In Texas Senate seat showdown, depraved MAGA "masculinity" rhetoric may backfire with ordinary voters
The race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico suggests that taking on MAGA requires Democrats to fully engage in fights over values as well as policy proposals
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
The Texas Senate seat contest between state attorney general Ken Paxton and Democratic state representative James Talarico has recently generated a burst of coverage and analysis — and for good reason. Perhaps most enticingly, the possibility that Democrats have a fighting chance of winning a Senate seat in Texas got a boost with the GOP primary victory of the deeply-compromised Paxton1. In turn, the fact that a Texas Senate seat appears to be in play ties directly into perceptions of President Trump’s declining fortunes, the appeal of MAGA politics, the Democratic Party’s path back to power in Texas and beyond, and the not-insignificant question of the future of American democracy.
Paxton has rightly been described by various observers as “Trumpy,” given his shameless levels of corruption and criminality, basic immorality, and embrace of lowest-common-denominator attacks on his Democratic opponent — all of which highlight the notion that the Texas senatorial showdown is functioning as something of a referendum on the president and the MAGA movement. The magnetic pull of the Texas race has been amplified by the presence of Talarico, a charismatic young politician who stands out as the relatively rare high-profile Democratic who places his Christian faith near the center of his political identity, and who seeks to frame the nation’s fundamental political struggle as a clash between a rich and powerful corporate class and ordinary Americans — a populist framing that’s on a continuum with the politics of Representative Bernie Sanders and fresher faces like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
New Republic’s Greg Sargent has suggested that Talarico’s blend of religiosity and open-tent attitude in building his political coalition offers a possible political model for Democrats; as Sargent describes it, “Paxton’s ugly MAGA credentials provide an unexpected opening for Talarico—a state legislator and seminarian—to play the foil to Trumpism with a new kind of politics rooted in a fresh understanding of our moment: It combines open professions of Christian faith and promises to transcend Trumpian acrimony with kindness and goodwill toward the opposition.” I would add that Talarico’s us-versus-them economic framework dovetails with this openness — in the most sympathetic reading, it would suggest that the great majority of Texans should rally to a Democratic candidate willing to take on the rich and powerful on behalf of everyone else. And as we’ll discuss more below, it will not be a stretch for Talarico to make the self-dealing Paxton into an unsympathetic example of the conflicts and injustices he contends are central to America’s challenges.
Of course, we don’t live in a country of open hearts and minds, but in one where battle lines have long been drawn deep and hard, where most Americans have strong, overlapping identities that drive them into one partisan camp or another, and where propaganda and disinformation muddy our understandings of political reality. Not surprisingly, the Paxton campaign has made clear that its preferred field of battle will not be a high-minded discussion of economic policy, but rather Talarico’s character — specifically, the contention that the Democratic candidate is an alien, destructive figure devoid of MAGA-level masculinity, with Paxton and his supporters accusing Talarico of being “low testosterone,” a vegan, and even trans.
This strategy combines inanity, menace, misogyny, transphobia, and old-fashioned bullying in a dizzying blur. On the surface, it can seem simply crude — yet the sheer coordinated relentlessness and tie-ins to long-standing GOP lines of attack against Democrats reveal a confounding sophistication. For the MAGA base in particular, it presses familiar buttons (trans! vegan! effeminate!), aiming to provoke visceral reactions: that Talarico is unmanly, feminine (and therefore, in the MAGA universe, obviously weak), and not even a real Texan.
What’s more, as Noah Berlatsky sharply observes, GOP slurs that assume the fundamental inferiority of women and trans people are also intended to denigrate women and LGBT Americans, who are (not coincidentally) core constituencies of the Democratic Party:
The attacks on Talarico are not, then, simply attacks on one politician. They are an attack on the Democratic coalition, and on the idea that women, queer people, or anyone who supports women and queer people should have any role in government or public life. Paxton’s campaign is saying that Democrats are illegitimate because they are not manly men, and that women and LGBT people are illegitimate because they are Democrats. Only manly Republican bullies are fit to rule.
Berlatsky goes on to note that, “the Paxton campaign is already making clear that [Talarico’s] whiteness and maleness and straightness will not stop the GOP from talking about him as if he were a woman.” Such insistence on making gender central to the GOP case against Talarico, and on an effort to make him appear weak and unable to defend himself, means that whether or not Talarico would have chosen this terrain of debate, he will have to respond in some fashion. But we should not assume that this automatically puts the state representative in a weak or defensive position, forced to play on GOP turf in order to stay politically viable against an onslaught of MAGA propaganda. By foregrounding a distinct MAGA view of masculinity that Paxton and his allies claim is far superior to Talarico’s supposedly alien/feminine/un-American affect, they are also setting themselves up for a very public evaluation of two distinct visions of manhood.
In the first place, they are loudly and proudly shining a spotlight on peculiar ideas of masculinity that are far more unstable and bizarre than they care to grasp. As Paul Waldman describes, a deep insecurity about their own masculinity underlies the GOP attacks; he describes it as “anxious masculinity, quivering, quavering, insecure, overcompensating, loser masculinity of the kind conservatives have been cultivating for a long time,” and goes on to describe the state of conservative manhood thusly:
This is driven by the most pathetic version of manhood imaginable, one in which being a man entails constant performances of stereotypical masculinity, with an eye cast forever over one’s shoulder to ensure that anyone watching knows you’re a real man being manly, eating manly food, dressing in manly clothes, walking with a manly gait, and driving a manly pickup.
Waldman reminds us as well of the more or less mass submission of male Republican politicians to the insane and doddering Donald Trump, a basic fact of our current political situation that makes a mockery of any idea of MAGA manhood that involves positive attributes like strength of character, independent thinking, or morality. And I think this gets us to the crux of the matter: Paxton and MAGA are betting the rhetorical farm on the idea that Americans will keep buying a vision of masculinity that is arguably the antithesis of actual manhood. The bet becomes even more tenuous as we note that the vision of supposedly ideal manhood as represented by Paxton and Trump involves outright criminality, rejection of basic societal strictures like not cheating on your wife or destroying the government, and a basic selfishness that’s incompatible with either political service or, frankly, the existence of anything approaching a just and healthy society.
Indeed, it’s not going too far to suggest that what Trump, Paxton, and MAGA more generally advocate is less a credible vision of masculinity and more an affirmative action program for those men in our society too mediocre, damaged, self-absorbed, or simply hateful to succeed on their own merits — a vision designed to pummel the rest of us into believing they deserve to rule over everyone else, despite their manifest failings.
To this point, it’s critical to note the element of bullying, conformity, and — above all else — violent threat that is key to pushing this vision on their fellow Americans. This has been on full display in the gendered attacks against Talarico, in which literally hundreds if not thousands of Republican men have formed a de facto gang insisting against the evidence of our senses that Talarico is somehow not actually a real man. This link between “real” manhood and violence is core to the identity of MAGA figures like Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the latter of whom may be the paradigmatic example of a man who revels in his capacity for death and destruction to compensate for his glaring inadequacies.
So it’s not just because Paxton has chosen to make questions of masculinity central to his campaign that Talarico has an incentive to respond. The overall effort to dominate Talarico would need to be challenged by any Democratic politician of any gender or sexual orientation, as perceptions of a politician’s ability to fight for themselves are inseparable from a voter’s belief that the politician will be willing and able to fight for them (a point that Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler cover in a good discussion of the Texas senate race). Notably, the qualities such a candidate might display go beyond easy gender classification — qualities like strength, equanimity, honesty, and passion.
More importantly, though, it’s simply not true that engaging in an argument about masculinity or manhood would be a distraction for Talarico, a “culture war” issue that is distinct from the real, material impulses that drive Americans to cast their votes. As the behavior of Paxton, Trump, and other MAGA leaders has demonstrated, their predatory politics are inextricable from their predatory vision of masculinity. As I suggested above, their vision is fundamentally anti-social, one whose logical extension results in the diminishment and even destruction of society as the price paid to elevate the immoral, the rapacious, and the incompetent.
The good news is that not only has Talarico chosen to talk directly about the issue of masculinity, but he has also targeted the striking link between broken manhood and MAGA’s societal plunder. This clip, in which the candidate directly acknowledges how talk of manhood has been part of the race for the Texas Senate seat, is well worth watching for his willingness to both condemn the vision proffered by Paxton (and MAGA), and to offer a compelling alternative. I found these lines in particular to be deeply resonant: “Here’s what real men don’t do. They don’t like and cheat their way through life. They don’t enrich themselves by stealing from other people. And they don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.” Notably, alongside such more high-minded (though cutting) rhetoric, the Talarico campaign has also directly attacked Paxton’s staggering acts of corruption, making explicit the link between his personal moral turpitude and the political danger he poses to Texans.
Talarico has also spoken of the need to stand up to bullies; in doing so, he suggests (whether purposely or not) the political instability inherent in MAGA’s domineering, self-dealing ideas of masculinity — ideas that are closely intertwined with its authoritarian governing style. In MAGA’s worldview, you are either a bully or the bullied, a formulation that leaves the majority of Americans (and Texans) in the latter camp. And while the implicit offer by MAGA leaders like Trump is that they will bully others on their voters’ behalf (in exchange for worshipful subservience), the public is increasingly grasping that most Americans are in fact inevitably victims of the president’s incompetence, corruption, and greed. Inflation persists; the Iran war smolders on; public money is siphoned from collective goods and into presidential vanity projects like the White House ballroom and a ginormous arch apparently dedicated to the triumph of Trump’s ill will. And all the while, the president’s approval ratings on a host of issues, from the economy to the war to border security, continue their leaden descent.
So when MAGA attacks Talarico on the basis of his supposed lack of masculinity, there’s an increasing possibility that instead of inciting or intimidating Americans into joining their hateful gang, its acolytes may actually be reminding Americans of just how freaky MAGA itself is. This danger is all the greater given that it only takes a minute or two of actually listening to Talarico to grasp how wildly the slander falls short of reality. The GOP is leaning heavily on energizing core MAGA voters into never even bothering to consider a vote for Talarico in the first place, while influencing less partisan voters into adopting their “low-T Talarico” framework so that they don’t take him seriously if they do come into contact with him or his message. But precisely because Talarico presents as a completely reasonable person — one, moreover, willing to contest the bizarro ideas of masculinity the Paxton campaign is relying on — such a strategy is vulnerable to backfiring, as undecided voters grasp the disjunction between GOP propaganda and reality, and cotton to the fact that the GOP is trying to hoodwink them.
After a decade of Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics and the rise of the broader reactionary MAGA movement, the country has sustained deep damage that can’t be measured in narrowly political terms alone. Alongside the relentless attacks on democracy — the incitements to reject adverse election results, the endless efforts to advantage GOP candidates through “politicians pick their voters” gerrymandering, the steady escalation of violence and intimidation in an effort to discourage political activism and solidarity — we have seen a broader corrosion that may be harder to gauge, but which is arguably as serious as the material damage to the U.S. government. A non-exhaustive list of these harms includes the advancement of white supremacism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia; denigration of scientific knowledge (including, tragically, efforts to undermine and even eliminate vaccines); and an ecocidal attitude toward the planet.
As opposed to the attack on the mechanisms and practice of democracy, these are all expressions of MAGA values — retrograde, destructive, even hateful values, but values nonetheless. Any Democratic strategies for truly vanquishing MAGA from the forefront of American life will need to engage directly (though of course not exclusively) with the foul moral vision that is so deeply intertwined with its war on democracy. Confronting MAGA’s indefensible idea that not only should men dominate women, but that the best men are those who respect no rules, wantonly threaten others, and seek personal aggrandizement over the collective good doesn’t seem like the worst place to start unraveling and moving beyond MAGA’s perverse dream of a diminished America.
Paxton’s proven and alleged offenses and crimes are too numerous to describe in detail in an article centered on other topics, but even a brief enumeration would have to include: using his office for personal profit; defrauding investors in a business scheme; accusations of bribery and abuse of office (which were investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation); illegal firing of whistleblowers who spoke out about his abuse of office; impeachment by the Texas House for the aforementioned abuse of office and bribery offenses; participation in Donald Trump’s insurrectionary schemes to overturn the 2020 presidential election results; and, petty but telling, the theft of a colleague’s Mont Blanc pen. The Texas news and culture site The Barbed Wire has a good compendium of Paxton’s various offenses over the years.