Over the past few months, there has been much prognostication over the flight of young American conservative women from the Republican party. Are young women leaving the ‘new right’? Have they become ‘disillusioned’ – as one news outlet put it – with the politics of the second Trump administration?
This weekend, the conservative organisation Turning Point USA hosted its annual women’s leadership summit in San Antonio, Texas. There, I saw none of the rumoured divide between being ‘Maga’ and ‘America First’ said to be fissuring young supporters of the GOP.
The summit represented the consolidation of a counter-counter-culture
Far from abandoning Donald Trump, the conference-goers in San Antonio appeared to channel the defiant spirit of the fabled Texas cry, ‘Remember the Alamo!’ When Riley Gaines, the champion swimmer turned Maga advocate, declared that for the media nothing was worse than being a ‘triple Trump’ voter – ‘the most cancellable of offences’ – the ballroom was awash with cheers from the thousand or so young women who in attendance. The event was organised by Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point founder shot dead at a Turning Point event in Utah in September. At several points the crowd rose en masse to give standing ovations to various speakers.
It’s true that there weren’t many mentions of Trump. But there wasn’t anyone bashing him from the stage, either. And there were plenty of booths outside the ballroom that were dedicated to promoting political activities on behalf of the GOP, including one that featured a Turning Point Action poster of a stylish young woman dressed in a polka dot dress and reading a document. The poster stated, ‘She reads the fine print and the ballot.’
The mood inside the ballroom was intensely serious, mixed with rock concert-style bursts of dry ice vapours to celebrate the entrances of everyone from former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to Texas state senator Angela Paxton. Speaker after speaker invoked the urgency of submitting to their husbands. It must be noted, though, that this was one topic that Paxton – who filed for divorce from her husband Ken, who is running for the Senate, on ‘biblical grounds’ – did not allude to during her address. Throughout the conference, the focus was on the family – the need to procreate as early and as often as possible.
If anything, the meeting created the impression that the Marriott hotel where it took place had been converted into a temporary mega-church – one in which the young parishioners were adjured not to falter or equivocate; rather, they should redouble their commitment to a higher cause.
How the dynamic and poised speakers reconciled their leading roles in the conservative movement with their ostentatious avowal of submission, as far as possible, to the stronger sex was left unresolved. Not everyone seemed to think it was fair for the fairer sex to take a unilateral back seat. Perhaps ‘the first female president’ would emerge from the crowd of young women, Gaines remarked. Or did she have herself in mind?
In essence, the summit represented the consolidation of a counter-counter-culture. ‘Make America Healthy Again’ booths vied with clothes merchants for business. In many ways the young acolytes seemed to have given a conservative twist to Timothy Leary ‘s old slogan, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’
Others wanted to drop in. On Friday, a protester burst into the initial meeting to heckle Erika Kirk as a ‘paedophile protector’ of Trump. Another demonstrator wore a mock mask of Charlie Kirk, falling onto the floor of the hotel in an attempt to replicate his assassination and shouting, ‘He deserved to die!’ On Saturday, Antifa-led demonstrations took place outside the hotel, but they quickly petered out.
The contrast with the long-tressed women in their prairie dresses, more than a few of whom were auditioning to become trad wives, was striking. The truth is that the opposition to Trump has nothing like the unified field theory of activism that the boisterous Turning Points celebrants demonstrated. If the conference was anything to go by, Maga isn’t splintering. It’s doubling down.
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