Fraser Sherman's Blog

Rep. Max Miller, running for re-election in Ohio, is allegedly (not that I doubt the allegations) a slimy, abusive creep who withheld his daughter’s favorite plush toy, the one she can’t sleep without. For some reason, that kind of petty cruelty creeps me out even more than the openly brutal abuse he’s accused of (no, I’m not excusing that). An article in American Prospect shows that much like the Toddler in the White House, Miller has an (alleged) track record of being spiteful and vicious to everyone who crosses him.

Nevertheless he’s choosing to stay in the race so Republicans are stuck with him. His best defense so far? Well, if Emily Moreno had been abused, would she have cooked him dinner? Yeah, it’s not like women with psycho partners ever make nice out of fear, hoping to defuse them.

In any case, Florida State Senator Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee says the abuse not an issue: ““We’re gonna support our nominees …We need to make sure we hold the majorities. Max, I’m sure, is on that side.” He dismisses the accusations by saying “there’s not many things worse than divorce.” Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s father in law, did come out against him but as I mentioned last week, he took his time, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over.

Given the Toddler of the United States has shielded multiple creeps and sexual harassers from federal investigation this is not surprising. Even for a sane political party, there’s pressure to be cold-blooded and practical, to turn a blind eye. And if it’s something like adultery that might be the right choice; even if we disapprove, we typically don’t have a better candidate to pick.

But if, like Gruters, we have no lines in the sand, we also have no principles. At worst, Gruters is one of those shits who think a man has every right to treat a woman that way; at best he opposes abuse in general, just not when he’s forced to criticie a fellow Republican. Come on, don’t you have sympathy for his position? He has no choice but to back Miller.

Wrong. He does have a choice. And the choice me made says he doesn’t oppose abuse, even if he tells himself otherwise. “Against abuse when it’s politically safe” is no better than “honest when convenient.”

Power cannot be the only standard. Democrats abandoning a credibly accused rapist such as Graham Platner was the right move, even if it had guaranteed Susan Collins gets re-elected (from what I’ve read, the seat is still in play).

Paul Campos at LGM quotes a commenter who makes another relevant point re Miller and the Toddler: “as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally.  Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people.” That’s not an attitude we should encourage.

I see a lot of that attitude in the way our society deals with rape. We live in a country where judges have said flat out that they don’t want to prosecute a teenage rapist because it would ruin his future. If Brett Kavanaugh hadn’t gotten his SCOTUS seat, he’d still have had a lifetime position on the federal bench. Even a slight bump in a man’s career over rape allegations was too much for some conservatives. Drawing lines in the sand and responding appropriately when those lines are crossed matters. Show that this shit is unacceptable and, ideally, that there are consequences. Miller has avoided them for most of his life.

As commenter Murc says at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Platner, rapist or not, would still be better in the Senate than Collins. When earlier allegations about Platner’s cheating and bad behavior came to light, “still better than a Republican” was one of the defenses raised. As Murc says, “the flip side of that is ‘there are in fact actual red lines beyond which this calculus no longer applies’ … Standards matter. There are more important things than the naked pursuit of power, and frankly orienting yourself purely towards power seeking is almost going to completely eliminate your ability to effectively USE said power.”

Someone else at LGM linked to a post at Slacktivist about the temptation to divide people into “ours” and “theirs”: “one of the obsessions I obsess about here became one of the obsessions I obsess about there — the toxic danger of distinguishing between “people” and “our people” and the realization that no good can ever come of pursuing such a distinction. And so now, for me, “Taking care of our people” is just “Taking care of people.””

As the Prospect article shows, the media have been astonishingly supine about Miller. The author suggests reporters just gave up because there’s no “shaming the shameless” and none of the coverage he did get has to date hurt his career. I think that’s inadequate as a reason. It’s unprofessional as far as news coverage but it shows the advantage the right-wing noise machine has. They’ll repeat accusations against Democrats day in and day out until it defines them and even the mainstream media start to accept that framing.

As I want Republicans to have increasingly little power, I hope Miller goes down. But I also want him to go down because if the allegations are true he’s a horrible human being. He does not belong anywhere near power or, well, other human beings he might hurt. I hope Ohio’s voters agree.

As I’ve written before, that so much of our society embraces a hierarchy of races, genders, religions, etc. is perhaps America’s greatest weakness (though it’s not unique to us). “Back when I was born, every WASP man knew even if he wasn’t at the head of the line, he’d never be at the end of it. Jews, African Americans, Asians, women, they would save him from being a loser. At least, he could imagine so.”

I think that’s one reason for the old line that Americans don’t see themselves as poor, they see themselves as billionaires having an off-year. If a man can look up at the wealthiest people or the Washington power wielders and see men like himself, hey, he’s part of the ruling class! Ditto for white people. Feminism, black power, gay rights, everything that threatens to level the hierarchy, they take that fantasy away. They mean a white man could indeed end up at the bottom of the heap, the biggest loser. And that’s unacceptable.

As I wrote at the link, hierarchy is so bedrock to our culture, many people can’t imagine a world without it. If feminists don’t want men ruling over them, it can’t be that they want equality — they must want to replace men at the top. Hence the many SF stories and dire predictions I’ve seen over the years where feminism really means men will wear aprons, stay home to cook and clean while women go out to office and factory jobs. The hierarchy cannot change, all that matters is who’s on top.

In that light, change is not just about losing power and status, it’s about the fear that if someone else is on top, they’ll be as ruthless as you are, only now you’ll be on the receiving end. Muslims can’t possibly want religious freedom, they must want to establish theocracy, just like conservative Christian leaders (Muslim theocracy is a thing in parts of the world but there’s no sign of American Muslims imposing sharia law).

Another way in which men imagine themselves ennobled by the achievements of other men is when they look back at the past. Who achieved everything? Men. Who performed feats of daring? Men. Who built America? Men, specifically white men (that much of America was literally built by black slave labor goes unmentioned). Any examples to the contrary? Outliers.

So men accomplished everything. According to sexist scholar Roy Baumeister there were no barriers to women doing the same — but why bother when “men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.” So the history of male accomplishment proves that men are the superior gender because there were no laws or culture pressures or anything like that restricting women. Which is the equivalent of looking at when the Ivy League didn’t accept women and pointing out that all the Harvard and Yale grads are men.

Like the current hierarchy, some modern men think this endows them with heroic status: they’re men, men created and organized everything, therefore they share in that awesomeness. Never mind they’ve never accomplished anything equivalent. By this thinking, since all the science and crafts and everything were developed by men and built by men and all the innovations were by men (they weren’t), therefore women who assert equality are taking these male fields away from men! Men did all the sciencing ever (this is not true) so by what right do women get to whine about sexism? Wouldn’t society already be egalitarian if women were really equal? Or blacks, or any other group not at the top?

This kind of thinking makes leveling the hierarchy an even longer labor than it has been.