Misogyny Among White Married Women Helped Elect Trump

Married white women in large numbers went along with their men and rejected Hillary Clinton. The why of this has been hard to determine because it’s difficult to look inside people’s minds. Most of the white women who voted for the Russian backed serial bankrupt assaulter of women and insulter of all races and ethnicities said they did so because they admired him and honestly believed she was a crook and a liar and unpatriotic. (Hillary has often remained seated on the sofa while the national anthem played during the TV broadcast of NFL games.)

My own belief, based on nothing, and roundly rejected by everyone I spoke with, was that women whose husbands or partners loved Trump and hated Hillary simply didn’t want to spend four or eight years being subjected to abuse and ridicule and blame if the first woman president ever did anything wrong. And women are likelier than men to understand that leaders sometimes make mistakes. Maybe some of them or a lot of them trusted the polls and believed Hillary would win anyway, and if bad stuff happened their partners would abuse Hillary but wouldn’t abuse them. Possible? It would be hard to get a woman to admit it.

It was very hard on white male egos to have eight years of embarrassment under a white male Republican president followed by eight non-catastrophic years under a black male president who didn’t blow the budget with a trillion dollar unnecessary and disastrous war and trigger a massive economic crisis. (It was extra humiliating that the black guy rescued the economy from what the white guy fucked up.) But to follow the very competent and cool black guy with a woman was simply too too humiliating for white men. They couldn’t bear it. I am sure their spouses and partners could tell that it would set them off in unpleasant directions for the next four, possibly eight, years. Violence against people of color rose dramatically during the Obama presidency. Would violence against women skyrocket during the first female presidency? And you can bet, just as Republicans swore to block everything Obama tried to accomplish, and the faithful in thousands of white superchristian churches prayed fervently for him to fail, that all the Republicans would do their damnedest to make sure Hillary failed. Because she made every Republican man and lots of Democratic men feel like a failure. Not only had a black man jumped the queue but now a woman had. The natural order of things was being upset. It upset people, especially white people, especially white people with dicks, but also the women who were married to them. So white women joined the Dickish Party. (It didn't hurt Trump's electability that thousands of Russian trolls and bots were pushing this same misogyny and race-worry at white voters in swing states.)

This new study doesn’t make this point but it does explain the pressure, both economic and political, that shaped the Trump vote among white married women. Deference is an old-fashioned idea some women still subscribe to. Maybe it's out of self-defense. Self interest is pretty human; people vote their pocket book. This study combines the two because it says deference to the man’s income shaped the vote of married white women; they voted against women’s economic interests to support their subservience to the man’s economic interests.

The study is reported on in the Guardian.

It’s worth looking at the unfairness at the root of all this. There is a double standard. Women are required to be perfect and at the same time deferential to their male counterparts even if those males are far less perfect than the women. Because failing to be deferential makes the males feel diminished. Some probably feel a greater need for male enhancement products if they are compared unfavorably with a woman, and that male dysfunction is contagious: when one man experiences it all men start to go flaccid and angry. Women may love their men in spite of their faults but men tend to feel uncomfortable around women who outperform them. A ultra competent woman is less attractive than a man who fucks up.

But her emails!

Last fall Newsweek published a story about how many emails George W Bush and Dick Cheney managed to lose to avoid having their Iraq War motives scrutinized. W lost 22 million emails, but nobody minded.

"According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.”

W and his boss Cheney spent trillions on an unnecessary war based on phony reasoning and what we would today call “fake news” and they covered up their machinations by “losing” 22 million emails. That’s million with an M, almost a thousand times more emails than Hillary allegedly lost. (Full disclosure: I delete emails every month, which I suppose makes me a suspicious character.)

Which Americans Prefer Dictatorship?

One thing I’ve been addressing, or trying to address, is this sudden popularity of fascism, of the idea of dictatorship. Why are Americans attracted to something they’ve never experienced? Why do Americans assume that a dictator would take dictation from them personally? Because that is the assumption Trump’s millions of admirers make.

It isn’t a misunderstanding of dictatorship. Dictators have total power but they are products of a machinery which is the source of that power. If Americans think this is a foreign idea or an obsolete idea they are wrong. It’s existed in America for centuries and it’s still here. As most of America has modernized and urbanized there are parts of America that have remained feudal and antebellum.

The regions where Trump is especially popular are actually very familiar with dictatorship.

The only seat of dictatorial power in America (since the decline of the big city machines anyway) is in rural areas where sheriffs run things. Every powerful office in America has a check on its power, a rival power center in the same district–––except small town sheriffs, whose only check is the electorate, an electorate which is more easily cowed and controlled in rural areas.

Rural sheriffs were the enforcers of Jim Crow. But these same sheriffs have also been the enforcers of male rule. Where the sheriff and his posse of good old boys is the only police force you will probably also find that crimes against women are seldom taken seriously. Unless the “violation of sacred womanhood” serves as a useful bludgeon against persons outside the powerful circles surrounding the sheriff.

Former (perhaps not so former) Jim Crow country is also Trump Country and Good Old Boy Country and Women-Do-As-They’re-Told Country. It's familiar from the rural South, but it persists in all corners of the country.

It would be worthwhile to examine and report on what I suspect is a significant difference in how women are protected by the law in these areas compared with the rest of the country, and how women in these areas are coerced into thinking like their menfolk and acting, thinking and voting as they are instructed.

There is an important difference between democratic power––the power of a democratic government––and police power. Certainly, these rural sheriffs are elected, but the actual power exists in the office, which is not subject to vote––these regions do not vote to invalidate the sheriff’s power, they simply rotate the occupants of the office, and the occupants exercise the traditional white male rule, enforcing laws that protect that rule and dismissing complaints that challenge it.

These are the areas where you hear serious discussions of "Obama seizing power", as reported in this MotherJones article. Any exercise of lawful Constitutional powers they dislike or disagree with is considered dictatorial, but their own dictatorial rule is entirely proper because it is local. These areas resent federal laws and judicial rulings and regulations because these are the alternate powers that protect and empower women and minorities.

(This bias against federal law was called Nullification when slave states refused to respect any federal law restricting slaveowners' rights. The strategy of Nullification re-emerged in 2009 as all Republicans vowed to disrespect everything the new black president proposed. This excerpt from a Frontline documentary describes this modern Nullification.)

This article from RightWingWatch describes another example of how rural dictators resent the dictatorial powers of the first black president. They cry out against imaginary dictators while they enjoy their own absolute power. They accuse Washington of dictatorship yet they admire a very real tyrant in Russia, whose spies are working hard to put their man Trump into the White House. (This idea of a local tyrant calling on a foreign tyrant to overthrow the national government is not new. It has roots in the Jacobite rebellions against the British parliament, the discontent that sent floods of emigrants to America, whose descendants still populate America's backwoods South.)

The idea of a local police force answerable to no one outside the community is sacred in the parts of America that gravitate toward Trump. Because how things have always been done in these areas is the only right way to do things. It was that way when Eisenhower tried to “interfere" with their Jim Crow law enforcement. It’s that way now when they scream about Obama’s planned dictatorship. Regulation by a fairer national law is anathema to them. What they call "liberty" we could just as well call defiance. They are defying the Constitution they claim to worship. In areas where women and people of color and newcomers who are simply “not from here" are not protected by the law, the system isn’t a democratic one, it’s a kind of dictatorship. These are the areas which want dictatorship on a national scale.