Despite gains for women in Congress, white men are still the big winners

Thanks to the record-breaking number of women elected to Congress in 2018 and the success of the #MeToo movement in taking down many powerful male predators, some critics have called 2018 the Year of the Woman.

The New York Times wrote, “It has been called the Year of the Woman, and rightly so — defined by historic political victories in the United States.” The Brookings Institution blog announced, “2018: Another ‘Year of the Woman.’” And the Washington Post headlined, “Year of the Woman? Darn right.”

But another contender for the title “Year Of” may have a stronger claim. In terms of political power, influence, and money, 2018 was the Year of the White Man.

Certain groups of white men gained the most:

Affluent white men: White men are the richest people in the country, and their wealth is growing. The richest 1 percent of families controlled a record-high 38.6 percent of the country’s wealth in 2016, according to a Federal Reserve report. That’s nearly twice as much as the bottom 90 percent, which has seen its wedge of the pie chart shrink more and more.

In 2018 white men got even richer, thanks to the Trump tax cut. (Some white women benefitted when husbands got tax breaks, but women not married to men did not.) High earnings and/or past family wealth amassed by males give them tremendous power.

White Americans are getting nearly 80 percent of the benefits of the Trump tax cuts, according to a joint report issued by Prosperity Now, a progressive think tank, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Black taxpayers received 5 percent of the benefits, Latinos got 6.7 percent: “More than 40% of all tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act go to the White households in the top 5% of earners (with incomes of $243,000 or more), despite only representing 3.9% of all tax returns.”

Conservative white men: Conservatives have dreamed of a reliably right-leaning Supreme Court for some 30 years. In 2018 they got it, with the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell kept Barack Obama from appointing a justice in the last year of his presidency by refusing to bring the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Senate floor. The appointment of Kavanaugh means the country will probably have a conservative majority on the court for many years. In addition, the Pew Research Center reports that Trump has successfully appointed more federal appeals court judges so far in his presidency than Barack Obama and George W. Bush combined had appointed at the same point in theirs, according to an analysis of data from the Federal Judicial Center.

In 1901, the much-quoted pundit Mr. Dooley, a fictional Irish immigrant created by Chicago Times-Herald columnist Finley Peter Dunne, observed that the Supreme Court follows the election returns. That may no longer be true in a court that increasingly values ideology over precedent.

Conservatives who are anti-choice relish the idea that this new court is likely to overturn — or at least eviscerate — Roe v. Wade. The Trump administration has already rolled back many protections of reproductive rights, including issuing a rule banning federal Title X family planning funds for organizations that provide referrals for abortion. Republicans have tried to defund Planned Parenthood, the only source of reproductive health care for millions of women.

Trump has also has set his sights on contraception. Under final rules published in late 2018, employers can obtain an exemption to paying for employees’ birth control if they object to some or all forms of contraception based on their “sincerely held religious beliefs” or moral convictions. Conservative men increased their power over women’s bodies in 2018.

Both here and abroad, the international antipoverty group Oxfam has documented “a broad, disturbing trend.” Dr. Marie Berry, assistant professor at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, notes in an Oxfam report, “The Trump administration is writing women and LGBTI rights and issues out of US policy documents, undermining decades of US leadership on these issues and threatening to imperil women and LGBTI communities across the world.”

White nationalist men: President Trump has actually called himself a nationalist, and many people believed the prefix white was implied. In an infamous statement, he called neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, “fine people.” He has called Mexicans rapists and liars, tried to ban all Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., and questioned the intelligence of well-known African-Americans. Congresswoman Maxine Waters is a favorite target, as The Guardian reported in 2018: “Trump has reportedly referred to Waters as ‘low IQ’ seven times already this year, often at high-profile campaign rallies, most recently in Ohio, where he called her ‘a seriously low-IQ person’ before a cheering crowd.”

Trump tweeted a double insult aimed at CNN anchor Don Lemon and basketball superstar LeBron James: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do.”

In 2018, the Atlantic concluded, “The White Nationalists Are Winning. Fox News anchors and high-profile politicians are now openly pushing the racism of the alt-right. The fringe movement’s messages have permeated the mainstream Republican party.”

If Trump had his way, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty would read, “Norwegians welcome.” Fox political personalities share that view. Fox is the most-watched cable news network, and has become what The New Yorker calls a “force multiplier” for Trump’s ideas. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told the magazine, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”

Fox host Tucker Carlson proclaimed that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes.” The Atlantic concludes, “They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of people of color, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country.”

Violence against people of color has flourished under Trump. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports that the number of hate crimes in the United States in 2017 surpassed a previous high, with reports of 7,175 incidents — an uptick of 17 percent over the five-year high reached in 2016.

A January 2018 report released by SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) tied Trump’s election to a “wave of hate violence against South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern, and Arab communities.” The taboos that once drove white supremacy into the shadows are vanishing. The SPLC says that the past two years “saw the ‘alt-right,’ the latest incarnation of white supremacy, break through the firewall that for decades kept overt racists largely out of the political and media mainstream.”

Misogynist white men: Just before his election, the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood recording was released, in which Trump said about women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

That comment clearly emboldened other men who hold little respect for women. Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, told CNBC, “[Trump] has managed to, with the rise of other alpha male leaders, unleash a wave of misogyny around the world as if it is legitimate in 2018.” 

The Internet has been a boon for men who are really, really angry at women, and that anger grew in 2018. The SPLC added the category “Male supremacy” to its list of hate groups for the first time. The SPLC proclaimed, “Male supremacy is a hateful ideology advocating for the subjugation of women. [It] misrepresents all women as genetically inferior, manipulative and stupid and reduces them to their reproductive or sexual function — with sex being something that they owe men and that can or even should be coerced out of them. Driven by a biological analysis of women as fundamentally inferior to men, male supremacists malign women specifically for their gender. A thinly veiled desire for the domination of women and a conviction that the current system oppresses men in favor of women are the unifying tenets of the male supremacist worldview.”

Misogynist white men have succeeded in driving women out of public spaces by threatening them with violence. In-depth interviews with dozens of female journalists from across the globe in 2018, conducted for a study in the journal Journalism, revealed that women in the news face serious online harassment, from sexist remarks and inappropriate requests to threats of murder and rape. The level of anger against women has perhaps never been higher, and the growing number of “manosphere” sites has given some males an effective way to silence women’s political speech.

Of course, not all white men benefitted from the election of Donald Trump, and even many who did see financial gains disapprove of his racism and misogyny. Working-class white men saw a very modest gain in their wages, but worried about possible cuts in health care and other services that would wipe them out financially. Transgender men now have to face the possibility of being barred from military service under Trump’s new guidelines.

But overall, white male political and financial power increased in 2018, largely due to Trump policies and proclamations. People of color and women have been demonized, through travel bans on Muslims, lies about “caravans” of Latinos coming across the border to kill whites, and Trump’s mockery of a woman who claimed his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, had assaulted her.

At the same time, in politics, many of us cheered to see that women now hold 102 seats in the House, the most ever. More women than ever before laced up their sneakers and ran for Congress.

The sobering thought, however, is that they comprise only about 20 percent of the 435 members.

The real political Year of the Woman will be when that number hits 50 percent.