The Inevitable, Vacant Charge Of "Sexism" In Elizabeth Warren Postmortems

Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog on Twitter) has done me the solid of cataloguing at least some of the "Elizabeth Warren didn't win because, sexism" balderdash you just knew would be rolling in following Warren's conceding the race. (Emboldening mine below.)

The feeling is nicely summed up by Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. "To repeat the obvious: there is no other explanation except for misogyny for what has happened to Senator Warren this year," Stanley tweeted after Warren suffered across-the-board losses on Super Tuesday. He called this "profoundly depressing."

This feeling was mirrored by feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who wrote in an essay that Warren had been "outright erased and ignored" by both media and voters. "Don't tell me this isn't about sexism," Valenti wrote. "I've been around too long for that." Sure, Warren may have been the most exhaustively covered female candidate since Hillary Clinton, and she may have one of the biggest war chests in the race, and she may have had among the most stage time at the debates, but still! She lost. The only explanation is that she's been systematically ignored and erased.

Valenti, one of the most predictable hacks out there, was hardly the only individual to make this spurious and risible cause the basis for Warren's failure to catch fire. In addition to those mentioned above, a few more:

• Warren herself:
  

  "Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, 'yeah, there was sexism in this race,' everyone says 'whiner,'" she said. "And if you say, 'no, there was no sexism,' about a bazillion women think, 'what planet do you live on?''"

• Emily Stewart in Vox:
  

  There’s no clear answer as to why she didn’t succeed and why her campaign, while resonating with millions of voters, didn’t quite get there. Misogyny is almost certainly an element — many Americans still question whether a woman can win the White House, and thus far, a woman hasn’t. And Warren’s campaign in some ways exemplified the challenges women face in so many aspects of life: They often have to work harder and gather more credentials to even attempt to reach the same heights as men, and even then, there’s no guarantee of success.

• Hanh Nguyen in Salon:

  "We had all that this time, right?" said Yang. "And it looks like America is not going to elect her, which really comes down to me, to a recognition that whatever we want to claim, gender is at the core of this. It may not be deliberate. It may not be that people outright say they cannot imagine supporting a woman or having a woman president. But when the going gets tough, when there's concern about electability, when there is a push-comes-to-shove around priority, things still seem to line up the same way. And that soft bigotry, that soft filtering, that consistently I think serves as the toughest of glass ceilings for women to raise."
  
  [Actress Sara] Gorsky also holds this belief. "I think that she faced an enormous amount of sexism and misogyny that's inherent in the system and in everyday voters still in America, which is hugely disappointing to me," she said. "I think the media painted a picture of a candidate who 'couldn't do it' and couldn't be elected. It breaks my heart that the media sent that message and that Americans seemed to receive it."

• Megan Garber in The Atlantic:

  Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,” Manne argues. It rewards those who uphold the existing order of things; it punishes those who fight against it. It is perhaps the mechanism at play when a woman puts herself forward as a presidential candidate and finds her attributes—her intelligence, her experience, her compassion—understood as threats. It is perhaps that mechanism at play when a woman says, “I believe in us,” and is accused of being “self-righteous.”

You really could do this all day, although I note with some interest that Jezebel has surprisingly failed to level this charge in their coverage, to their credit. The simple, obvious rejoinder to this idiocy is that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primaries as their standard-bearer in 2016, and why are Democrats such sexists now? It says a great deal about the state of the Democratic polity that this is such a go-to answer for any and all of Warren's failings. As Herzog put it, "Warren's followers are both primed to see sexism everywhere and so enamored with their candidate—so sure of her (and their own) righteousness—that they are unable to see any of the flaws that are so apparent to anyone outside their bubble."

Update: It occurred to me that we have seen this exact, data-free approach before, with two other female candidates in the 2020 presidential race:

•  Kamala Harris herself in an HBO interview after she suspended her campaign:

  Harris: Essentially is America ready for a woman, and a woman of color, to be president of the United States?
  Margaret Talev: America was ready for a black man to be president of the United States.
  Harris: And this conversation happened for him. There is a lack of ability, or a difficult — a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done forty-five times by someone who is not that person.

• Kirsten Gillibrand: "Gillibrand’s exit is particularly significant – and betrays a worrying anti-feminist undercurrent within the Democratic Party."

Yet it's truly hard to find similar charges leveled at the voters for rejecting Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, or Tulsi Gabbard. (I did manage to pick up a piece complaining about differential media treatment of Klobuchar in Politico, but it has yet to be raised as a justification for her campaign's dissolution.) The idea that the press coverage is aimed at the audience has never been more apt.