Macho Man
by Marcus Stanley

High-living serial groper Arnold Schwarzenegger may be the new Republican governor of California, but it's safe to say he's no traditional-values conservative. In certain ways, though, Arnie is the perfect representative of today's Republicanism: he's a man's candidate for a man's party.

The Republican party's dominance of the white male vote has been a key to its success since the days of Ronald Reagan. Bush clobbered Gore by 24 points among white males in the 2000 presidential election. Even the hapless Bob Dole outpolled Bill Clinton by 11 percentage points among white males during his losing effort in 1996. With their consistent advantage among white males, Republicans figure they can win elections while basically writing off the black vote and infusing just enough estrogen into their message to break even among white women.

Especially after Sept. 11, 2001, Republicans have openly crowed about their status as the more masculine party. As Jay Nordlinger puts it in the most recent issue of the conservative magazine American Enterprise, "the Democrats will have to acquire a bit more testosterone if they're to compete with the GOP. This is, indeed, no time for 'pitty-patty.' As for the Republicans, if they had any more testosterone, they'd be The Incredible Hulk." Schwarzenegger, who took massive amounts of steroids during his bodybuilding career, certainly supplies plentiful testosterone.

Masculine appeal is a unifying element among what seem on the surface to be conflicting constituencies in the conservative coalition. Fundamentalist Christians (both male and female) tend to have markedly traditional attitudes about gender roles. Fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry Falwell preach against the "anti-biblical feminist movement." Secular, anti-government libertarians couldn't be more different than fundamentalists in many ways, but libertarianism has its own appeal to masculine ideology. Real men don't want the government to coddle them. They're too busy kicking ass and taking names. It's only liberal momma's boys who call for government intervention to change the rules of the success game, probably because they're too weak to win it on their own. Or, as Cato Institute vice president David Boaz writes, "Liberals want to be your mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose. Libertarians want to treat you like an adult."

Schwarzenegger clearly represents the swaggering, got-mine, libertarian element of Republican machismo, exaggerated to a cartoonish degree. A pumped, 'roided up Horatio Alger for the 21st century, he offers his fans the opportunity to identify with an ultimate guy fantasy of wealth and success, complete with video-game action roles, Hummers, and frat-boy gangbangs of willing (or not so willing) groupies.

Not surprisingly, that kind of fantasy was an appealing distraction from the problems of a bankrupt state still on the verge of a recession. For social liberals, it also offered a more genial, reassuring version of masculinity than the stern paternalism of the Christian right, and so helped Republicans make inroads into the Democratic voter base in socially liberal California. Schwarzenegger tied among supporters of abortion rights, while in the 2000 election Bush lost this demographic by almost 30 percentage points.

Schwarzenegger's macho image offers some clues about how he cruised to victory with a campaign whose only content was its constant stream of scandal. Boys will be boys, after all. Bill Clinton offered the public earnest liberalism with (thanks to Hillary) more than a touch of feminism. His workplace sexual escapades felt hypocritical to the public, and Republican scandalmongers capitalized on them. By contrast, Schwarzenegger offers a testosterone-fueled success fantasy, and the charges against him didn't get sufficient traction to swing the election.

Groping unwilling women isn't exactly accepted behavior in American life, but it's nevertheless occasionally tolerated as a masculine reward for reaching the top. Schwarzenegger's backers sometimes seem to suggest that it's just the price we pay to have real men drive our economy. The recent celebration of Arnold's sexual exuberance by the Wall Street Journal's editorial writers implies that they might agree:

What sticks out now is the aplomb with which he handled allegations of loutishness with women, at once admitting and minimizing the incidents, and only seeming the more inevitable for it ... His alleged groping suggested exactly the Schwarzenegger of the movies, exuberant, wisecracking, physical and provocative.

But the real price the California electorate could end up paying for being seduced by Schwarzenegger's swagger is more evident in his substantive policy proposals, such as they are. In an election whose major issue was the state budget crisis, he made tax cuts a major campaign plank. He called for further deregulation of the California electricity market, despite over $9 billion swindled from the state during the previous experiment with deregulation. His proposed solutions to the state's massive deficit rely heavily on cuts in unspecified government "waste, fraud, and abuse" (strangely enough, not a line item in the California budget). Apparently, details are for pussies.

The detail-phobic approach to politicking also plugs into the code of American masculinity. America prides itself on a muscular, can-do winner's spirit. At its best, that spirit inspires a useful, solution-oriented pragmatism. But it's also all too easy for publicists to spin into an anti-intellectual impatience with all complexity, as though reflection is for losers. In Schwarzenegger's movies he never encounters a problem he can't smash his way through. When we're faced with the knotty, difficult, frightening problems that make up actual political life, fantasies about simply crushing the obstacle become extremely attractive. Complexities can be left to the wonky liberal girly men.

Over the past few years the Republican Party has been increasingly marked by this ethos, although in a more sophisticated way than we see from Schwarzenegger. Bush's 2000 campaign offered breezy, content-free assurances that its proposed tax cuts were broad based and perfectly affordable. Now massive giveaways to the rich have helped create $500 billion annual deficits, endangering baby boomers' retirement prospects. The whole world was on our side after Sept. 11. Today, after two years of fist-pounding speeches about "evildoers" and blustery lectures to former allies, we've pulled off the seemingly impossible: coming across as the villain in a war with Saddam Hussein. The administration appears to have planned the details of its own action hero's staged carrier landing more carefully than the reconstruction of Afghanistan or Iraq.

Someone seems to have forgotten that real men (and women too) need to deal with reality, not just feed their egos. Let's hope Schwarzenegger does better in California.

E-mail Marcus Stanley at mms24@weatherhead.cwru.edu.