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The Perils of Political Maternalism

By Jean Bethke Elshtain

Now that Cindy Sheehan has taken up attacking all who disagree with her, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-N.Y.), Democratic commentators are singing a different tune. Where once Sheehan was a sympathetic mother rightly demanding a meeting with President Bush—presumably in order to call him a “spewer of filth” to his face—now she is guilty of making bad judgments and allowing herself to be manipulated by extremist groups who have turned her protest into a media circus.

But Sheehan hasn’t changed at all - she’s simply broadened her field of targets. At this point, one wonders whether New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, still believe her mind-boggling assertion that a mother, like Sheehan, who has lost a child, possesses “absolute moral authority.” Dowd is no moral philosopher, of course, but any thoughtful person can take note of how mischievous such a proclamation is. Presumably, by implication, it means the grieving mother of an S.S. officer fighting for Nazi Germany possesses a similar “absolute moral authority.” If not, why not? She, too, mourns her loss.

This observation points to but one of the dangers of politicized motherhood. If the grieving mother holds absolute moral authority, everyone else, by definition, has no moral ground to stand on at all. Or, better put, whatever moral authority anyone else claims is trumped by maternal authority. Unfortunately, maternal grief does not distinguish between deaths for a noble or an ignoble cause. When maternal loss is politicized in a highly partisan manner, as in Sheehan’s case, it exercises a chilling effect on political speech. Criticism seems churlish and mean-spirited. One is being mean to a grieving mother.

As well, the woman without children is told she has “no idea of what it’s like”, so she had best demur.(Unless, of course, she agrees completely with Sheehan, in which case she has presumably triumphed over her childless condition and made a moral leap into complete identification with Sheehan’s loss.) One wonders, as well, where fathers belong in all of this. Mr. Sheehan disagrees with his wife about the Iraq War. Is his grief not as authentic as hers? But a father’s loss lacks the wrenching immediacy afforded by maternal imagery, so dads fade into the background.

A second troubling feature of Sheehan’s world is that a 24-year old adult son who served one tour of duty in an All Volunteer Force, then signed up for a second tour of duty, then volunteered for a dangerous mission during which he lost his life, is frozen in time as perpetual “child.” For we hear the staccato refrain over-and-over again, “She lost her child in Iraq.” This loses sight of certain salient facts. Casey Sheehan wasn’t a reluctant conscript, hauled off to fight against his will. He was an adult. Does this not count for anything? Rather than respecting the adult son who made tough decisions and paid with his life, the "Lost child" motif strips Casey Sheehan of his adult status. Young Mr. Sheehan made some choices, but that is lost sight of.

The sad truth is that grieving mothers are no more immune from political mischief and misjudgment than anyone else. Sheehan’s claims must, therefore, be evaluated as the extreme political claims that they are, laced through and through with conspiracy theory, vulgarisms, cheap shots, and plain old-fashioned ignorance. Her colossal mistake lies in the fact that the power of maternal loss, if it is to be galvanized to political ends, must be represented with dignity and gravitas. I think here of the Mothers of the Plaza in Argentina and the central role they played in calling attention to murderous policies in their country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the mothers eventually fragmented along partisan lines, at the height of their protest they were the conscience of an Argentine society ripped apart by state-sponsored terrorism, governed by a military junta.

The mothers pled for fundamental human dignity and human rights. They argued against tyranny. They had no publicists nor spinners. In effect, they proclaimed: who among us will openly defend the abduction, torture, and murder of young people? Who among us will step forward and openly denounce basic human rights? Witnessing Las Madres in their powerful vigil in the heart of Buenos Aires, I was struck by the power their imagery evoked. And it did so precisely because the moral message was clear and unambiguous: A decent society does not ‘disappear’ people, does not criminalize dissent. When I interviewed Las Madres, they told me that their protest aimed to prevent massive and egregious human rights abuses of the sort suffered by their sons and daughters from ever occurring again in Argentina. Further, they didn’t want their sons and daughters obliterated from cultural memory. Their vigil and protest constituted a living memorial to those lost to political criminality.

In Cindy Sheehan‘s world one pillories, one inflames, one doesn’t worry if one has the facts on one’s side. She has apparently voiced sympathy for conspiracy theorist who opine that it is the "Jews and Israel" who are responsible for the Iraq war in the first place. Saddest of all is the fact that Sheehan’s traveling protest now revolves around her. Casey Sheehan has faded into the backdrop. Cindy Sheehan’s brand of political maternalism narrows rather than broadens our sympathies and our understanding by claiming a unique moral authority and insight that is hers — and, by extention, that of all who agree with her. Mothers who dissent from Sheehan’s extreme position, and who have also lost sons, are regarded as ninnies who have been gulled. Surely it is far better for our political process to operate on the assumption that all citizens qua citizens have standing and moral voice and no single person or group of persons’ moral authority is, or can be, absolute.

From July, 2006

Comments

Certainly the politics of Las Madres del Plaza had more substance than the "absolute moral authority of a grieving mother" that Elshtain seems to say Cindy Sheehan (or is it Maureen Dowd's image of Cindy Sheehand?) now claims. But nowhere in her article does Elshtain indicate how she arrives at this vision of Sheehan's moral/political stance--other than by saying Sheehan "has apparently voiced sympathy for conspiracy theorist[s]" and "In Cindy Sheehan‘s world one pillories, one inflames, one doesn’t worry if one has the facts." Yes, some facts about this would be nice here.

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