Conservative women can bid for status and attain it, but they still belong to a party and a movement that deny them equality.
On Wednesday, Nikki Haley bowed to inevitability and ended her bid for president. The GOP is Donald Trump’s party again. There is no room for Haley, and perhaps not for her voters, either, though she maintains a show of defiance. She said she had no regrets as she left the race and declined to endorse Trump, who she said would have to earn her voters. Trump responded by “inviting” Haley supporters to join his movement, and Biden did the same, albeit in a more coherent statement. In a presidential race with razor-thin margins, Haley voters could be consequential. It’s less clear if the same can be said of Haley herself. Haley’s lackluster campaign never offered much of a challenge to Trump — and couldn’t with her at the helm.
By challenging Trump, she took on the reactionary forces he represents. In theory, that could have been brave. In reality, it meant little. There is hardly any daylight between Trump and Haley, who served as his ambassador to the United Nations. She is a far-right Republican and was a comfortable fit in Trump’s administration. Though she attacked Trump over his morals and age toward the end of her campaign, the delay looked opportunistic. Her campaign often more resembled a brand-building effort than an anti-Trump crusade. Nowhere was that more apparent than in her approach to gender.
Haley tried to avoid liberal identity politics as she campaigned, but she emphasized her femininity when it suited her. She joked about her high heels and played Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl” and “Woman in the White House” by Sheryl Crow after her rallies, Politico reported. She called her male opponents “the fellas.” On the campaign trail, she attacked rights for transgender people by adopting a pseudo-feminist tone. Women, she told NBC News, “are being told their voices don’t matter.” Yet she danced away from gender, too, in an attempt to placate a skeptical Republican base. “Think of the fact that you might be making history in this moment,” she told voters ahead of the Iowa caucuses. “And I’m not talking about history of a female president. I’m talking about history saying we are going to finally right the ship in America. We’re finally going to get it right.”
On abortion, Haley’s dance proved uniquely ineffective. She bolstered her anti-abortion credentials with her record as a South Carolina lawmaker and later as governor, in addition to personal stories about her fertility struggles and her husband’s adoption out of foster care. When the Alabama state supreme court ruled that frozen embryos were children, she initially said she agreed. At the same time, she called for a “consensus” on abortion, and she has said that she doesn’t judge people for being “pro-choice.” Haley looked vague and even indecisive to some in her own party. Jason Hennessey, the president of New Hampshire Right to Life, told the Washington Post in January that he saw Trump “with his Supreme Court justices … moving the ball forward and not using our tax dollars to support the abortion industry.” He added, “I guess I don’t know a lot about what Nikki has done.”
As Haley wavered between girl-power enthusiasm and traditional anti-feminism, she followed a path set out by previous generations of conservative women. But as she learned, today’s GOP is Trump’s GOP. Trump’s open misogyny emboldens older forces within the party and the conservative movement to which it is bound. A voter in North Carolina summed it up neatly: A woman can’t be president because she’s got no balls to scratch, he told NBC. “All a woman’s good for in my book is having babies and taking care of the house,” he added, describing himself as “old school.” Although his views are extreme, they’re legibly conservative — and no more misogynistic than anything Trump has done or espoused.
There is room, then, for women in the Republican Party, but only if they obey. These days, their subservience to Trump enables their rise. (To give Haley some credit, she is no Elise Stefanik.) The great irony of her situation is that she may not be able to face up to it. She had just enough boldness to take on Trump, whether she did so out of cynicism or out of idealistic conviction, but she never had the courage to shed the anti-feminism of her party and challenge his misogyny. She is still caught in a trap that she set for herself.
