New Orleans       Of all the surprises of this election season, one of the biggest to me has been the conservative effort to overtly subjugate women.  In general, I’m not surprised to find that the right wants to put women in the kitchen-cage and the maternity ward, but to move this from a constant undercurrent and a stealth campaign to front and center of the Republican program, as articulated by their vice-presidential nominee, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, well, honestly, that’s a surprise.

I thought the replacement theory that the wingers were losing sleep about was all about race, and groups with a tan moving in and muscling out the lily whites.  It turns out that it’s also intersectional.  There are a lot of these guys, mainly white guys, I’m guessing from their spokespeople, who are also waking up in the middle of the night screaming, because they are upset at being moseyed out to pasture by the womenfolk.  They have this notion of “trad” wives in some kind of mythical reshaping of a history most can’t remember of the 50s.  They long for a Nelson family rerun where the man goes to work and Harriet stays home to mind the house and raise the children.  Did they not get the memo that in fact there is a woman running for President now in the United States, and many actually running countries around the world, as they have been for quite a while now.  What a peculiar view of modernity?  There’s no time machine that lets the world go back that far.   How badly do these boys want to lose this election?

Having won a reversal of Roe v. Wade so that they could rewrite women’s right to chose around the country, they turn out to be very sore winners.  The number of abortions nationally has risen, not fallen.  Poor women who can’t travel to a blue state will be forced to have more children, but that doesn’t make the replacement people happy, because many of those women will be black and brown.  They need to read the classic Random Family and see how that works out, which is a lot different than they might be hoping for.  Vance and his “childless cat ladies” and Elon Musk and his horde of children isn’t going to shame women into having children.

Of course, they’re pandering to what they hope is their base.  As the Journal reports,

            An April survey of 8709 adults from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 59% of Trump’s supporters say society is better if people give priority to marriage and family, compared with 19% of President Biden’s backers….47% of Trump supporters said the country’s falling birthrate is a bad thing, compared with 23% of Biden’s supporters.

I have to wonder what world these folks are living in?  On one side, they aren’t talking about universal childcare, increasing welfare payments and child tax credits, universal health care, better educational support, and the other things that would help family life be more sustainable.  Do they not understand the current economy domestically and internationally depends on women in the workforce?  What’s their plan to replace those women workers, while they oppose immigration?  Do they not realize, wracked by rising costs, how many women – and men – are working two or more jobs, yet they want to pretend, while not raising wages, that they can – and should stay home?

When they are this far out of step with America, especially it’s women, they need to learn something about elections, because for those in public offices spouting this kind of gaslighting swill, they are just asking to be replaced.