"Principled" is the New "Unlikable" for Female Politicians

[ehrnst]

At some point, men are going to have to cope with the possibility that Elizabeth Warren is exactly who she says she is. The 2020 Democratic primary began with more viable runs by women than ever before in history. Now, with less than two months to go until the Iowa caucus, Warren is the only woman left with any kind of shot. Predictably, her competitors are sharpening their knives, casting Warren as a sell-out, a liar, and an untrustworthy careerist. Now, a woman who is famous for taking principled stands is forced to produce receipts to prove she has principles at all—because, no matter what we say, we do not want and cannot deal with principled female politicians.

The latest round concerns Warren’s past as a corporate lawyer. After releasing her tax returns from that time, in response to pressure from Pete Buttigieg, her income was trumpeted in headlines like CNN’s “Elizabeth Warren made at least $1.9 million for past private legal work over three decades,” which typically failed to explain that this averaged out to about $65K per year. The work itself was cast as shady, nefarious pro-corporatism, not only by conservative outlets like the Washington Times (which labeled her a “high-powered corporate vulture”) or Tucker Carlson (who recently proclaimed that “she is like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons”) but by the very “leftists” who used to embrace her: “Progressives, Trust Your Gut,” went one Guardian headline, “Elizabeth Warren is not one of us.” In the article itself, Nathan J. Robinson insists “there were good reasons for progressive leftists not to trust that Elizabeth Warren was on their side.” His first two such reasons were that “Warren worked at Harvard Law School training generations of elite corporate lawyers [and] did legal work for big corporations accused of wrongdoing.”

Some of this is classic 1950s sexism, casting Warren as scary and selfish because she dared to have a career of her own. The problem is not her fees—which, again, hardly left her rolling in filthy lucre—but that she charged for her work at all, rather than doing it out of the goodness of her heart. There’s a distinct “get in the kitchen” tone heard when someone like Robinson lists, among a woman’s negative qualities, the fact that she taught at Harvard. But there is also a subtler sexism, which should be familiar to us after two straight presidential campaigns featuring female front-runners: Warren is untrustworthy and unbelievable by default. Any areas of her life that we can’t see into are presumed to be repositories of malice and trickery; none of her actions can be taken at face value, but each and every one must be interpreted in terms of the scary, corrupt creature we assume her to secretly be.

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We push women to be good and pure and stand on principle, to be selfless, to serve others first, to make the right choices rather than the choices that will get them re-elected. We tell them to be more like Elizabeth Warren, or at least, more like the version of Elizabeth Warren people said they’d vote for in 2016. Yet when women actually do all that—when the real Elizabeth Warren actually stands up, and asks to be handed power—we punish them anyway. We tag them as careerists, elitists, “corporate vultures” and sell-outs anyway, less on the strength of anything they’ve done, and more because of our baseline assumption that women are deceitful. As happens so often, in patriarchy, there’s no winning this one: If you are careful and cautious, and proceed only as far as the moment will allow, someone will come along in a few years or decades and claim you were not brave. If you are brave—and Warren, who substantially sparked the Democratic Party’s swing back to economic populism back in the early aughts, and whose candidacy has inspired cold sweats among Wall Street executives and tech bros since its inception, certainly counts as one of our braver politicians—then not only will you make plenty of enemies, your own side won’t back you up.

Warren is a grown woman, and a tough person, and she can take care of herself. She is still a front-runner in the race, and she is among the few female candidates still standing—and the only one among the leading four candidates—in what was once a vibrantly and excitingly female field. Yet her candidacy, which once seemed like such a pure beacon of hope, has left a much more cynical message. When we tell women to be brave and pure, we aren’t pushing them to be better. We’re pushing them off a cliff.

https://www.damemagazine.com/2019/12/19/principled-is-the-new-unlikable-for-female-politicians/