Lessons in Disaster

We're in the midst of a massive anti-feminist backlash. Is there anything we could have done differently?

Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash

To the internet’s great amusement, the Democratic Party is spending a bunch of money to figure out where it went wrong with men. And yes, there are many reasons to lol at spending millions just to conclude that economic anxiety was actually real and men prefer to have jobs and no one likes to be mocked or derided. There are many reasons to ask why Democrats need to spend enormous sums to figure out what seems obvious to every White Man Whisperer on Twitter and to all of the internet’s self-styled anthropologists of the working class.

But also: Embracing a simplistic conclusion that seems obvious to everyone on Twitter is how Democrats got into this mess in the first place.

We are in the midst of an aggressive antifeminist backlash after a far-too-short flurry of progress. #MeToo broke open new conversations about gender, sex, and power. Black Lives Matter forced a national reckoning first with race and policing, and then with race and all of us. And both have been met with retaliation far more furious and extreme than the movements themselves.

Some of the criticisms of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter are warranted: There were moments when #MeToo really did overreach and tossed out important due process concerns and even basic common sense, and there really were some hypocrisies and burying of inconvenient truths with BLM (for example: large outdoor gatherings during Covid were either safe or not). I worry, though, that too many liberals and moderates are adopting a position of “these movements were a mistake and that was obvious all along,” when actually, movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter exploded because of legitimate rage and maltreatment, and these movements did overwhelming good — even if they also alienated some voters. They collapsed not because they were bad, but because of extremely potent reactionary forces coupled with some intra-movement dysfunction, disorganization, and mistake-making.

It is also not true that the Democratic Party has wound up in shambles because of these movements that were born in the wake of Trump’s first election. It is not true that economic insecurity was the only real issue all along, and the mean feminists and race-baiting BLM activists simply exploited a moment of liberals shock to push a now-failed left-wing indoctrination scheme.

The single narrative of “economic insecurity” as an explanation for Trumpism actually didn’t (and still doesn’t) totally make sense as a catch-all explainer for his rise to power, and just as all white working-class men weren’t identical when feminists and racial justice advocates were criticizing their voting choices, they aren’t identical now in their motivations, struggles, or desires. If the lesson of Biden’s 2020 victory should not have been “Trumpism is done and the progressive faction of the Democratic Party was right,” then the lesson of Trump’s 20204 victory should not be “everything progressives fought for was toxic and the angry white men were right.” These narratives are just way too simplistic for a country as wild and diverse as America.

I am perhaps a masochist, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways in which I got things wrong (I also think through where I think I got things right and why / how, but writing about that publicly is more an exercise in ego inflation than real learning). The truth is that progressive movements go through these backlash periods, which are often far more aggressive than any initial overreach. I actually don’t think there is any perfect way for progressives to build a movement that never oversteps, never offends, never results in blowback. Progress begets blowback! Movements that are large enough to make change are also movements too large to fully contain! You just don’t get the progress without the messiness.

But there are degrees of messiness.

I think the question is whether we can defend our decisions once the giddiness of rapid change has melted into the anxiety of backlash. And if we can defend most but not all of them — which is how I feel — then it’s worth assessing what to change for the next go-round.

These are a few of the lessons I’m thinking through:

1. A politics of cruelty never serves the left as well as it serves the right. There is no question that the Trumpist right is crueler than the most cancel-culture-happy leftist movement. And also: progressives have at times embraced a culture of cruelty (and mockery) that may feel cathartic, but turns off potential allies and brings us no real gains. This rarely comes from politicians, but it does come from broader progressive culture. Think, for example, of those Male Tears mugs that were all the rage a few years ago. Cathartic! Not a Democratic Party joint by any stretch! But also: sent the message that progressives generally and feminists particularly enjoy seeing men suffer. Do we? I don’t think we do.

2. If you’re explaining, you’re losing. But but but! you say, those Male Tears mugs weren’t about hating men or reveling in their suffering; they were about women being fed up with endlessly prioritizing men’s feelings over our physical safety. As someone recently put it in a tweet I can’t find, when women say “I hate men,” what we mean is “I hate that men risk my life and safety every day.” When men say “I hate women” what they mean is “I can’t get the exact girlfriend to which I believe myself entitled.” These things are not the same! Feminists are right that male privilege is real. We are right that misogyny and misandry are not parallel concepts, any more than racism and “reverse racism” are equally potent. But human emotion doesn’t always function at that level of nuance; human experience makes us feel under threat when we are mocked and when we see others enjoy our suffering. Not to mention: If you are part of a movement that aims to tell men “it’s ok to cry” and then makes fun of them for doing just that, maybe something has gone off the rails — and if you have to spend 20 minutes explaining why the obviously mean-spirited thing is ok, actually, then maybe it’s not ok. And to be clear: This is not really about a mug. Progressives are constantly finding ourselves explaining why what we said isn’t actually what we meant: Defund the police didn’t mean totally defund the police; Abolish ICE didn’t mean abolish all immigration enforcement, and so on. We need to (1) steer clear of big statements we can’t stand behind, and (2) actually say what we mean, not just ping back and forth between a catchy slogan and extremely not-catchy in-group jargon.

3. Maximalism isn’t proof of virtue. One way we get from righteous rage to really stupid politics is by assuming that the maximalists are the purest and therefore the most righteous. Sometimes that’s true! And sometimes it is very much not true. The task is not to instead assume that the centrists are always right (they’re often not), or that this could have all been avoided if only Bernie Sanders had won. It is to assess various movement narratives and priorities each on their own terms and in light of the movement’s purported values — and to resist the ideological blackmail of being deemed insufficiently progressive / feminist / whatever if you object to language or priorities or policies or actions that fly in the face of those values. To use a series of concrete examples: