The same website that brought you the racist screed “Cuck Elegy” has decided to let a man play identity politics and decide who does and does not represent Republican women. The basic conceit of “Nancy Mace Doesn’t Represent Republican Women” by Gavin Wax is sexist enough. The substance is even more so.
For starters, unlike the Left, conservatives aren’t supposed to buy into the nonsense that any single figure is emblematic of an entire demographic. That sort of gender and racial essentialism is pure identity politics, but again, not all that surprising coming from a site that claimed that David French’s opposition to racism actually just means he wants to watch his wife have sex with a black man.
Wax’s predictable and primary beef with Mace, the freshman congresswoman from South Carolina, is her insufficient sycophancy toward former President Donald Trump. In Wax’s telling, “Mace showed the pesky pro-Trump masses that she was above them, she knows more than they, and their priorities are moot” simply because she didn’t vote to overturn the democratically decided presidential election results.
Despite the continued descriptions of Mace as “a maverick in the John McCain sense” who wants to “return to the George W. Bush agenda so the GOP can resume its traditional role of losing to the Democrats with dignity,” there’s no talk of Mace’s actual policy preferences beyond the election vote and her relative openness to impeachment. (Mace did not vote to impeach him.)
“Mace will never have the courage to stand up to the deep state power structure because she only possesses illusory strength, compared to Trump’s genuine strength,” Wax writes. “She prostrated herself beneath the powers that President Trump rooted out and fought valiantly.”
That Mace wears a mask in accordance with every government and medical guidance is described as her putting on “the COVID mouth diaper to show what a strong woman she is.” And, of course, despite Wax’s assertion that “the minorities who enter the Republican Party typically have been co-opted into a condescending milieu of rank tokenism,” he praises the QAnon-promoting anti-Semite Marjorie Taylor Greene for trying to impeach President Biden.
It’s patently sophomoric to write an entire article claiming that Mace doesn’t represent Republican women without an iota of policy considerations of either her or GOP women polled generally. But it’s a further vile step to say that Mace “checks all the right victim group bubbles on the survey, so she can be a leader in the age of diversity.” What Wax is referring to here is that Mace survived a rape when she was 16 that nearly derailed her life, a fact she only revealed when, while debating a fetal-heartbeat abortion bill that she supported in the South Carolina legislature, her colleagues opposed an exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
Republican women are not a monolith, and just like the party at large, they include factions ranging from more libertarian to more neoconservative to more protectionist in the mold of Trump-style populism. It’s still early in her term, but Mace has proven that despite her conservative policy preferences that crucially align with Trump’s on border security and national security, she has the courage to lead by principle — even at the cost of her own political standing in the party. Mace may not represent every Republican woman on policy, but if we’re talking about her moral fortitude to stand up to the mob, then yes, she certainly does represent us.
