Focus on Faculty
Professor K. A. Cuordileone, Social Science
In the following essay, Social Science Professor K. A. Cuordileone examines the political culture in America today in terms of the powerful social forces that shaped this country's posture in its Cold War confrontation with the former Soviet Union. These forces are described in bold relief in her book, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War, published in 2005 by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
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In all the partisan wrangling about the decision to wage war in Iraq, the blame-game lurches between charges of hubris and artifice against the Bush administration with its dubious intelligence data to counter-charges against the Democrats who accepted the administration's case for war and now regret it. Questions of access to and the integrity of U.S. intelligence aside, there is something that is overlooked in the discussion of the pro-war stance Democrats took: the politics of image and the Democrats' own painful history of being stigmatized as "soft."
Since the onset of the Cold War, when they were accused by the Republican right of "selling out" America at Yalta and "losing" China to the Reds, Democrats have been dogged by the stigma of softness, timidity, gutlessness, emotionality -- in a word, femininity. Indeed, Democrats' acceptance of a preemptive war in Iraq cannot be attributed solely to the self-confidence with which the Bush administration persuaded Americans of the wisdom of war. Nor was it simply due to the trauma of 9/11 and the gravity of the war against terror. Republicans have held a near monopoly on masculine toughness since the late 1940s, while . overcompensating Democrats have always had to work hard at proving their readiness for war -- witness the case of LBJ and Vietnam. In the months before the first bombs fell in Baghdad, Democrats were compelled to wear their muscularity proudly, lest they be accused of being timid, inept "appeasers" who could not rise to the occasion of the war on terror.
The kind of excessive masculine political posturing that marked the early Cold War years was surely unique, yet the dualities that have separated liberals from their opponents at least since the late 19th century runs deep and remains a powerful, partly subterranean dynamic in American political life. The sense that liberalism embodies feminine values -- emotionality, sentimentality, tolerance, communitarianism, permissiveness, cooperation, conflict-resolution, collectivism, pacifism -- while conservatism embodies masculine, paternal values -- rationality, toughmindedness, individualism, realism, instrumentality, self-assertion and self-reliance -- is no small factor in the national political imagination. These associations are encouraged by a two-party system that yields readily to a feminine/masculine dichotomy: the Democratic party, with its traditional emphasis on "maternal" issues -- health care, social welfare, education, inclusion and social harmony -- and the Republican party, with its emphasis on "paternal" issues -- individual responsibility, government austerity, law and order, national defense and global security.
Linguist George Lakoff has argued that underlying the discourse of American politics is a conceptual system of meaning through which individuals process political phenomena. People formulate their political worldviews within a framework of metaphors, and the chief metaphor is the family. Thus the liberalism of the Democratic party suggests a "nurturant parent ethic" of caring, empathy, cooperation and growth, while the Republican party promotes a strict "fatherly morality" that seeks to protect the family and punish transgressive acts. In the liberal "nurturant parent ethic," the individual, like the child, is understood as essentially good, and through understanding, nurturing and education, is capable of becoming better. In the conservative "fatherly" ethic, the world is divided between good and bad people; the bad people, like the bad child, must be constrained and disciplined. In the former, the individual, like the child, must be encouraged and emotionally supported to become a moral member of the community; in the latter, the individual, like the child, must internalize the values of self-reliance and self-responsibility to avoid becoming weak and dependent.
“Manhood and Americal Political Culture in the Cold War,” K.A. Cuordileone
If Americans consciously or unconsciously process partisan politics and ideologies through the lens of family, as Lakoff's work suggests, clearly the personalities attached to those ideologies are mediated by the gender-charged dynamics of image. The dynamics have played themselves out in multiple ways in post-Vietnam and post-Cold War America: honest, gentle Jimmy Carter, the antidote to the lies and arrogance of the previous era until his feckless, feminine gentility became an international liability; the courtly paternalism of Ronald Reagan, who revived the idiom of Cold War toughness and promised a restoration of old-fashioned values of family, self-reliance and patriotism that would morally strengthen America as the global bulwark against an "evil empire"; George H. W. Bush, bearer of a kinder, gentler conservatism intended to mitigate charges of right-wing callousness, an oil man who waged war in the Persian Gulf but whose failure of nerve left Saddam Hussein in power; centrist Bill Clinton, the soulful, empathetic seducer ("I feel your pain") and easy-going adulterer whose compulsive sexual exploits, unlike Kennedy's, did not enhance his reputation as a "man's man," but rather rendered him the symbol of a baby-boom liberalism grown self-indulgent and decadent; Al Gore, the wooden, inauthentic vice president whose projection of a sensitive façade so feminized him that he practically lactated in his presidential campaign, as Maureen Dowd saw it; and George "Dubya" Bush, whose rugged cowboy image and appurtenances (the ranch, the belt, the boots) along with his unilateralist foreign policy and Texas toughtalk marked him in some quarters as a macho president of the immature sort. To the insurgents in Iraq, Bush retorted with a swagger some thought reckless: "Bring 'em on."
As Gore's attempt to nourish the "feminine within" suggests, the dynamics of image have changed in ways that resist easy comparison to the early Cold War years. Despite considerable analysis of the gender gap, the jury is still out on whether a masculine or feminine demeanor helps or hurts a candidate these days. Much depends on the electorate's mood, the economic and other circumstances of the moment, the opposition's perceived failures, and the skill with which candidates can negotiate a gendered self-image without going too far in either direction and alienating a majority of voters. But given Gore's lack of an alpha-male persona and his relative success in 2000 -- he won 54 percent of the female vote next to Bush's 43 percent and scored a victory in the popular election -- we know that the projection of "sensitivity" is certainly not the liability it once was, at least in peacetime, and is probably an asset in some sectors of the electorate.
While the Communist bogey is now absent, right-wing polemics against soft liberals still bear some resemblance to those of the 1950s. Expressed in an idiom that excoriates "bleeding hearts," these recriminations suggest that our feminine sensitivities to the plight of the victimized and oppressed (not to mention trees and spotted owls) have enfeebled Americans, extinguished older ideals of self-reliance, toughness and individual responsibility, and left us vulnerable to internal and especially external perils. To critics, such sensitivities, along with the relinquishment of moral and legal restraints easy divorce laws, women in military combat and gay sit-coms, reflect an "anything goes" moral anarchy. Liberalism -- now inextricably wedded to feminism, multiculturalism, civil rights, secularism, gay and lesbian liberation, welfare statism, affirmative action, corporate regulation, environmentalism, immigrant rights, multilateralism -- is held in contempt by conservatives who promise to restore an older America in which the values of freedom, individualism, self-responsibility and traditional "fatherly morality" will prevail.
What conservatives know and liberals don't, Lakoff argues, is that politics is essentially about family values. In the unconscious system of concepts operative in political discourse, conservatives have the edge, he claims, for they have grasped this fundamental point and successfully use the metaphorical language of family and morality to appeal to voters. Whether, as Lakoff suggests, the key for liberals is to shed the dry, rational language of the Enlightenment and develop a rhetorical strategy keyed to morals and family values remains a question. But it is likely that, rhetorical strategies aside, the gender imagery through which Americans process political ideas will remain a factor in partisan politics if only because political stances are inherently gendered. A politician who supports a punishing policy toward rogue nations that sponsor state terrorism will appear as a stern father figure, while another who favors international cooperation and negotiation will be perceived as maternal and conflict-resolution oriented, regardless of the language employed to express such stances. The same is true for domestic issues that lend themselves to the paternal/maternal dichotomy -- social welfare, capital punishment, gun control or crime.
Rhetoric and imagery certainly play a considerable role in shaping political ideas and the ideological unconscious of voters. But the advantage Lakoff sees in conservative rhetoric may lie less in the great skill with which conservatives deploy the metaphorical language of family and morality, and more in a simple fact of prime importance: the deeply embedded, age-old authority of the father, inherent in the political positions that conservatives take. If it is true that conservatives are more successful in working the "unconscious system of concepts" to their advantage, it is because they possess, by virtue of their very political convictions, the voice of the authoritative father which, absent error, excess or failure, carries enormous power in the political imagination. Liberals may heed Lakoff's advice and adopt fresh rhetorical strategies that will appeal to and exalt the ideal of the nurturing, cooperative, equalitarian family as a political model for the nation-state. But the playing field upon which these family models rest is not equal. In this world, still, the paternal is privileged over the maternal, the masculine over the feminine, and there is nothing much liberals can do about that.
Of course, liberals reinvented themselves during the Cold War by adopting an ultra-masculine anti-Communist posture suited to the mood of the times. But Cold War liberalism was discredited by Vietnam, and the heady U.S. nationalism associated with that misadventure and others like the Bay of Pigs came to be regarded by Democrats themselves as the primary blunder of American foreign policy-makers in the 1950s and 1960s. The arrival of new global challenges after the Cold War's end threw the old hawks vs. doves dichotomy into confusion. As the question of American foreign policy in the 1990s hinged upon the international role of the U.S. in the absence of the Soviet threat, liberal interventionists were the ones to call for an assertive use of U.S. military force in conflicts around the world -- Somalia, the Balkans, Rwanda -- in the name of a humanitarian foreign policy.
When Madeline Albright made her case for intervention in the Balkans and asked Colin Powell, "what are you saving this superb military for if we can't use it?" she could show herself a tough-minded proponent of the use of American military power -- a "hawk" against a reluctant and even timid military establishment. Yet an interventionist foreign policy in pursuit of "idealist" aims could also be denounced as hopelessly sentimental and feminine -- the utopian fancies of those who would place the U.S. in the position of selflessly saving the world from itself while squandering its resources and naively dragging the nation into Mogadishu-style disasters and quagmires from which it could not easily extricate itself.
If the foreign policy dilemmas of the 1990s did make it seem as if the old divisions between hawks and doves no longer corresponded. to the post-Cold War world, 9/11 brought those divisions back: "hard" manly unilateralists bravely willing to go it alone in the world, regardless of what our European allies, the U.N. and the global community think, and "soft" multilateralists and "nervous nellies" who worry too much about world opinion and recoil from war under the guise of collective diplomacy. The hard/soft dichotomy has undoubtedly worked to the advantage of Republicans. How well Democrats can negotiate the politics of gender and image at a time when the Bush administration is increasingly on the defensive while anxieties about global security still run high remains to be seen.
