Some thoughts about feminine dynamics in political debates, dishonest framing of issues, and feigned emotional displays (confusion, pitiability, anger), and their prominence in American life.
One of the more discouraging aspects of our public discourse is the constant false and exaggerated emotional valence. It’s strange to reflect on the fact that, 30 years ago, this kind of mock outrage and sympathy gathering and feigned confusion was fairly rare. Many policy debates occurred without any of this, and the people who attempted it were often taken less seriously. I think it’s a fair statement to say that, while deception and equivocation have always been a part of American democratic politics, manufactured emotion and the mining of sympathy and the assumption of the status of victim are all fairly new. These strategies would have been self-defeating two generations ago, and now they are not. They are constantly deployed, which means that they must sometimes be effective. These days there is virtually no panel discussion on CNN or X exchange that doesn’t try to frame someone as a victim, or ask deliberately obtuse and hysterical questions, or try to include the feelings of some party or another. Immigrants in Los Angeles are fearful! Federal employees are heartbroken! Female politicians in Minnesota and Florida are literally weeping whilst conducting public business or giving interviews.
The strangeness of this sight to the people of 50 years ago can’t be overstated. Of course there were hysterical and emotionally unself-controlled people back then. But we understood that these qualities were incompatible with leadership and decisiveness. Not only have we forgotten that, but we now often reward politicians and thought-leaders and activists who display inordinate emotion. What else can we call this but feminization?
‘Slain lawmaker broke down as she defended brave vote days before shooting’. I hope Rep. Hortman rests in peace. My criticism isn’t of her, but of the voters: do you want a leader who can’t resist the urge to cry while being questioned about a fairly routine budget vote? How would such leaders react when urgent and grave matters come up? I worry that they might defer to their emotional impulses. To her credit, in this case Rep. Hortman didn’t do that. Less than five days later she was killed. Perhaps it’s time to reduce the volatility and emotional intensity of our public debates?
These would’ve seemed strange and off-putting conversational features to the people of even a generation or two ago… because feelings don’t matter. Not when it comes to public policy. The fact that some group is ‘victimized’ by a policy doesn’t matter. The fact that civic leaders are overcome with emotion says very little about the policies in question and it says a lot about those leaders, none of it good. The fact that immigrants in Los Angeles are fearful might be unfortunate, but instilling fear in those who are breaking the law is an essential function of law enforcement, and always has been. The fact that federal employees are sad to be losing their jobs is natural, but the crying and the emotional interviews and the melodramatic farewell ceremonies - all of these are overdone. That’s really the issue: emotion shouldn’t be included in these matters at all, because emotion never helps decision-making, and emotionally labile leaders and thinkers aren’t to be taken seriously.
The fact is that every national policy has costs and victims, and they’re nearly always invisible. Emotion isn’t just unreliable as a guide to the future - it’s always selective (and therefore invalid and unethical) when it’s applied to politics. Did any of these people - heartbroken about the victims of Trump’s immigration enforcement - weep for the sexually trafficked children whose lives were forever destroyed by the Biden administration’s border policies? Why the hell not? Emotion quickly becomes the handmaiden of ideology. When you combine that dark reality with the fact that it shuts down logical reasoning it’s no wonder that we used to throw emotionally erratic and expressive people out of leadership positions. Or, rather, we would never have let them there in the first place.
I will continue to hammer this point, but imagine if the Trump administration had dropped the ball in this manner. Truly, try to envision the media coverage that would explode… and compare it to what you’re seeing now. THAT is media bias.
Emotion is often in tension with reason and rules, and reason / rules must be the principal heuristics when it comes to making policy for millions of people. There are always people to feel sorry for. If you let your initial emotional response dictate your attitudes towards an issue you’ll be ripe for manipulation and unable to consider the implications or the long term effects of the matter. We used to understand this, intuitively. I don’t think I’m assuming too much when I say that all of this seems very likely to be a side effect of the feminization of American political life. Sympathy for immigrants, sympathy for trans people, sympathy for black men - all of these naive (and, frankly, ignorant) impulses led us into a thicket of bad policies. This is partly because they smothered any discussion of the real outlines of the circumstances (narrative being an inherently emotional undertaking), and partly because they blinded voters and observers to the actual results of the attendant policies. Emotion cries out: do something! The fact that the ‘something’ in question is perverse and horribly counterproductive is secondary, and often forgotten. The emotional reflex has been satisfied: something has been done. Police departments have been defunded (as a response to a debate about the quality of police… this is literally the opposite of the natural policy recommendation one would make to address this issue). Trans people have been allowed to live out their innermost feelings, and public policy was remade around them, at tremendous cost (which we’re still paying). Millions of immigrants were let into a country in which their presence was illegal, destructive, and dangerous. We just felt so sorry for them.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that probably more people now vote based on these kinds of cognitive processes than do based on careful and educated deliberation. It remains to be seen, but it’s quite possible that a feminized culture can’t coexist with a national democracy.
And if feminization is really the culprit here (and I won’t pretend to be certain that it is, but I’m certain that it might be) then the associated developments, of people pretending to believe things that they don’t, pretending to be ignorant of things that they’re not, and using (false) displays of emotion - outrage, grief, indignation - are ingredients in the same toxic social stew.
We all know what toxic masculinity is: it’s aggression and anti-social behavior and impulsivity and status-seeking narcissism and violence against women. Incidentally, by these measures, we are perhaps the least toxically masculine major civilization that has ever existed. What if toxic femininity is female political leaders habitually failing to take accountability (while using the language of accountability), and the emotionalization of all of our political issues, and the leveraging of sadness and confusion and indignation to try to maneuver through conflicts and debates?
Which brings me to the issue before us today: 18 federal immigration judges were abruptly fired, recently. This comes atop dozens more who’ve been let go in the past 6 months, The reactions have been predictable: feigned indignation and confusion and (of course) sadness. People are pretending to be confused, when they’re not. They’re pretending to be horrified (which they might be) and fearful about the implications for judicial independence, which they’re not. In short, they’re misrepresenting their own feelings and beliefs about this issue, pretending to value things which are unimportant to them. This is shockingly common nowadays, and it’s also shocking how rarely this behavior is called out.
It’s as if we’ve all grown so used to these theatrics that we’ve internalized the script, and learned to play along. Taken in the broader historical context, this is - I think - truly bizarre. We cannot continue to keep having conversations and making decisions like this.
A few thoughts:
I find it a bit eerie that the vast majority of the photos of the judges that I’ve seen - all but one, in fact - have been white women.
This is being spun as an assault on the independence of the judiciary. Perhaps it is - I’m not legally educated enough to say whether it is or not for certain. Based on my reading, the situation seems a bit different though. My sense is that immigration court judges are a bit like family court judges: they interpret the law in order to make decisions regarding specific cases before them, in order to adjudicate the claims or petitions of claimants. If judicial independence is truly the issue here, then let’s use a counterfactual: let’s imagine that there were dozens of judges under the Biden administration who were denying nearly all of the asylum claims. Several years ago, asylum grant rates climbed to nearly 40% (which seems absurdly high, based on what I know about the legal requirements for asylum). What if there were 20 judges (let’s say) who denied 95% of asylum claims and did this consistently, for years, across hundreds of cases.
If the Biden administration fired these judges, would these people object? If they wouldn’t, then their central complaint isn’t judicial independence (the central complaint is almost never what it’s represented to be these days… another symptom of pathological feminization). That would be an analogous situation and therefore an equivalent encroachment upon judicial independence. Their central complaint is rather that Trump is firing people in order to expedite and influence the federal judiciary in clearing asylum claims (according to a strict and legally defensible standard). Their central complaint doesn’t revolve around a political norm or standard. It’s based upon an agenda. These people are upset that more people will have asylum claims rejected, and that judges will feel pressured to reject them. As always, when it comes to this issue, the main thing is letting more people across our border, and letting them stay. All the rest of the talk about traditions and policies and checks and balances is essentially a facade. All of it would be discarded tomorrow if discarding them helped them achieve their agenda.
This kind of pathological dishonesty is killing the left, and they can’t even see it. They literally cannot make an honest and direct argument. They cannot openly describe their goals and their values. Does this seem like another symptom of feminization to you?
These judges have amnesty claim approval rates far higher than the national average. Judge Ila Deiss had an affirmative rate of 94%, nearly 3x the national average. That is absurd. To anyone who’s looking at this in a logical manner it suggests that perhaps she is applying the law in an unorthodox (let us say) manner. Furthermore, she was doing so in a climate when other judges were doing literally everything they could (including breaking the law) to protect immigrant petitioners (as in, let as many of them stay in the country as long as possible). This is a very unusual time, and it’s not primarily unusual because of the stringency of the Trump administration. In fact, his policies are broadly consistent with the immigration policies and promises of decades of presidents (up until Joe Biden). It’s unusual because of the radicalism of his opponents - both in the streets and on the bench
I believe that there are usually many more salient factors than identity category… but I definitely detect a pattern here.
One of the terminated judges (Ila Deiss) pretended to be completely bewildered and heartbroken about her firing. I’m sure she’s sad… but she’s not confused. Everyone knows exactly why Judge Deiss no longer is. Why would someone pretend to be confused about something that they’re not, in the context of building a narrative of grief and victimization? A better question is why so many people in the media and in the public would play along… instead of saying to themselves, ‘wait; she’s lying.’
Judge Deiss had an asylum approval rate of 94%. 94%. She knows that of course, although she never addressed this inconsequential detail. And most of her supporters have brushed it off, pretending that the termination is about other things, or that it’s a mystery. It’s not a mystery.
People are pretending to be confused - flabbergasted - that the Trump administration is firing judges… when we have an asylum case backlog. We have an immigration judge shortage!
I’m really not sure why we have to play these games. Everyone knows what the situation is here. The Trump administration doesn’t want asylum claims to be resolved, if that means granting nearly all of them. That’s not consistent with federal law, and it’s definitely not consistent with the administration’s policy priorities. The Trump administration wants asylum claims to be adjudicated swiftly and for judges to judge the claims very strictly, only granting tatus to the clearly deserving (who don’t represent 94% of petitioners). The voters want that, and there’s nothing illegal or unusual about it. Again, the Biden administration recently went far in the other direction. Clearing these dockets is only a success if they’re cleared properly, which means rejecting most asylum claims. I’m fairly sure that Trump could clear a lot of these claims right now, by granting amnesty to entire classes of petitioners. Everyone understands he’s not going to do that, and we all know why. So why are we pretending that it’s irrational that these judges are being let go? Obviously the backlog isn’t the only issue. It’s not even the main one. The main issue, as it stands right now is the glut of illegal immigrants that we still have in this country. There are still violent felons discovered every day who’ve been arrested multiple times, or served with deportation orders 2 years ago… and who were never reported to ICE. Protecting immigrant asylum seekers isn’t the government’s main priority. It’s not really a priority at all, and that is a perfectly valid reflection of the national will on this issue.
The truth is that rules and laws and reasons don’t matter to these people, at least not in the ways that they claim they do. A rule or a standard or a piece of evidence is (in general) a neutral concept: it can either support and validate your impulses, or it can conflict with and refute it. These people begin with their impulses (which are fueled by ideology, which in turn is based on a kind of monstrous worldview of ‘niceness’ - “don’t be mean!” as a policy imperative) and then they grab the rules and laws and evidence that bolster them. And they ignore the rest. This is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty and no one ever calls them on it, except for their opponents. Do you know how rare it is for someone on the left to say “I agree with your claims, but your arguments are flawed or disingenuous”? All that matters is which side you’re on, and if you’re on their side there are few tactics or debate habits that will be criticized, ever. This leads to a vast number of people motivated only by agenda, warping and twisting their ethical intuitions and their very picture of reality to suit it. It’s gotten completely out of control. And I really hate to make this point again, but this cohort of activists and believers is dominated by educated women. As the debate tactics have become more duplicitous and the emotional tone of the arguments have risen in pitch, men have left the coalition. Coincidence?
Here’s a question: did any of these judges, or any of these commentators, or any of the media organizations signal boosting this story, use any of these rubrics (law, evidence, logic, emotion) to oppose the Biden administration’s immigration policies? We’re talking about millions of people here, and dozens of executive orders. Surely some of them were harmful or misbegotten? Surely some of the cases in question indicate a system that makes mistakes in the other direction (granting asylum claims to people who shouldn’t have received that status). Because when a framing is only deployed in one direction then rationality and objectivity just become facades, just tools to be cynically deployed in order to achieve the agenda. An agenda, in this case, thoroughly rooted in emotion and bounded by a toxic and un-American ideology. And the worst part is that these people won’t even admit their core values, or be honest about their arguments. The fact that we all feel compelled to play along with this kind of bald-faced lying and faking is an ominous sign for our civilization, I think.
This isn’t just a ‘woman’ issue, of course. Feminization affects us all - the entire culture - as well as our values and our organizations. Men are just as feminized as political discussion might be, partly through cultural influence and partly through selection processes (more feminized men being rewarded and promoted). Nevertheless, I’ve always been told that the notion that femininity is somehow more emotional or irrational when it comes to making important decisions is sexist garbage. Considering the place that we’re collectively in, I rather hope that they were right about that.
Feminization is, absolutely, the problem here. It seems that we have collectively realized it, even if not ready to state it out loud (though I've been pointing it out for quite some time now.) One of the biggest vectors is the childless women who've made proxy children of black criminals and immigrants.
At a recent faculty meeting (English Language Learning) our "there's no difference between men and women" star millennial passed out orange tags with instructions on how to prevent ICE from kidnapping our students. No discernment between international students and illegal immigrants. You could see the expansive pride she took in this mamma bear bullshit. In union meetings, she wasn't addressing the policies, but the emotions, e.g. "we're family and they can't treat family that way!" Hearts flew out of the chat. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing. It was she who also was tasked with informing us ignorant Boomers on things we can no longer say in class, such as "Where are you from?" No cognizance of the consequences of enabling feeling offended by such a benign question.
This week, one of the female faculty (she's Gen X, or maybe even a Boomer) pled with the director to hold class online because the 90-degree temperature in the forecast came with an air quality warning. So the director gave us the option to hold class online because 'coming to school in the heat will be challenging.'
This irritated me to no end. It caused some chaos, as well. I kept my irritation to myself in my response, saying, "I'll hold class in person as usual." Then the students emailed me because 'all the other teachers were holding class online." I responded, No sorry we are having class in person no matter what the other teachers are doing (as I had told them the day before).
"Challenging." My own commute involved walking four blocks in a temperature of 82 degrees to the air conditioned subway. Then another four blocks in 84 degrees to the air conditioned school.
Imagine encouraging students to feel that they shouldn't have to go outside of their homes on a hot day. It's beyond ridiculous -- and so -- FEMININE.
I have also seen, time and again, emotional assertions replacing evidence in research papers, with no intervention by the (female) professor.
I'm a woman and I approve this message.
A few years back, I had a student who was fully into genderwoo garbage and was actively recruiting peers to join her. It was a mess. The parents of the other kids were very reasonably upset, and I talked with all of them.
I only talked with one father, and he said, in blunt and no uncertain terms, that he didn't want his child hanging around the other kid ever. And if his child did, let the dad know and he'd take care of it.
All the mothers on the other hand—I'm talking 100% of them—were very concerned but spent most of their time talking about how they try to teach their kids to be nice, to include everyone, etc. They could not say: "I don't want my child around this creep" even though that's what they felt. They had to be nice. They had to be kind. They had to be gentle.
This seems similar to what you write about—masculinity is traditionally associated with drawing the hard lines, enforcing the rules even when it makes a person cry. Femininity is traditionally associated with being soft, with showing empathy.
The problem is we can't have rules based on softness. Rules have to be hard. When we create soft "rules" that nurture dysfunction, we only get more dysfunction!
And just like in the case of my students, nobody is protected or helped by trying to be nice. Only the father who came at the situation with hardness, unconcerned with the feelings of the dysfunctional—only he did anything to protect his child.