The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh is a stark reminder of patriarchal power, but also a catalyst of militance and mobilization. Suburban women—the so-called soccer moms—are a major swing vote, and in the midterms their feelings about sexual harassment could be a decisive factor, at least when it comes to the House. But beneath the outrage and determination is a more complicated picture. To ignore it is to suffer the results.
According to the web site Five Thirty Eight, led by crack data cruncher Nate Silver, the Republicans succeeded in ratifying Kavanaugh’s nomination because they made it about the #MeToo movement. Lindsay Graham’s tirade, in which he blazoned his identity as “a single white male from South Carolina” who has been “told to shut up, but I won’t shut up,” was not just a spontaneous expression of anger. It was the flash point of a coherent Republican strategy, and it worked because they know their base. The specter of a social putsch by shrieking feminists is now codified in the Republican line. The Democrats are to be regarded as an angry mob led by a harpy horde. This is an anti-feminist version of the dog whistles that have long guided GOP politics when it comes to race. Call it a bitch whistle.
But that tactic may help the GOP maintain the status quo. Just as racial backlash facilitated a wholesale abandonment of the Democratic party by white males—only about a quarter of them voted for Al Gore—the current version is solidifying the Republican electorate through fear of sexual change. It’s no surprise that, as the Kavanaugh hearings focused on the issue of male privilege and predation, Republicans were more likely to support him. As Five Thirty Eight put it, “there is a deep vein of resistance to #MeToo and what it means in conservative America.”
Look at the numbers. According to one survey. 54 percent of Republicans think that movement has gone too far; only eight percent believe it hasn’t gone far enough. And here’s the real shocker. Forty-eight percent of Republican women say they would consider voting for someone facing multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Only 14 percent of Democratic women hold that view. But if these figures are put together, they suggest that most women would not be swayed by such accusations alone. For men, that figure is, unsurprisingly, even higher.
Polls vary, of course; a number of them say that a majority of people don’t approve of putting Kavanaugh on the court, but that includes those who object to his past rulings. When it comes to sexual abuse, the stark fact is that those who think an accusation is sufficient grounds for keeping someone from public office are a minority. So the most salient question to emerge from the Kavanaugh calamity is a time-honored one: What is to be Done?
I preface my response by acknowledging my position as a white male. (I’m also gay, but I don’t think that makes me much more objective about this issue.) I do, however, have political instincts, because, at a very advanced age, I’ve been around the block. And, though I have reservations about some aspects of the #MeToo movement, I regard it as one of the most important political events in history, and I share many of its goals. I believe that the regulation of male aggression is the story of civilization itself. The issue for me is where to draw the line between regulation and the suppression of male desire, and how it should be done. If the movement intrudes too far into the intimate lives of people, it is bound to meet with fierce resistance. If it does away entirely with due process, it will seem dangerous to many people. This may not be the case if your world consists of Facebook followers, progressive media, and commentators for The New York Times. But it’s a big country, and if you expect much of it be quiet in the face of fear, you might succeed at producing silence, but you won’t control the way those who feel threatened vote.
Susan Chira, who writes about gender issues for the Times, has a superb piece analyzing the many reasons why some women oppose #MeToo. One of them is the imbedded belief that authority should be vested in men. The corollary is the belief that men should protect women and children even at the cost of their lives. To the extent that feminism challenges these values, as it must, it will alienate those women, unless they see that their lives and the welfare of their families are better served when power is shared between the sexes. This is a tricky process, to say the least, but it has to be undertaken if feminism is ever to spread beyond the boundaries of blue-state America. That mainstreaming must involve dealing with women who are uneasy about the movement, not just because they were inducted into a system of sexual hierarchy, but also because they worry about the fate of their husbands and sons.
The disturbing data I’ve cited is evidence of why I think feminism is different from other movements for human rights. I believe that the races should live together, intimately as well as communally. Still, the species will survive if they don’t. Gays and straights don’t usually mate, and that’s one reason why the LGBT movement has been successful; it doesn’t have much of an impact on the heterosexual population, and a backlash based on religious convictions is less potent than one based on personal anxieties. A successful right-wing campaign combines both sources of resistance to liberalism, and Republicans have mastered that combo over the past half century. It is at the heart of their politics.
How can this strategy be shattered? There’s no way to do so without addressing the economic insecurity that underlies all the angst, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. What seems necessary to me is a feminist politics that understands why, unlike other movements, this one has to consider everybody. Speaking bitterness about the sexual system, no matter how necessary, won’t expand the feminist base, because the sexes are bound together. What this means is that men have to be engaged in any meaningful change, and on terms that seem right to them. There’s no way out of that unless you intend to live in an enclave where all the televisions are permanently tuned to Rachel Maddow.
Acknowledging the importance of intimacy doesn’t mean giving up on empowering women and controlling abusive men. It means devising a strategy that most men and the women in their lives feel comfortable with. It’s a difficult agenda, given the profit to be made from exploiting people’s fears. But I don’t think feminism can establish itself as a truly popular ethos without undertaking that task. The danger in ignoring it is that liberals guilty of misconduct will be ruined, while culpable conservatives remain in power. Goodbye, Al Franken; hello, Brett Kavanaugh. In the long run, this bifurcation could widen the divide between a largely liberal, urban and suburban middle class, in which men embrace the standards of equity and probity, and a largely conservative, regional and rural right in which men—and most women—resist it. That isn’t victory; it’s a sexual version of states rights.
So perhaps we ought to talk about what forms of due process are appropriate for an accusation of abuse. It seems to me that the Senate came up with one—but then they and the White House rigged the result. A fair version of that procedure, in which charges are fully investigated, with the aim of corroborating them or not, could make a difference in how people who are frightened by this movement come to see it. If the facts are supported with evidence, some of these people will agree with us, enough of them to make a difference. The Republicans know that; we must act on it.
Roy Moore went down in ruby-red Alabama when the truth about his behavior became known. We can look at that election with horror, since he came close to winning, or we can see it as a model for what must be done. Most people are guided by ideological beliefs, but not determined by them. There will always be a group that resists any attempt to replace male power with something more fully human. Still, I believe the opposition will shrink if people are convinced that what is being alleged is true. One woman who voted for Trump told Chira that she believes in innate difference between men and women, but she added, “We don’t have blinders on.” Perhaps it’s male naivety on my part, or self interest disguised as reason, to sense that there are many women like her. We won’t know until we try to reach them.
The standard doesn’t have to be “innocent until proven guilty,” since sexual abuse often occurs without witnesses, but we can’t convict someone ipso facto. It feels authoritarian, at least to me. Some system in which both possibilities are weighed must emerge from this trauma. If that doesn’t happen, resentment will enhance the conservative agenda, and it will rule us.