The Insecure Men of the Republican Party Go Scorched Earth

Screeching "He's gay! He's totally gay!" at James Talarico is about the least manly thing one can do. But it's what Republicans will say for the next five months.

The matchup in Texas between James Talarico and Ken Paxton is vital to control of the Senate, and will probably be the most expensive such race in history (a record currently held by the 2020 Georgia race that put Jon Ossoff in office). It will also be one of the ugliest campaigns any of us have ever seen, absolutely saturated with anxious masculinity and appeals to homophobia. What would happen if you gave a bunch of middle school boys whose dads never hugged them a billion dollars so they could air ads screaming “You’re gay! You’re totally gay!” for the next five months? We’re about to find out.

We’re not supposed to use the phrase “toxic masculinity” anymore, because that makes some men feel bad and then they vote for fascists. Fair enough. But this campaign is going to be all about anxious masculinity, quivering, quavering, insecure, overcompensating, loser masculinity of the kind conservatives have been cultivating for a long time. This campaign will put it front and center in a manner so explicit that it will provide a test of just how far the right can take this kind of appeal.

Man up, cowboys

First, let’s set the context. One of the key differences in how Republicans and Democrats campaign is that because Democrats care about policy, they often believe that policy is the way to win elections. You offer an agenda crafted to maximize your appeal, you criticize your opponent’s substantive record, you show people what’s truly at stake in the election and convince them that you’re the better choice. Sometimes, that works.

Republicans, on the other hand, think that the way to win elections is to tap into powerful emotions, especially negative ones: fear, hatred, anger, resentment, bigotry. For Democrats, “issues” means important matters with policy implications that affect people’s lives; for Republicans, “issues” means character flaws about their opponents (real or invented) and things that make voters’ blood boil. There is sometimes overlap between these two conceptions of what an “issue” is, but often there isn’t.

In this case, Republicans could run a non-crazy issue-based campaign. Texas is a red state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in over 30 years, and party identification alone might be enough to prevail; it certainly would have been if John Cornyn had become the nominee. But because Paxton is one of the most flamboyantly corrupt politicians in America — he was impeached by Texas Republicans in the legislature, and among the charges was that he pressured a wealthy developer who may or may not have been bribing him to hire his mistress — things get more complicated.

So what’s the answer? Had Jasmine Crockett won the Democratic primary, Republicans would have gone into a frenzy of race-baiting that would have made George Wallace blush. But since Talarico is a white guy, they’ve gone with gay-baiting. And it’s not just Paxton himself, but the entire Texas Republican Party and the entire national Republican Party, all the way up to the White House.

The foundation was laid before the runoff between Paxton and Cornyn. Republicans were waiting for an incident they could use to illustrate the idea that Talarico is effeminate, and they got it when the Democratic nominee took Barack Obama to his favorite taco joint and ordered a potato, egg, and cheese taco, a perfectly normal taco enjoyed every day by untold numbers of people possessing Y chromosomes. Republicans immediately started calling Talarico “a vegan,” not because they don’t know that vegans don’t eat eggs or cheese (and Talarico isn’t even a vegetarian, let alone a vegan), but because they’re happy to lie and they think vegans are gay.

Presumably, any real man would only order a steak, pork loin, brisket, ham, oxtail, bacon, and liver taco, very loudly and aggressively lest anyone in earshot think for a moment he wasn’t absolutely bursting with testosterone. Because real men don’t eat what they want to eat, they eat what they think other people will think is manly.

“Vegan” has now become part of a litany of insults Republicans throw at Talarico, all of them oriented toward making voters think he’s light in the loafers and loose in the wrist. That includes the idea that he is “Low-T,” a phrase used to induce insecure middle-aged men to spend thousands of dollars on scammy “male enhancement” supplements. And while in a more innocent time Republicans used to do this with insinuation to retain deniability (remember how they said John Kerry “looks French”), in the era of Trump, that kind of subtlety is for wimps. So we get this exchange, distinguished not only by the fact that the putrid Stephen Miller just came out and said Talarico is a member of the minority group that is to MAGA what the Jews were to the Nazis, but because the Democratic Party responded with an appropriate clap-back:

Not that I condone such vulgar rhetoric as a general matter, but at times it’s necessary to be firm and concise, especially when dealing with a worm like Miller. Every interaction like this is a demonstration to voters, and one of the things Democrats need to show is that they won’t just sit back and take whatever abuse Republicans decide to dish out.

What are we really talking about here?

So what are we really talking about here? The Republican argument, distilled down to its essence, is this:

1. James Talarico is kinda gay. Or trans, or whatever.

2. If you vote for him, that makes you kinda gay.

3. You don’t want people to think you’re gay, do you?

This is driven by the most pathetic version of manhood imaginable, one in which being a man entails constant performances of stereotypical masculinity, with an eye cast forever over one’s shoulder to ensure that anyone watching knows you’re a real man being manly, eating manly food, dressing in manly clothes, walking with a manly gait, and driving a manly pickup. If I were to suggest that an actual real man eats whatever the hell he wants and votes for anyone he thinks is a better candidate, whether that candidate is male or female or gay or trans or anything else, these fearful little boys would cry “No! If I don’t vote for the manliest man someone might think I’m not a man!”

So behold, the pulsating hunk of virile man-meat that is Ken Paxton:

One of the ironies of this whole period is that the conservatives trying hardest to convince everyone that they’re super-butch are the most pathetic, spineless lickspittles for Donald Trump. This guy is the one before whom they have debased themselves — a walking collection of character flaws, a vain, insecure, shallow, moronic, amoral bully who dodged the draft, whines constantly about how everyone is being mean to him, spends hours on his makeup and hair, and couldn’t do a push-up if his life depended on it.

And all these supposedly manly Republican men snickering about other men being gay would literally get down on all fours and lick the soles of Trump’s shoes if he told them to. Literally. Do you think they wouldn’t? Of course they would. These are not men. They’re sniveling little boys without an ounce of masculine strength between them. When you watch those cabinet meetings where they go around the table so each person can offer their pathetically over-the-top praise of Trump, do you think “Wow, look at how strong they are”? No, you think, “What a bunch of losers.”

Sadly, none of that means that the attacks on Talarico won’t work. Lots of male voters will respond in precisely the way Republicans hope, because they’ve been conditioned all their lives to view their masculinity as fragile and tenuous, always in danger of being lost if they fail to perform it in the correct ways. For many, all it takes is someone saying, “I don’t know, that seems pretty gay” for them to run in the other direction.

There are a number of options for how Talarico and Democrats can respond (he’s now drawing attention to a sweetheart deal Paxton’s office gave an accused child predator), but one of them ought to be to point out that your average bookish 10-year-old boy is more of a man than the collection of cowards and snowflakes who populate the Republican Party. Just imagine if you could convince people that screeching “He’s gay!” is about the least manly thing one can do?

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