Phony 'War on Women' Discredits Both Parties and Disserves America

Enough is enough.

The US economy is structurally unsound. The global financial system has yet to recover or learn from its brush with catastrophe. Large and growing numbers of Americans are increasingly dependent on the government, yet feel more on their own than ever.

Our strategy in Afghanistan is unpopular and adrift. A geopolitical sea change is underway throughout the Old World. Traditional allies are weakening, yet they're not being replaced with newer and stronger ones.

And America's two major parties are fighting over a phony war on women.

Though inexcusable, this is happening for reasons that an intelligent person living hundreds or perhaps thousands years ago could understand. In fact, a couple intelligent people from centuries past did understand the roots of today's increasingly unhinged and vicious controversy over women. A quick trip back in time shows us why Republicans and Democrats are facing mutually assured destruction over their false portrayal of a with-us-or-against-us battle to the death over the status and value of women.

According to Plato, Socrates suggested that all societies could be ruled by only one of four possible loves. In descending order, these were the love of wisdom, the love of honor, the love of money, and the love of all things. These he associated with the rule of philosopher-kings, the rule of so-called timocrats, the rule of oligarchs, and the rule of the many. In no society were women the measure of all things. Their role, and their worth, was established not so much by who was in charge, but by what shared love ruled a society. Since our society is clearly not governed in accordance with the love of wisdom or honor, we can focus on the Socratic judgment that, in an oligarchy, the value of women is understood economically and financially, while, in a democracy, the value of women is understood in as relative and egalitarian a way as everything else.

According to Tocqueville, the US provides a corrective to Socrates' view. America, in his analysis, is a hybrid regime, a combination oligarchy and democracy. For Tocqueville, this is possible because the centuries-old movement of humanity toward ever-greater social equalization has fostered a transitional age between the old, aristocratic era of sharp inequality and the future era of supreme equality that faces humankind. In our transitional age, we can't sharply distinguish between the moral values created by a love of money and those created by a relativist love of all things equally. We Americans experience those two loves as inextricably bound up with one another -- even though there are real tensions between them. So Tocqueville described American women as both more feminine and more masculine than women who came before. The leveling of old aristocratic standards allowed women to be truer to their nature and freer in their choices. On the other hand, it also required them to learn some competencies that used to be thought of as solely manly virtues. Just like the regime they lived in, women were transitional hybrids, too.

Both Plato and Tocqueville hold that the value of women (and men!) can't ever be set in a foundational or objective way. Whatever the natural features of the sexes, the valuation we place on them is always going to depend on social and cultural conditions. To us, that sounds like a recipe for neverending conflict. But to Plato and Tocqueville, social values changed inexorably. In Plato's schema, oligarchy does give way to democracy. In Tocqueville's, the present transitional age will give way to the era of equality's consummation.

We only flatter ourselves that the culture wars are interminable. And we do this because we don't want to leave our transitional age where the moral standards set by oligarchic and democratic values are all mixed up. That hodgepodge of values is tremendously economically productive. It allows us to have things both ways. Democracy, Plato explained, was the regime that most favored women and children, because the relativist love of all things equally favors, to be blunt, fashion, cosmetics, and toys -- all industries that demand a near-constant replenishment of novelties and choices. We unleash huge productive power by rewarding the many winners of our colossal market competition to satisfy that fickle demand. Because the economic and noneconomic rewards are so great, we enjoy a powerful social corrective to the inherently stagnant, conservative, and sterile masculinity of oligarchy. (Plato's Republic begins with the token oligarch going to bed early, leaving Socrates and Athens' bright young things to drink and talk late into the night about questions he would foreclose with his judgment that wealth is the highest good because it allows you to sleep soundly.)

What's all this got to do with the spittle-flecked accusations of various wars on women? Simple: the relationship of a mother to a child she births and rears is stubbornly resistant to being monetized or relativized. Judging by how powerfully it has distracted us from urgently pressing challenges at home and abroad, that relationship may well be the most stubbornly resistant feature of contemporary life. In an age where one thing loved above all sets the measure for all things, even the mother-child relationship is defined and valued accordingly. But in a transitional age like ours, the values of motherhood and the meaning of womanhood are incessantly pulled between competing standards.

Compounding the problem, the ruling ideologies of the two major parties don't correspond at all neatly to those standards. The love of money dictates that women be viewed primarily as bearers of economic value -- people whose economic value, measurable in dollars paid, should be maximized and realized. The love of all things equally dictates that women should be viewed primarily as bearers of pleasure -- above all, pleasurable to themselves; in other words, since nothing is more choiceworthy than anything else women's choices for themselves should be beyond reproach and beyond question. Both Republicans and Democrats incoherently defend variants of both these standards. Democrats will sometimes complain that the household work of wives and mothers isn't monetized, but then also sometimes look down on that work. Republicans will sometimes insist that real women's liberation means celebrating women who choose to put motherhood above a career, but then also sometimes lament the cultural impact of permitting women to choose the reverse.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats can figure out whether they are leading the charge or playing the victim. It's a pathetic display -- most of all because many among both parties seem to realize they are arguing over an issue that no amount of political warfare can ever adequately resolve. Yet many partisans feel as if choosing therefore to reject the conflict is the one thing that will guarantee their defeat.

At the same time, record numbers of Americans are choosing to reject the two parties. Though some disaffected people may be yanked back into partisanship by the symbolism and psychology of the war-on-women accusations, more may well conclude that the controversy merely confirms their negative judgments about the two parties. Real life corresponds poorly to the bitter talking points and risible gaffes they see on the television. A partisan operator says something stupid before a national audience -- as is inevitable in a round-the-clock news cycle that emits commentary in thirty-second increments. Because social conditions are changing too slowly for some and too quickly for others, the parties swing once again into all-out rhetorical combat. What's it to the rest of America?

Some savvy analysts think the war on women talking point is dead. But it remains a shame that Barack Obama has decided his best chance for reelection is to preside over a partywide smear of Republicans as hostile to women. And it remains a shame that Mitt Romney has decided the best way to respond to this is to trot out ill-conceived statistics that simply flip the president's script instead of condemning it completely. The real threat to women is that the two parties will demagogue them within an inch of their lives. And the real risk to the two parties is that their bad-faith accusations will lead them to fight and to lose a war against themselves.

