The She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything
The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers take from their victims, they don't want to take the blame. And one of the prerogatives of power is to be in charge of blame, and abusers routinely exercise that power to make their own acts someone else's fault.
Let me start with where we used to hear "she made him do it" all the time--in sexual assault and gender violence. The logic was that somehow women were very powerful, which is why they got raped and beat up--their power consisted in making men to do things, which men were powerful enough in the sense of brute force to do but powerless in the sense of moral agency or self-control to resist doing. The idea that all this was a result of men losing control was always undermined by the fact that a person who truly has no self-control will act heedlessly, recklessly, and these acts were usually carried out covertly, in an effort to escape hostile witnesses and consequences.
There's a term, coercive control, which describes such violence and sexual assault as part of a larger campaign of domination, which is why it was always about control, never about losing control. Blaming the victim is another tactic in a campaign of control and power, and it has often worked. It still does. Male violence was a given, and it was women who were supposed to alter their lives to avoid it and who were blamed not only by attackers but by society if we didn't succeed.
This was not just personal intimidation or gaslighting--in cases like that of Harvey Weinstein, whole teams of lawyers, spies, and aides were deployed to allow Weinstein to continue his decades of sexual assaults. The legal system cooperated in many ways, including with NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) – legal instruments used to silence victims over and over (though in 2019, California banned them in cases of sexual assault or harassment).
I grew up long enough ago that women's clothes and lipstick and dancing and laughter and smiles and being present at this event or being out alone or out at that hour and being pretty much anything but a nun in a locked room holding a machete was considered an invitation. Stuff like saying "no" did not revoke that invitation, which lay not in your agency, but your essence. You were the invitation, whether you liked it or not. It was your fault for being embodied and on the same planet as men who wanted something from you. Women made men rape them by being too attractive, though children and ancients (and nuns) also got raped.
Women also made their partners cheat on them by not being attractive enough. We were supposed to walk a spider-silk tightrope between too attractive and not attractive enough. Of course that tightrope was always breaking and women were (and still are in the eyes of misogynists) too much or not enough or both at once. In the horrific rape case on trial in France last year, in which Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife and raped her and offered her to dozens of others to rape, he blamed her for what he did. Newsweek reported that he said "it was her own fault for not agreeing to go swinging with him, according to a psychologist who testified at his trial." And then a lot of the men he solicited blamed him for their decision to sexually assault a deeply unconscious older woman (or claimed they assumed he could give consent for his wife). They blamed him, he blamed her.
"She made him do it" operates in politics too. The most recent example is Trump's declaration that somehow Ukraine's President Zelensky was responsible for Russia's invasion of his country, declaring "But he should never have let that war start.” The war began with Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, well before Zelensky's presidency and well into Putin's, so there's that. As Aaron Blake at the Washington Post notes, "Since the war’s earliest days, Trump has frequently talked around any sort of blame being cast on Putin.... Almost every comment deprives Putin of agency and casts what’s happened as a result of the Biden administration’s (and now Zelensky’s) failings." Trump envoy Steve Witkoff blamed Ukraine too, saying Russia was "provoked," as if Ukraine was wearing a miniskirt.
"Fair or Not, Zelensky Is Angering Trump. Is His Style Hurting Ukraine?" asks an outrageous headline in the New York Times, over a "news analysis" that asserts "his approach to the Trump administration has fallen flat with the White House, engendering not empathy but hostility from the American president." Trump thinks Zelensky should've placated Putin, and the New York Times thinks Zelensky should placate Trump, but nothing will sufficiently please the Russian dictator and his American fanboy short of a full-fledged surrender of much or all of Ukraine's territory and sovereignty. The readers' comments were almost universally furious at this framing, and some of them noted the "she made him do it" logic.
Both Putin's invasions of Ukraine and the January 6, 2021, insurrection recall a deadly form of coercive control: the former husband or boyfriend furious that she left him and somehow intent on terrorizing her into returning or destroying her if she resists (experts on coercive control tell us the most dangerous time for an abused woman is when she's left her abuser). In all these cases, there's a logic of "how dare she do it" that denies her right to choose anything but him or, really, to choose at all. Putin seems intent on recovering what he perceives as the power and glory of the Soviet Union by annexing Ukraine (and annihilating its example to Russians of a former Soviet Republic becoming a functioning democracy with political freedoms for its citizens). The 2014 invasion of Crimea followed the ouster of the pro-Russian thug Putin helped put in the presidency (his name was Viktor Yanukovych, and his campaign was masterminded by Paul Manafort, who then turned around to help Trump get elected; Yanukovych fled to Russia when Ukrainians rose up against him).
As for the January 6 insurrection--I've always wondered what the besiegers and berserkers imagined victory looked like: did they think the nations of the world and the people of the USA would bow down and say "you smashed up Congress pretty good; Donald Trump is now the winner?" After the insurrection, Ted Cruz in a classic blame-the-victim move tweeted at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, "You know, there's a lot of partisan anger and rage on the Democratic side. It's, it's not healthy for our country, it's certainly not conducive of healing or unity...."
Trump himself almost routinely accuses his opponents of intentions and crimes of which he himself is guilty, including efforts to steal elections. It's a well-known psychological phenomenon: "the unconscious defense mechanism that Freud called projection: the attribution of one’s own forbidden – and typically malevolent – motives, impulses, or emotions to others. When people project, what is true about oneself instead becomes true of others." Trump is specifically the most prolific, shameless, and public practitioner of a version of projection that Dr. Jennifer Frey dubbed DARVO in 1997. That's an acronym for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, a frequent technique of abusers to shift blame to victims. Among his many DARVO moves, Trump has accused his rivals of trying to steal an election and Zelensky of being a dictator. Cruz was engaging in it too, when he was making out Democrats as troublemakers for not being nicer about a violent coup attempt.
In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages.
And in the same way the diverse population left of center is supposed to make nice to the right or be responsible for when the right goes wrong. These stories amount to "the left was so annoying about pronouns or liberals made people feel so guilty about plastic straws they had no choice but to get on board with the second coming of the Third Reich and the destruction of the planet." Behind these stories is the assumption that some people matter more than other people, and that we who matter less have to pander to those who matter more – conservatives when they are imagined as straight, as white, as male, as rural, as salt of the earth, as the real Americans, unlike us ethnic/ immigrant/ urban/ non-male/ non-straight people.
Mark J. Dunkelman has a new piece out in the Atlantic titled "How Progressives Broke the Government," a loaded choice of title at the time when a right-wing coup is actually breaking the government. He writes, "America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in all these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves."
To take one of his examples, why are we actually struggling to harness the promise of clean energy, which is healthier in the short run, prevents ecological devastation in the long run, and, once the infrastructure for it is in place, could be far cheaper in dollars? One huge factor is interference from fossil fuel interests, which nearly all Republicans serve devotedly and have since the party decided to pretend climate change was a hoax and a liberal conspiracy. Another is poor coverage of the issue by the mainstream media, both in making the catastrophic reality sufficiently recognized and the excellent available solutions well understood. But in the framework here, right-wing sabotage of a livable future is the fault of progressives.
The always trenchant Rebecca Traister writes at New York Magazine: "Pundits and politicians from across the ideological spectrum have joined in rare consensus: that it was 'identity politics,' known more commonly as 'wokeness,' that is largely to blame for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office. Liberals and centrists arrived at this conclusion with a speed and ardor only available to people who’d been dying to crow about this for years. Prominent leftists are also onboard, making one righteous argument at the expense of another."
In fact identity politics as reproductive rights prompted one Democratic victory after another in the immediate wake of the June 2022 overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Joe Biden's huge victory after the police murder of George Floyd and the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, while he promised to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court and protect reproductive rights and the climate, could be seen as a sign that identity politics can also be winning politics. Traister notes "advice that Democrats should get quieter on ideas that are simply the right thing to do and that helped motivate millions to vote for them just reaffirms a pallid insincerity, and is therefore politically suicidal." It's the politics of appeasement, and it doesn't work with abusers on any scale.
Besides, straight white male is an identity too, and the right pushes a hateful, regressive version of those identity politics, though no one blames straight white male identity politics for Republican losses. It was never "he made her do it." Those identity politics are rendered invisible or treated as beyond question. But I'm here to question them.
Because she didn't make him do it.
p.s. Since all too many people across the political spectrum blamed Ukraine for the invasion on the grounds that the nation was on the brink of joining NATO or that somehow NATO itself provoked it, here's Canadian political scientist and eastern European expert Maria Popova tweeting: "NATO membership for Ukraine was never on the table and the Russians knew it. In winter 2022, Putin repeatedly ignored attempts by the west to reassure him Ukr[aine] isn’t getting in." NATO is a defensive alliance and Russia's invasion has made it clear why many European countries would want to belong and prompted Finland and Sweden to join up.
p.p.s. Here's a gorgeous tweet from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez when the Democrats in the lower house were being blamed for not rescuing Republicans from their own chaos as they sabotaged Kevin McCarthy's position as speaker and failed for weeks to elect a replacement. The Washington Post editorial board had declared of the mess Republicans had made, "Democrats should be willing to help them clean it up" by voting for a Republican speaker instead of their own candidate or by voting president.
