Transcript: Do Democrats Need More “Working Class” Male Candidates?

Two experts on gender and politics say that gender and masculinity are at the center of Trump-era politics.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the July 15 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Our guests today are Danielle Kurtzleben—she’s a White House reporter at NPR—and Meredith Conroy is a political science professor at Cal State San Bernardino. And we’re going to talk today about gender and masculinity and how they’re playing a role in politics—or maybe they’ve always played a role in politics, is probably how I should say it. We’re going to talk about the role they’re playing now, in this Trump and Graham Platner era, and so on. Guys, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Danielle Kurtzleben: Thanks for having us. So excited.

Bacon: So I’m going to start by going through a few terms that are out there in the political discourse that I think are gendered, but we don’t necessarily realize that as we’re—or it’s not really acknowledged that we’re talking about gender when we’re talking about these terms. So I’m going to start with Danielle, and I’ll start with authenticity, because you wrote about that last year.

Kurtzleben: Yeah. So when I wrote about that, it was right around the time of Graham Platner’s big—I think it was his first ad, the ad that he got all the attention for. It was him shucking oysters and talking about being an oyster farmer, being on his boat, and in it, he swings a kettlebell. There is so much manhood in it.

And so everybody was talking about how, Wow, this guy is so authentic. He’s just being himself. And at the time, there were a few other specifically white male candidates on the Democratic side who were getting written about as authentic. And typically, these are guys with facial hair, either blue-collar jobs or the ability to convincingly look blue-collar.

And it just struck me that even in the media, among serious political reporters—and I really don’t mean to harsh on my compatriots too much—but there was so much credulous, Oh, these guys are authentic. What a breath of fresh air. When truly, gender and race and sexuality, all of that, but gender especially, were just at the core of how these guys were presenting themselves. Of, I work with my hands, whatever that means. Of, “I’m working class.” Working class is so closely tied to this.

Kurtzleben: I think to zoom out, what I’m really saying is, the conversation about wanting authenticity in a candidate—I just sit and consider, OK, what kind of authenticity will people really tolerate? For example, in that piece, I talked about if you wanted a working-class woman candidate—you would have a campaign video of her not shucking oysters, not swinging a kettlebell, and you wanted her to be authentic, you would have her cleaning a house, like maybe working as a person who cleans houses, maybe working as a daycare worker, something like that. You would have her hair in a messy bun. She would be wearing her old pilling yoga pants, maybe leftover maternity pants—who doesn’t wear those?—and drinking her ninth Diet Coke of the day. That is authentic—

Meredith Conroy: I already had one.

Kurtzleben: Sure. My vice is LaCroix. But that’s not the authenticity we’re craving.

Similarly, if I were to run for office—which I never will—what’s authentic for me? I was thinking last night, I love classical music. Could I run on that? No, because then you’re a snob. So authenticity has so much class and gender stuff to it. And I’ll stop there, because I could go on for hours.

Bacon: Meredith, can you respond to that? And I guess maybe I’ll ask it this way: can a female candidate be authentic, as graded by the media?

Conroy: Yeah. So Danielle already alluded to this, but I’ll say a little bit more. Authenticity is a judgment. It’s a judgment that audiences make. It’s not actually a trait. Of course, we all prescribe all these traits as being authentic that Danielle hit on—especially the ones for men: working with your hands, being gruff, unpolished, and blunt, I think, is a more modern archetype of an authentic male candidate in the era of Trump.

But yeah, to your question: how do women map onto this idea of authenticity? And it’s really difficult for women to do that. Because if our definition of authentic are the things that Danielle said, and then I’ll add on the ones that I did—being blunt or unpolished or even a little angry at the system—those don’t map neatly onto femininity, which is what people expect of women.

So I would say that women don’t fail to be authentic. They’re just being measured against an authenticity that they—a template that wasn’t built with women as the reference case. So it becomes really difficult.

I think we could talk about some women in politics who do come off as authentic. But yeah, it’s much harder.

Bacon: Yeah. My sense is authenticity is used as a positive term way more for male politicians than female politicians. But talk about some female politicians that you all think are authentic, at least to you. Who should be called authentic even if the media is not calling them authentic?

Conroy: Do you have someone in mind, Danielle? I do, but I wonder if—

Kurtzleben: I think about, for example—the easy answers are like AOC and Ilhan Omar.

Bacon: Pressley, yeah.

Kurtzleben: Yeah, yes. I think about specifically—I believe it was AOC and Omar are the ones that come to mind, because I think it was during the pandemic, they did like live streams while they were playing video games—

Conroy: Had no makeup too.

Kurtzleben: Yeah. And it wasn’t a put-on. It didn’t appear to be something that was focus-grouped, or something that like, “Oh, the kids like this.” No, they seem, “This is a game I enjoy playing. Here, I’m going to play it and talk to you about XYZ.”

One other that comes to mind, a really interesting case I think about a lot, partially because I covered her campaign so much: Elizabeth Warren in 2020, running for president. Now, it’s complicated, but there were a couple things she did that made me go, “Whoa, that’s new.” One was—this is a small thing, but I think it was her announcement video, she pulled a beer out of the fridge, which seemed to be a nod to a candidate you can have a beer with.

Like, a lady candidate pulling out a bottle of beer—it sounds so backwards to say that is groundbreaking, but it was new. You hadn’t seen Hillary Clinton or anyone else do that before.

And one other thing—I still don’t know what to think of this—but do you remember when she talked about thinking The Rock was attractive?

Bacon: I do remember that, yes. I thought that was fun. Yeah, now that you mention it, I remember.

Kurtzleben: Yes. We had never heard a female candidate be—I don’t want to say horny. That’s not it. We had never heard a female candidate talk about being attracted to anyone before. And I remember thinking, in a very tiptoeing way, “That’s edgy, Elizabeth Warren”—to talk about having feelings for someone. So that was a little bit of authenticity.

Conroy: That example goes against my hypothesis. AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley are the ones that I was going to mention, and I think that a lot of it has to do with generation—but obviously Elizabeth Warren is much older. But I do wonder if, like, younger women and women of color—I’m not going to say women of color have an advantage in our political landscape, but when you have these expectations, and you have a young woman of color who is already perceived as being outside of some archetype, then maybe they have slightly more flexibility or leverage with how they can—or their personas, perhaps.

But I do think younger women in politics, which we don’t have a ton of examples of, have maybe room to redefine what it means to be an authentic politician that women of a certain generation don’t. Setting aside your examples of Elizabeth Warren, which—now that you mention it, yeah, I can see some of that as her trying, being herself.

Bacon: Let me ask one other follow-up, which is—you named three women who are ideologically on one end.

And I think often politicians, both male and female, are criticized that they’re perceived to be too flip-floppy, not sure where they stand. So is there any sort of center-left person, or either a Republican or a Democrat, who would still be an authentic woman?

Conroy: I was gonna say Sarah Jacobs.

Bacon: Like Gretchen Whitmer or somebody like that, whose politics are more—

Conroy: Oh, Whitmer, interesting. I was going to say Sarah Jacobs, who isn’t really well known. She’s a newer member of Congress in Southern California, a younger woman. Interestingly, I think her background is she has quite a bit of wealth, actually—but maybe that also gives her some leeway to be who she is and not try to fit into some mold. I’ll think about Whitmer.

Bacon: I’m just giving examples of ideologically what I’m getting at.

Conroy: No, I think that’s a good one. Yes.

Kurtzleben: I think it’s funny—I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I think that there’s something maybe instructive there, because we’re talking about authenticity as being gendered and having a very particular identity attached to it. It’s not to say that wanting a candidate to be authentic is BS, or that the idea of authenticity is entirely made up.

It’s that—all right, try this on. I think the idea is you have to have something to push against. And so the idea of an authentic candidate means this candidate seems authentic compared to what we’re used to. This candidate, for example, does not seem focus-grouped to death.

And I think that the idea of, for example, a working-class person being authentic—it’s not that’s absolutely silly, even if it’s limiting. It’s that a working-class candidate is authentic compared to what? Compared to the patrician politicians of the past. Compared to Mitt Romney,.

Bacon: John Kerry—those kind of people.

Kurtzleben: Yeah. Plenty nice guys, who maybe—were being authentic but just were a little stiff. Al Gore, that sort of thing.

Bacon: They are naturally stiff. That might be the case in real life.

Kurtzleben: Absolutely. And so when we’re talking about gender and authenticity—the way I’ve put it is, there’s guys and there’s men, and the Mitt Romneys are the men. And Graham Platner pops into my head, but he’s recently distressed, even though he denies it. But like Bernie Sanders—those are guys. Guys who seem a little looser.

And on the women’s side, I just don’t know that we’ve had enough women archetypes to push back against, for there to be like gals who are thumbing their nose at the stiff ladies of yore, because there just aren’t enough ladies to compare them to. That’s a hypothesis I have about all of this.

Bacon: You mentioned working class. Let’s zone in on working class. I’ll start with Meredith this time. So there’s a great push, particularly among Democrats—Democrats need to reach the working class. But I don’t think they mean Black women who work in whatever job. I don’t think they mean that. So what are we talking about?

Conroy: Yeah, exactly what you just said. If you look at data that says who is working class in this country, it is increasingly, yeah, women of color. But when the Democratic consultants say working class, they do mean white men who are—

Bacon: The candidates and the voters, is what you’re saying, right?

Conroy: Yeah, the candidates and the voters. White men who work with their hands, or in blue-collar professions, or maybe drive a truck. I also think rural is wrapped up in working class, although a lot of working-class people are actually in urban areas. So those are the things that I think is meant when we say this.

I also think we mean a certain attitude, too—an attitude that is opposed to the conflation of the Democratic Party with political correctness, and this idea that you can’t say what you want to say. The HR ladies is the counter. So I do think working class, it does require a foil to make sense, and that’s the one that tends to arise. So yeah—the HR lady.

Bacon: Danielle, what do you think?

Kurtzleben: No, I think that’s absolutely right. And we’ve covered quite a bit of this already. It does track neatly also onto, though, the bifurcation of the parties in terms of educational attainment, right? The fact that people with four-year college degrees are increasingly voting Democratic, people without those degrees are increasingly voting Republican.

And all of this gets so mishmashed up........

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