“I will present a nominee next week. She will be a woman ». Barely 24 hours had passed since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the US Supreme Court judge who became a feminist icon for many, and Donald Trump made his message clear: his replacement would also be a woman. The blunt tone and the content of the announcement seemed to want to calm the spirits among those who lamented what Ginsburg represented for this body, while they looked with concern at the future of the court. The most optimistic even thought that Trump was straying from his usual ideological line, the most conventional and misogynistic among the Republicans.

But the haste with which Donald Trump acted was, however, due to other reasons: aware of the importance of the Supreme Court as the highest interpreter of the US Constitution, and that many of his voters trusted that during his mandate this body took a conservative turn, Trump could not lose a single day if he wanted to name a life successor before the elections – the process consists of three phases and can take up to 100 days to execute.

When on Saturday, September 26, he presented the Catholic jurist Amy Coney Barrett as a candidate in the gardens of the White House, it was confirmed that the phrase "it will be a woman", pronounced a week before, was perhaps one of the least relevant – although one of the most symptomatic – about a chosen one that Trump already had in mind. Few people could better represent the opposite of the spirit and ideas of Ruth Bader Ginsburg than Coney Barrett. It would suffice to say that he has received the blessing of the most conservative and far-right Republican base: he has a strong anti-immigration stance, he is against abortion and he defines himself as an "orginalist" because he tries to apply the Constitution in his sentences according to the original intention of those who they wrote in 1787.

One of the most terrifying headlines that ran through the US press (News Week, Reuters, ABC News) in recent days pointed out that the conservative and Christian organization to which Coney Barrett has belonged for much of his life, called People of Praise, had writings in which women from lower social classes were described as "maids", which would have inspired Margaret Atwood to write her famous dystopia. In The Handmaid's Tale they dress in red, are raped and have a role reserved for the procreation of babies, which after delivery are given to rich women, the wives of commanders. However, just five days ago, Atwood was questioned about the issue and clarified in National Review that it was not exactly this organization that she used as a reference, but another with similar characteristics and a name. But these events are symptomatic of the fear of setbacks in women's sexual freedom that Coney Barrett arouses. A fear that is real and justified.

“More than a stellar scholar and judge; she is also a deeply devoted mother », wielded the president during his presentation. If her entry is confirmed, she would become the youngest woman with a seat in the high court (48 years old) and also the first to do so as a mother with dependent minor children (she has a total of seven, out of 8 to 19 years). The expert Lara Bazelon described her choice as “cynical and insulting” in The New York Times, and warned that “the message for women is clear: There is nothing to see here, ladies! One of you is as good as any other." Bazelon speaks in this text in the mouth of many American women who see the explicit announcement of a surrogate woman as a base and hypocritical calculation of the president. "The fact that President Trump's nominee is a woman doesn't matter if she doesn't support the causes of the long fight for gender equality championed by Judge Ginsburg."

It's easy to come to this conclusion when Trump's misogyny has never been a secret to anyone. To the president who believes he has the power to “take women by the pussy for being famous” and who even dares to sexualize and objectify his own daughter – “I have already said that, if Ivanka were not my daughter, maybe I would go out with her”– these episodes are rather let through, or even considered funny, just another part of her folksy personality. But it would be a mistake to think that the election of Coney Barrett is a mockery of feminism and the women who admired Ginsburg, a gesture as provocative as it is ideologically empty; Rather, it seems that her strategy responds to a conviction that the reactionary imaginary of an anti-feminist nature will be better represented by Barrett than by any of her male counterparts.

Donald Trump and Amy Coney Barrett. Photo: Getty

What is an item in your pantry you regret buying?

— Kate Casey Thu Jun 18 03:58:14 +0000 2020

This is not a new phenomenon. If we take some European countries as an example, we see how the electoral trend that in recent years has turned towards the extreme right is accompanied by a greater presence of women leaders in these conservative political parties. Despite the fact that the factors are multiple and diverse depending on the location, it seems clear that part of the female electorate is mobilizing thanks to this renewal of the feminine image –not feminist– on the extreme right. The most paradigmatic example is that of Marine Le Pen in France, who after replacing her father and softening the xenophobic and nationalist slogans of the Popular Front, managed to significantly increase support for the old party, partly thanks to the vote of women French. Already in 2012, during her first electoral campaign, the candidate's results were very similar between men and women. Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, used to register five or six points difference between the two. From here, and aware of this advantage, Marine Le Pen has been feminizing her image and taking her status as a divorced mother to the coalition whenever she can: in the last campaign she proclaimed herself the "candidate of women", she changed her usual trousers for a skirt and in the official video for the second round we see her introduce herself as "mother, lawyer and patriot".

Does this mean that women are willing to vote for a party with an opposite ideology simply because there is a woman at the helm? Or that controversial Supreme Court decisions will be better received with Barrett's favorable votes? No, of course not. In fact, the growth of the ultra-right has also had women as its main opponents: if we take into account the general calculation, both in the US and in Europe, they vote for the extreme right in a much lower percentage than they do; and in turn, they are also the first to warn about the danger of extremism. For example, continuing with the French case, we see how the largest mobilizations against Le Pen's candidacy in the last elections were led by the feminist movement. However, what these data do allow us to deduce is that the female electorate that is ideologically located on the right or extreme right, increasingly active, today finds in these leaders –almost always white women, mothers and Catholics– a model to follow, a reference with which to identify and share values.

From Amy Coney Barrett to Marine Le Pen, the list is not short: Alice Weidel in Germany, Beata Szydlo in Poland, Siv Jensen in Norway, Giorgia Meloni in Italy or Pia Kjaersgaard in Denmark. All are leaders of parties located beyond the traditional conservative right, but also represent grassroots differences with neo-fascism or the American Alt-Right. Mainly because these currents – still alive in parties like Golden Dawn in Greece – are based on the worship of the male soldier and their role as women could not be more than that of mother and wife. Their profiles are more twisted: they navigate between the most reactionary theses on the role of women in society and the fundamental premises of a neoliberal feminism that is committed to meritocracy, entrepreneurship and equal opportunities. It is from this ambiguity that they can come to broaden and define the base of an increasingly radicalized female electorate that, however, cannot ignore some rights that women have already won.

In fact, if the ultra-right has been forced to make these changes in order to prosper, it has also been because they have found in parties with patriarchal structures a way to continue exercising power as women: separating one from the other. When Marine Le Pen says that she is the president of women, she only refers to those white women, with French passports and better if they are mothers. It is for this reason that feminist sectors accuse her of using the defense of women's rights as a pretext for her growing Islamophobia and xenophobia.

The most flagrant example of the contradiction that leading one of these parties supposes for a woman is probably that of Alice Weidel. She is the leader of the nationalist and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who was described on television as a "Nazi bitch" after her allegation against political correctness. Weidel is 38 years old, is a lesbian, lives with the film director Sarah Bossard and her two children and declares herself a feminist; while he opposes homosexual marriage and dismisses as "gender ideology" those who propose that sex education be taught in schools. Although perhaps his greatest commitment is behind the slogan "Germany first", winking at Trump: he believes that the main problem in Europe is immigration, criminalizes Islam and intends to ban women's headscarves in public spaces.

Margaret Atwood may not have been directly inspired by the People of Praise story, much less anticipated how the far-right would spread across Europe, but the landscape left by the recent election of Amy Corey Barrett It's not much different than this division between wives and maids. The Handmaid's Tale can be read precisely from the perspective of the mobilization of upper-class women in defense of an essentialist ideal of a patriarchal family, where motherhood and the homeland –in the face of foreigners and sexual deviants– are one and the same. . It is a story that we already know how it ends: the woman who participates in the creation of the new reactionary regime ends up with a cut finger for exceeding her duties as mother and housewife. His crime is to read the same book that he had written to found that society. But the question now is to know what kind of story we are living in, and if we should see the figure of Barrett as an exception or as a symptom, because if it is the latter, perhaps we should start paying attention to the articulation of these traditionalist discourses in instead of discarding them as an old ideological residue that will eventually disappear. When we let them cut off a woman's finger, we will be letting them cut off all of us.