Among analyses of the 2020 election are descriptions of groups that voted Democratic or Republican. One result that feeds my thoughts most is the determination that more white women voted for Donald J Trump than voted by a Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administration. From the articles I read over the last few weeks, most journalists, political pundits, Twitter observers and Democratic voters are more surprised by this measurable outcome than I, a woman whose DNA analysis shows not an iota of ancestry outside Europe. Not a drop.
To be clear, I had toyed, if that is the word for mixing a bit of hope with some scrutiny of limited ancestral information, with the notion that some ancestors were Jews, or of African descent, or of native American descent. There were a few scattered clues that led to my inquiries. Some digging among documents confirmed that my Papa came from a family that owned slaves, that at least one German immigrant arrived with financial and business backing, that my other grandparents' families arrived in Texas before the Comanche and Kiowa were forced north of the Red River. Until I accrued serious hours verifying documents and ancestry links, and until I paid for the DNA analysis, preliminary information simply fed my imagination. Which is where most of the information came from, the information that my parents and their siblings passed on. Imagination.
I do not need to use my imagination to accept the election results. Nor do I need to surmise with only a smidget of credibility that half of all women voters decided to vote for the white supremacist currently in the White House. The evidence is clear.
Ever since women demanded their right to vote and won the fight for it, their reluctance to participate in the voting process and to push religious and societal boundaries prevented this kind of election result. No previous presidential election in the USA was determined one way or another by women voters. Previous national elections were decided by white men, third party candidates' ability to pull votes, and the larger bloc of Americans who do not vote. Even though women would turn out for elections that decided school board members and mayors and judges, they did so because it was easy. Their participation was minimal, husbands and boyfriends could not be alarmed, and they felt a duty to vote when choices seemed to have a immediate and direct impact on their families. National elections, including Congressional, required far more investment and exposure.
One group among women whose voices have affected election outcomes across all local and national governments are white women who also identify with the evangelical-fundamentalist religious organizations in the USA. The religious movement did not grow without the strength and passion of its white female followers. Even to this day, the largest percentage of evangelical members and devotees are white women. How did these religious absolutists become a strong voting bloc within the Republican party, the political party that owns the nation's white nationalists and Nazi sympathizers?
Backlash to the chaos of the 1960s protests, riots, emerging and strengthening of liberal voices, civil rights' legislation, war, feminist movement, and--I will not apologize for this assertion--to audaciousness of Hollywood film and US-British rock-n-roll that together appealed widely to America's youth became the catalyst for turning a sleepy, meek white evangelical movement into a mighty political force. Southerners blamed the Democratic party for the national unrest and frightening changes. The Bible belt burst with collective self-righteous indignation. The Republican party opened its arms to the infuriated absolutists. The Republican party created a quid pro quo that to this day decides local and national elections to their favor even though their voter base remains a decided minority within the country. "We'll represent you and increase your power if you'll vote GOP up and down ballot every election."
So white women who hated and feared the changes in society's rules concerning sex and race, especially among those who had kept the evangelical-fundamentalist religions alive, were given power. They tasted the power in the 1970s. First, when their President Nixon blamed all unrest on the "evil press". Second, when a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter won the presidency. These women were not winning battles against national tides. Singer Anita Bryant's rendition of the national anthem did not halt women's fight for reproductive freedoms. But their votes were establishing white male power in local and state governments that remain solid to this day. The Texas legislature in 2020 is a powerful group of white males.
Religious fanaticism and absolutism has no place in the legislatures or judiciary of a liberal democratic republic. But white women who own and drive the white evangelical movement are not concerned about democracy. Their participation in the electoral process has always been about sex and race. Every time we try to analyze their voting decisions and give them credit for reason and deep critical thought, we come back to their narrow ideas about sex and race. Yes. It is that reductive.
Therefore, the majority of white women voters who said yes to continue a Donald J Trump presidency and his white nationalist agenda also said yes to a very real authoritarianism that the Republican party aspires to. White women who identify with the white evangelical religious movement already experience authoritarianism in their religious structures. Why shouldn't they mind if a political party wants to undermine our democratic processes? As long the authority figures are chosen by these white, self-entitled, societally-privileged, narrow-thinking, religious fanatics, then it is a go.
Must the Democratic party now spend millions of dollars and play another GOP-style quid pro quo to earn the votes of white women? Must the party that wants to defend the Constitution and create a thriving liberal democratic republic bow to the wishes of white women who want an authoritarian regime that empowers white Christian fanaticism?
I do not need to answer these questions.