National Embarrassment

It's a record year for women in the House of Representatives. We've got the first ever female Speaker, and a record-setting 71 female representatives, bringing us to an astounding 16% share. That puts us at #66 on the Inter-Parliamentary Union's list of 190 countries "classified by descending order of the percentage of women in the lower or single House," outranked by China, North Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as some notable examples, for reasons I imagine are self-evident.

An "extensive survey of women in professions that produce many lawmakers: education, business and the law" done by political science professors Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless found, in part, that women who are asked to run are "just as likely as men to do it," but also that "women are less likely than men to be asked to run for office by party leaders and other officials." Such conclusions certainly seem to be bolstered by Ryan Lizza's The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat in today's New York Times.

[E]ven as this nurturing image [of Nancy Pelosi "on the House floor, surrounded by children and bedecked in pearls"] dominated the news, the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday was notable for another milestone in gender politics: the return of the Alpha Male Democrat.

The members of this new faction, which helped the Democrats expand into majority status, stand out not for their ideology or racial background but for their carefully cultivated masculinity.

"As much as the policy positions is the background and character of these Democrats," says John Lapp, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who helped recruit this new breed of candidate. "So we went to C.I.A. agents, F.B.I. agents, N.F.L. quarterbacks, sheriffs, Iraq war vets. These are red-blooded Americans who are tough."

Mr. Lapp even coined a term to describe these manly—and they are all men—pols: "the Macho Dems."

The return of Democratic manliness was no accident; it was a carefully planned strategy.

I can't tell you how pleased I am to know that the Democratic Party planned a strategy predicated on not asking women to run. Or asking a specific type of woman, like Iraq veteran Tammy Duckworth, whose "toughness" and "red-blooded Americanness" is conferred by a participation in a traditionally male bastion—because the candidate already running was just a plain old woman without any evident credentials to qualify as a "Macho Dem."

The idea here is, of course, to counter the perception that the Dems don't provide "leadership, strength, clarity and sureness" in the same measure as the GOP, whose foremost exhibitor of such characteristics has strongly, clearly, and surely led us into an intractable quagmire that most Americans now deeply regret. Following a bow-legged cowboy whose singular nourishment is the certainty of his own rectitude only seems charming when he leads the posse down the right path. Ultimately, the trail is just as important as the posture of those who blaze it, which is why I'm decidedly unimpressed with a strategy that prioritizes masculinity to the exclusion of sex- and sexuality-based political concerns.

Sure, some Macho Dems express support for, say, abortion rights but one gets the sense that ensuring Roe’s preservation may not be one of their highest priorities in coming to the Senate. It’s hard to imagine them at the next Emily’s List fund-raiser.

Ideologically, many Macho Dems are culturally conservative and economically liberal—making them odd ducks in a party that since the Clinton years has been defined by cultural liberalism and Rubinomics.

I'm not unaware of the positive affects economic liberalism can have for women, so I'm exceedingly grateful to see its reemergence among the Macho Dems—but any benefit to women granted by liberal economic policy is undermined if we lose ground on retaining our bodily autonomy. A higher minimum wage matters little if one has no reproductive choice.

As I've said before, It shouldn’t matter, in terms of having women’s issues addressed—from reproductive rights to securing funding for female-specific health issues—what the percentage of progressive women in Congress is, but it does. (It even makes a difference whether male representatives have daughters.) And knowing that it does, I can't help but be irritated by a strategy that is "inherently pro-male." The Democrats simply cannot pretend that deliberately excluding women from running won't have demonstrable consequences for women, or that remolding the party as Daddy Party Lite won't be troublesome for women (and undoubtedly the LGBT community, as well). For some time now, I've been seeing defenses of the Macho Dem strategy that include the argument it's better for women and gays to have a socially conservative Dem in Congress than a Republican, which may be true depending on the Republican, but it would certainly be better if we had a socially liberal Dem. Our "tough guys," however, evidently can't be tough enough to stand unapologetically and unyieldingly in liberal women's corner. And the national party doesn't appear interested in whether they do.

"Joe Sestak—that guy’s muscular!" says Mr. Lapp. "He’s a vice admiral. I’ve told him to spend a lot of time going on the national talk shows. He can really do a service changing the mold and the way the Democratic Party is viewed."

Indeed. My view is changing all the time…

Dems can't win in red states if they're pro-choice or pro-LGBT rights. A socially conservative Dem is better than a socially conservative Republican, because at least things won't get worse. Just let us get the majority, and then you'll see things change for the better. Blah blah blah. I've heard it all before, and it all boils down to: "Where else ya gonna go?" That it's the best I'm being offered as a progressive woman in America is shameful; that I represent merely one demographic of many being told exactly the same thing is a national embarrassment.

(Crossposted at Ezra's place.)