Jill Filipovic, Political Medium, Speaks To Conservative Ghosts

Jill Filipovic once described herself as a "recovering attorney", which is about right, because she doesn't actually do a terribly good job of encapsulating the arguments of her opponents. I came across an essay of hers in NBC News' Think blog, in which she attempts to extirpate the stain of Chappaquiddick from the Democratic brand while bagging on conservatives for their support of someone as vile as Donald Trump. Leaving that aside for the moment (and she does have a valid point that support for Trump precludes conservative moral dudgeon on a vast array of Democratic transgressions), she seriously stumbles at her misapprehension of what the conservative argument actually might be:

The conservative worldview has always been animated by the idea of men as sexual predators who need reining-in by the morally temperate, sexually mild and inherently alluring female of the species. Women, in this view, are a family’s moral beacon, while men are its public face. That ideology conveniently requires women to stay behind the scenes; if women do subvert their traditional roles, it removes responsibility from men to still behave well.

 This is a curious charge to level at Republicans, who offered up a famously incompetent but still female vice presidential candidate in 2008. Republican women form a majority of women governors and lieutenant governors, as well as notching 706 elected state-level representatives. Not only does Filipovic's explanation appear not to come from someone within the movement, it doesn't even square with known facts. It's like she's having a conversation with the ghost of Phyllis Schlafly.