It didn’t start with Limbaugh and Trump: The deep roots of the GOP’s war on women

[DonViejo]

Though Rush & The Donald draw attention for their vulgar misogyny, conservative assault on equality dates to Nixon

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Donald Trump reduces the dog whistles of Movement Conservatism into cartoons that expose them for what they really are. Movement leaders profess to be shocked by his crude attacks on Megyn Kelly, but he has simply ripped the gentility off sentiments that the eminently “respectable” Weekly Standard made in its cover story three months ago. “If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016,” Joseph Epstein wrote, “she will not only be the nation’s first woman president but our second affirmative-action president,” elected, he said, thanks to her status as a member of a “victim group.” Days later, Fox News went after First Lady Michelle Obama with a similar argument. Fox contributor Angela McGlowan told viewers that “the reason she got into Princeton was probably because of affirmative action,” and that “the reason she became an associate at a law firm was probably because … they needed a woman, and a woman of color.” She added: “That’s a twofer.”

Trump’s piggishness is merely a less euphemistic way of expressing what those who dominate the Republican Party have long believed and argued. For Movement Conservatives, women, by definition, are subordinate. They cannot succeed in America unless the government gives them a leg up. Properly constructed, the nation belongs to white men.

The idea that the country should be led by white men goes back to antebellum slaveholders, who argued that the world was naturally divided between working drudges and elite leaders, who directed their workers and used the wealth the workers produced to promote progress. Slaves and workingmen had no such vision or ability, and they must be kept from power. If they were permitted to participate in government, they would demand more of the wealth they produced and fritter it away in extra food and small luxuries. That “redistribution” of wealth would hamstring society’s leaders, preventing them from devoting their energies and capital to advancing humanity.

With the end of slavery and the enfranchisement of former slave men, this elitist argument translated into opposition to any social welfare legislation funded with taxes. But it focused on excluding lower-class men from power. Even after women got the vote in 1920, the idea that they stood for home and family helped to keep them from being seen as politically dangerous in the way that working men and male minorities were.

Few politicians did much to move the needle toward anything resembling gender equality, but it was President Nixon who first threw women under the political bus of Movement Conservatism. Desperate to consolidate support during the turmoil of late 1960s, Nixon adopted the language of Movement Conservative speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who had come to the Nixon White House after Barry Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 campaign. In 1969, Buchanan divided the nation in two in a speech in which Nixon pleaded for the support of the “silent majority” to enable him to stand against “a vocal minority” trying to impose its will by protesting in the streets. Among those in the streets, of course, were the women demanding equal rights and fighting for “women’s lib(eration).” By 1971, Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 “The Feminine Mystique,” complained that Nixon was doing nothing for women. What women really needed, she told an audience of politically active women, was political power.

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http://www.salon.com/2015/08/22/it_didnt_start_with_limbaugh_and_trump_the_deep_roots_of_the_gops_war_on_women/