This essay is based on the premise that no matter how old and secure we are, and no matter our gender, we all have a vulnerable child inside of us.
by Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist
In 2008 Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fought a hard race in the primaries. In 2016 Hillary actually won the popular vote. Clearly Democrats and independents were ready for a woman president.
Currently if the pundits and pollsters are to be believed the Democratic race is down to two male candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
Unless someone suffers and untoward physical event the next president will be a white male in his seventies, hopefully a Democrat.
I have noted in other essays that I am merely an amateur political scientist, and a retired psychotherapist and not even a social psychologist. Therefore when I try to understand how the Democrats sentiments and preferences have been favoring two white male father (or even grandfather) figures I lean towards a psychological, really a psychoanalytic, explanation.
I think that three years of Trump has made many Democrats desperate to replace him with a reassuring parent figure.
Mothers in our culture provide most of the reassurance to children, hugging them when they are frightened and telling them that everything will be okay. Now we are all children in the sense that we are at the mercy of dangerous forces we cannot control. We feel personally at risk. Our anxiety of Trump and Trumpism is palpable.
Being hugged and reassured by mommy, even a strong assertive one like Warren, Klobuchar, or Harrris was before she dropped out may not have been enough. I think with the enemy breaching the gates we may unconsciously or consciously want a strong father figure.
We may want someone who metaphorically can barricade the homestead doors and grab his hunting rifle, make sure the kids are hidden safely away from harm, and ask his wife to pass the ammunition while he assumes the traditional old fashioned male role of protecting his family with the ultimate symbol of maleness, a firearm.
To paraphrase the adage about Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes it’s a shotgun.
Although women fight in combat alongside men, and come home like Tulsi Garrard to run for president, unconscious American societal beliefs that men are the nitty gritty fighters persist.
Freud’s concept of penis envy is anachronistic and modern psychoanalysts say not to take it literally, he developed it when women felt inferior to men because they were perceived and treated as inferior.
American society has advanced tremendously when it comes to gender roles and how women perceive themselves. But sometimes underlying psychology is very slow to change.
So when will we have our first woman president?
If the Democrats win it there’s an excellent chance that the vice president will be a person of color, and very likely a woman. Due to the age of the Democratic candidates this sets the stage for that vice president becoming the president in the next election, and if the president remains in excellent health, the election after that.
In the primary we had three women, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris, among the several others who, like Hillary Clinton, were clear ready to step into the Oval Office on day one and begin the arduous task of ridding the country of Trumpism plus handle any national or world crisis that emerged.
While as I write this Michelle Bernard* on MSNBC says “this is still anybodies race.” However, by all indications from the punditry the race is now between Sanders and Biden.
There will be egg on a few faces if it turns out to be otherwise.