Male voters have been drifting right in record numbers – and Republicans are taking a viciously homophobic and sexist tack to appeal to them
The Republican party’s exploding support among men comes as the organs of rightwing media and many Republican politicians have embraced a vitriolic language of gender grievance. For months now, the conservative media has been hammering a message of gender and sexual disorder, seeking to stoke the fears, bigotry and resentment of its audience against the social and legal gains that have been made by women and LGBT groups over the past decades. This message has been enthusiastically taken up by Republican politicians, and issues of sexual anxiety have come to preoccupy every level of American government, from local school board meetings to the recent confirmation hearings of a new supreme court justice.
It is hard to define the exact moment when men’s gender grievance came to preoccupy the Republican party. With Republicans’ long commitment to anti-choice and anti-trans bills over the past few years, the issue has had longstanding resonance among the base. But a shift seemed to occur last September, when Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, announced that he would be taking parental leave after he and his husband adopted a pair of newborn twins. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News broadcaster who serves as a weathervane for so much conservative grievance politics, attacked Buttigieg on his show.
Carlson’s comments were layered with bigotry – against gay men, against mothers, against trans people. But the message was clear: caring for children was feminine and unbecoming of someone who aspired to the masculine authority of a cabinet position.
Merging with the elaborate fictions of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that the United States is run by a group of elite, secretive and possibly cannibalistic pedophiles, the renewed homophobic enthusiasm on the right has now manifested in a mass hysteria over so-called “groomers”. This all-purpose smear is now applied to any liberal (or insufficiently conservative) adult, from politicians to school principals, and alleges that any tolerance for gay rights, or indeed any belief in gender equality, is evidence of a pedophilic interest in children.
That there is no evidence for this hateful lie that liberals are pedophiles has not stopped ordinary conservatives from embracing it. In Connecticut, a rightwing online group posted the name and home address of a public school superintendent whom they labeled a “groomer” due to the alleged presence of a transgender student in one of the schools she oversaw. The forum called for the school official’s execution.