George Conway on the Q&A Tomorrow; Authoritarian War on Women

Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will be tomorrow, Friday August 16, 1-2pmET. George Conway will be our guest. He is a lawyer, a contributor to The Atlantic, board president of the Society for the Rule of Law, and a tireless critic of Donald Trump. He will speak to us about his Anti-Psychopath PAC, which he founded to bring Trump's instability, lawlessness and contempt for American democracy to the center of public discussion during this election season and beyond.

If you'd like to join tomorrow's discussion and benefit from these weekly sessions, you can sign up as paying or upgrade to paid here. Paying subscribers will receive a link to register for the Zoom gathering at 10amET tomorrow.

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With Vice President Kamala Harris rising in the polls, Trump's campaign is doubling down on his macho image. And every day another misogynist comment by his vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, surfaces. I will be writing soon about the Fascist roots of the GOP obsession with "childless" women, and the need some extremists evidently feel to relegate women to being vessels of childbirth and child-rearing.

For now, I wanted to send you the comments I wrote for the recent conference of the National Organization of Women and, separately, for Tara Setmayer and Michelle Kinney’s new Seneca Project.   

I am often asked when authoritarians hold appeal for societies. One throughline of this history is the perception of a "crisis of masculinity" at times when women have made strides in society that are perceived and felt as injuries and threats to male authority. Up comes the “strongman” to solve the problem by turning the clock back and restricting or eliminating women’s rights.

"Women are as much the targets of authoritarians as judges, prosecutors, and the press," I write in Strongmen, and the flip side of the charismatic demagogue's cult of masculinity is the war he wages on women, with the help of enablers who share his dread of female power. In 1930, Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg called for “the emancipation of women from the women’s emancipation movement," a goal shared by many male and female members of far-right movements and parties today.   

Vance's belief that women should be forced to stay in abusive marriages stems from the same misogynist impulses that led Trump to partly decriminalize domestic violence during his presidency so that economic impoverishment, psychological and emotional harassment, and other forms of abuse could no longer be prosecuted.

This is why women have so often been in the forefront of resistance against authoritarians: along with the loss of voting rights, women lose their bodily autonomy.

Women demand the resignation of dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, Minsk, Belarus, 2020.

As we prepare for the most consequential election of our lives, showing solidarity to each other and reaching out to women and their male allies to communicate the dangers we face from a Trump-Vance victory is among the most important things we can do now.