identifying misogyny risks reinforcing it. It can be hard to describe the dangers of running for office while female without giving those dangers visibility; to speculate about what kind of slurs might be thrown at a candidate is to put those slurs out there in the first place. Feminists know this, yet layered on top of the trauma of Clinton’s loss is the dread of repeating it.
Sure enough, the hardball-playing Republicans plan to use pages from the anti-Clinton playbook against Warren in her 2018 Senate race; the long-range strategy is to inflict damage ahead of a possible presidential run. Thus the drumbeat of Warren being ‘out of the mainstream’ and being ‘pushy’ is growing louder in the conservative media as the GOP wants its narrative to sink in and resonate with the electorate well before the voting begins. If Democrats allow themselves to be preemptively spooked by possible Republican attacks, they may be falling into the right’s trap.
The double bind for female candidates is that women who contend for power are less likely than men to be seen as likable, but likeability has outsized importance for them. Voters might support a qualified man they dislike but not an unlikable, qualified woman. In 2016, she notes, 18 percent of the voters disliked both candidates, and these voters went for Trump by double digits.
2) Who Else?
As of this writing, the Dems lack a template for a likable female presidential candidate. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York senator like Clinton before her, is widely considered to be more personable and charismatic than her predecessor, but she’s already been caricatured in similar terms. Gillibrand describes how, upon entering the Senate, “opponents and detractors” nicknamed her “Tracy Flick,” after the perky, dementedly ambitious character from the movie 'Election.' There’s no telling how much people will like Gillibrand after an overwhelming campaign of Republican demonization.
Or consider California Sen. Kamala Harris, who seems, at least on the surface, a potential distaff analogue to Barack Obama. (Indeed, the Washington Post once ran a piece headlined, “Is Kamala Harris the next Barack Obama?”) Like Obama in his Senate days, she’s a telegenic newcomer to the national stage with a melting-pot background (she is the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India). She’s garnered buzz for her early and consistent opposition to Trump, including her sharp questioning of John Kelly, now head of the Department of Homeland Security, over how he would handle undocumented immigrants who’d been brought to the U.S. as children. At 52, she’s relatively young, and for several decades Democrats have done best with young candidates: John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama were all under 55 when they were elected.
But an unfair double standard pervades the polity: while men are often judged on their potential, women are judged on their achievements, which makes it far from clear that any woman could mimic Obama’s rocket trajectory, because women have to spend more time than men do proving themselves capable. Then once they’ve put in the time and paid their dues, they can easily be written off as too old. Hillary Clinton spent decades working to become overqualified for the presidency, culminating in 112 countries visited and nearly 1 million miles flown as secretary of state, and her efforts were rewarded with Trump and his supporters successfully questioning her “stamina” during the 2016 campaign.
Given the endless ranking of Clinton’s flaws as a candidate both during and after the election, it’s easy to forget that before entering the race, she was the most popular politician in the country; at one point, the Wall Street Journal reported her favorability rating at 69 percent, a level President Trump can only dream of. But people perceive women differently when they’re contending for executive office than when they’re running for a collaborative body, like the Senate, or serving under male leadership: If you’re too tough, you’re not feminine. If you’re too feminine, you’re not tough enough. There’s a very small space between those two that is safe territory.
Clinton was never able to find that place.
If you buy Clinton’s analysis of the challenges she faced, it’s hard to know what to do with it. It would be a very dark irony if a feminist reading of 2016 led to the conclusion that Democrats shouldn’t nominate a woman in 2020. Logic and the current political reality dictates that the long-term solution to male anxiety about female leadership is to have women run so often that it becomes commonplace. Seen that way, the next primary could mark the beginning of this process.
It’s not just about a woman candidate. It’s reaching the state of affairs whereby all the best candidates are women.
An important factor is that the shock of 2016 has galvanized women with progressive views into taking action. Some surveys show that the Democratic Party is 59 percent female, and there would be quite a base for a strong female presidential candidacy.
Still, it’s easy to imagine the furious female energy in the Democratic Party expressing itself as it has so often in the past: by lifting up a magnetic young man in the JFK or Barack Obama mode. French President Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau's famous handshakes has shown there’s power in going mano a mano Trump on his own masculine turf. An American politician who could similarly unman the president would create a lot of enthusiasm. Many American women face the dichotomy wherein they want to break the male lock on the presidency, yet they also want to preserve what they see as the nation's true values, and it’s all too possible that those two goals are at loggerheads. For many women, at this stage they don't care whether it's a man or a woman, they just want Trump out of there.
Therein lies the rub.