https://iclfi.org/pubs/wr/47/maga-women
Pro-Trump women are an enigma to many leftists and feminists, and one they are not eager to approach. How is it that so many working-class and impoverished women support a racist, anti-woman tyrant and Jeffrey Epstein’s good friend? Why do they defend Trump’s ICE agents when they systematically brutalize immigrant mothers and shot a white Minneapolis mother in the face because she protested the raids? Why do they support the sinister White House cabal, which wants women to be submissive to their husbands and seeks to turn this country into a Christian evangelical reenactment of The Handmaid’s Tale?
Some may ask, why are we communists fighting to convince such women to oppose Trump? “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) women are a class-divided group. It includes not just the despicable Karoline Leavitt and wealthy bourgeois wives. MAGA women are also workers, wives of workers, small shop owners, teachers, nurses and many others just struggling to survive. Many of them are also pro-union, gun-toting, strong-willed mothers who want some abortion rights and constitutional rights at the same time as they want to give their children a better life. The revolution needs these women on our side.
In 1921, revolutionary leader Clara Zetkin said in a speech to the Third Congress of the Communist International:
“Women, who are now often obstacles to revolutionary struggle, must become its driving force. For let us not be deceived, comrades: either the revolution will win the women or the counterrevolution will do it!... If you Communists do not see to it that the broadest masses of women are present in the revolutionary camp, the bourgeois parties will make sure they are in the camp of the counterrevolution.”
—“Report on Communist Women’s Movement,” published in John Riddell, ed., To the Masses (2015)
Conservative working women are reacting to the decomposition of American life as they once knew it. Grandpa and dad worked at Ford. A single household income of 50 hours a week was enough to buy a home, a car and maybe a fishing boat to putz around in. Even if you were poor, you felt you had the possibility to work your way out of it. Kids could roam around freely outside and after they grew up, they could expect to get a job as good or better than their struggling parents had. Maybe mom wasn’t happy and dad was always exhausted. But they always had food and a roof over their heads. The men had jobs.
They view liberals as the ones who attacked that old way of life. They are not entirely wrong. Conservative women are seeking the safety and financial security that previous generations had. That’s why they embraced the slogan “Make America Great Again” in 2016 and rejected Hillary Clinton’s “America Is Already Great” refrain. No amount of pandering by Democrats today will erase the imprint her characterization of Trump supporters as “deplorables” left, for it captured the distilled class hatred of the liberal elite for their wage slaves.
MAGA women are so sick of the deindustrialized liberal world order that they desire a president who will tear it to shreds, falsely believing Trump will bring good jobs and prosperity like their grandparents had after WWII. Trump’s vicious misogyny and his headlong dive toward another economic recession are not enough for these women to oppose him. Conservative women are willing to suffer a lot if Trump can do one thing: Give American workers and their kids a better life.
Trump will fail them miserably. Trump doubles down on the culture wars and religious bigotry while he breaks each promise he made—there is another war in the Middle East, fewer jobs, higher gas prices and a worse future for their children. But working-class MAGA women will not be broken from Trump through insulting their beliefs or scorning them for holding on to religion when they feel powerless. Religion is the only coat they have in this storm; it is often their only source of strength and community-building.
They need to be shown in the course of concrete events that the MAGA cabal is not the answer to their needs. It will take successful working-class upheavals in order for most women (and male workers) to shed religion and their other prejudices like a worn-out coat. But, in the meantime, if socialists fail to sever their ties to Democratic Party liberalism and to give MAGA women real answers to their concerns, it will only drive them deeper into the arms of misogynist, white nationalist reactionaries. Organizing women and men workers to change their conditions in this life is key.
