July 8, 2019--Make American Men Great Again

For more than two years, my sister-in-law, Guest Blogger Sharon, and I have been attempting to understand why so many women, white women, 53 percent of them, voted for Trump. It seems so against their best interests. 

Recently she wrote-- 

I still haven’t totally figured it out, including what role religion may have played. I think there are people whose world view or “values” may trump (sorry) self-interest. Just look at the number of women who voted for a misogynist. Or are so pro-life that they are willing to give up control of their own bodies.

Then I wrote--  

About the women who voted for Trump: like you I've been obsessed with trying to understand this since he was elected. Some of it is a version of Evangelical belief about the appropriate place for women in the social and family hierarchy. "In their place" below men. But I have come to conclude it's less about religion than about gender. 

Likely for most of Trump's white men the women's movement tripped off all sorts of scary bells and whistles. Having in many cases to deal with female bosses; having to deal with dramatic changes in sexual behavior where women have come to assume an almost equal role; needing wives to enter the work force not for career reasons but because the men couldn't earn enough to pay the bills and sustain them as stay-at-home wives and mothers, often with the women earning more than their husbands, as a result feeling dispossessed, these men are angry about their shrinking hegemony within the family and the larger society, and voted for Trump in the belief that he would restore things to their natural, their rightful gender dispensation.  

And then for the these women--they want their husbands back. The ones who could support them, dominate them, and make them feel protected and secure. They too feel that something profound has been abrogated, overturned. Thus, that is what making America great again means to them. It really means how to make men a regressive version of great again. 

To progressive women this represents a retreat from all that has been fought for and accomplished during the past 50-60 years; to conservative women this would represent a restoration of the natural order.

The Dems need to figure out how to relate to this in a non-condescending manner for at least two reasons--they'll lose again if they don't and because it's the right way to engage Trump supporters--with understanding and sensitivity. Doing so, though, doesn't mean we need to roll over and come to agree about everything. Or very much. But we do need to show respect for how they are experiencing life in a changed America, and try to find some empathetic common ground.

Toward the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign, when it finally dawned on her and some of her advisors that they were losing white working-class voters--women as well as men--some of her people who had kept Bill Clinton at arms length from participating in campaign strategizing, realizing he was in fact their best strategist, finally asked him what he thought was going on with these voters, mainly the men. He said, "They're dying of a broken heart."

He was right. And since it was too late to reach out to them in appropriate ways, Hillary Clinton lost their votes and ultimately the election.

Fair warning.