Is the Left Driving Women Away?

0:01A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto the David Frum show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

0:38It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

0:53for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

1:32Hello, and welcome to The David Fromm Show. I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Shannon Watts, political activist, organizer, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action. The book under discussion this week will be Killing Baby Hitler by Michael Tomosky. But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the discussion you are about to hear. My dialogue with Shannon Watts was recorded two weeks ago. The dialogue addressed generally some troublesome attitudes toward women in the progressive world. Shannon, a formidable progressive organizer and activist, had spoken forcefully about her concerns on social media and on her stubsack and in her podcast.

2:16One of the matters Shadden and I touched on in our dialogue was the case of Graham Plattner, the Democratic nominee for Maine's 2026 Senate seat. At that time, the New York Times had recently reported on a number of women who suffered quote-unquote unsettling behavior by Plattner, including one woman who went on the record detailing that Plattner had grabbed her hard enough to leave marks and on one occasion locked her in a room. Of this charge, Plattner told MSNBC's Chris Hayes, Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who was politically motivated.

2:54People close to the story suspected and communicated that this was probably not the end of allegations against Plattner. But suspicions are only that, and Shannon and I took care to restrict our discussion to the published record as it then was. On Monday, July the 6th, Politico published a report that alleges that Plattner sexually assaulted a named woman. Plattner denies this allegation as well. He says that any allegation of non-consensual behavior is, quote, categorically untrue. Plattner has suspended campaign events. Maine law allows another week for Maine Democrats to replace Plattner on the ballot.

3:34These new developments bring into fuller view some questions that could only linger in the shadows when Shannon and I spoke. These new developments also make more urgent the topic of my conversation with Shannon. The red flags waving so brightly today were fully visible a month ago. Plattner's promoters were excited by his transgressive personality. It is not credible that they are surprised by his transgressions. To hold President Trump to account, Congress must change hands in November. But there is unfortunately a faction of Democratic progressives who are much more energized by their factional fights than by the defense of American democracy.

4:17In 2018, the anti-Trump coalition won House seats like George H.W. Bush's former seat in Houston, Newt Gingrich's former seat in suburban Atlanta, and Eric Cantor's seat near Richmond, Virginia. As we head into 2026, however, and 2028, the presidential year, some progressive Democrats have decided that 2018 and President Biden's success in 2020 represent failure, not success. They want a smaller, more ideological coalition, defined by disillusionment with the American economic system and hostility to the state of Israel. To date, they have had some success in nomination fights in ultra-blue house districts, where winner of the Democratic primary is virtually guaranteed to win the general election.

4:59Those fights don't gain any additional seats for the anti-Trump coalition. On the other hand, they don't put seats at immediate risk either, except indirectly by tainting the broader national anti-Trump coalition brand with the extreme ideology and sometimes off-putting personal records of some of these factional progressive candidates. But the Senate is a different story. The path to beating the Trump majority in the Senate is difficult and narrow. There is no margin of safety for the anti-Trump coalition. Yet progressive Democrats, for factional motives, put the main Senate seat at risk by nominating Plattner, and Michigan Democrats seem determined to replicate the same mistake, or worse, in a state that voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

5:47Democrats should learn a lesson from the negative example of their Republican adversaries. Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have thrown away winnable Senate seat after winnable Senate seat by bad candidate choices. Remember the I am not a witch lady who threw away Delaware's seat for the Republicans in 2010? Remember the women don't get pregnant from legitimate rape candidate in Missouri in 2012? Remember Mark Robinson, Herschel Walker, Richard Murdoch, and Roy Moore? Remember how you, if a Democrat, shook your head at a Republican party that got captured by crazy people? Remember how you wondered why responsible Republicans so easily surrendered their party?

6:29Fanatics, grifters, racists, anti-Semites, crackpots, and sexual abusers? How you vowed that I'd never allow that to happen to my party? I have news for you. It is happening to your party. Not everywhere in your party, but in enough places to lose the Senate in 2026 and put at risk the presidency for 2028. This is your time for testing and time for choosing. What are you going to do about it before it's too late? And now, my dialogue with Shannon Watts. But first, a quick break.

7:12A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

7:49It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

8:25We'll see you next time. come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

8:42The day after the Sandy Hook school massacre, Shannon Watts posted a message of grief and fury on her Facebook page. That single post launched Moms Demand Action and made Shannon Watts one of the country's most powerful voices for gun safety. She led the organization for 11 years before stepping down to throw herself into Democratic Party organizing. In 2024, she convened what was billed as the largest Zoom gathering in history, mobilizing over 200 ,000 voters and raising more than$11 million for Kamala Harris. Her 2025 book, Fired Up, was an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. She has since extended the themes of that book into her firestarter university and her in-person bonfire communities nationwide.

9:25The 2019 debut book, Fight Like a Mother, told how a stay-at-home mother of five in a blended family remade herself into one of the most dynamic forces in American politics today. Shannon Watts, thank you so much for joining me today. It's an honor, David. Thank you. So I want to talk about, this is one of your big themes now, the role of women in politics, what women add to politics when they are present, what women subtract from politics when they are not included on an equal basis. And I want to start this with a pretty specific focus. Now, we all know, we all should know, we all can see that male resentment is one of the bulwarks of power that President Trump has used and mobilized.

10:03It's a big theme of maybe even more explicit with his vice president, J.D. Vance, who has derided women in so many of the interviews that got him to Trump's attention and made him the vice president. Sex, gender, big, big source of power and recruitment for the MAGA movement. But one of the things, I'm a follower of you on Twitter, X, and I noticed you are becoming uncomfortably aware of similar kinds of emotions in the liberal and progressive world. I'm not a native of that world. I didn't grow up with that politics. So maybe you could explain to me what you think is going on. What are the tensions and flashpoints that you see going on in the liberal progressive world between men and women's power?

10:42Well, just to go back to the beginning, when I started Moms Demand Action, the reason I did that was because when you looked around at who had the levers of power at their disposal, it was not women, right? It was the gun lobby, which the average gun owner in this country is a white man over the age of 50. and to take on the wealthiest, most powerful special interests that's ever existed, I felt intuitively would involve women. And that's because women are so often expected to be moral and effective. And if you look at activism throughout the centuries in this country, you'll see that it's often women who are at the forefront all the way from prohibition when women were allowed to advocate for something that was considered sort of a Christian value.

11:34And really that toothpaste could never be put back in the tube, right? All the way up to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And I was inspired by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, this group of angry, outraged women whose souls had been insulted by the fact that people were drinking and driving with impunity and just ruining lives. And so when I started Moms to Man Action, I felt intuitively that it was women who were the right people to take on this mostly male gun lobby. And I think that was borne out. When they saw us coming, they were either very excited or very scared, which is exactly right, the emotion that you want.

12:17And I felt that tension immediately, not just in the zeitgeist, right? I mean, I immediately started getting threats of death and sexual violence, not just me, but our volunteers from men. And I expected gun extremists to be upset that women were advocating for what they felt was curtailing their rights, what we felt was making society safer and more free. But there was also this interesting dynamic in our own party of men feeling like we needed to be ideologically pure, that we needed to share our network and our capabilities with them, and a lot of criticism when it came to wanting more power.

13:10I saw that play out certainly online in the election. When Hillary Clinton was a candidate And there are all these Bernie bros who were, again, angry about sort of the need for ideological purity. And I think it also came down to women having too much power. And I've just seen that intensify over the years. And here we are now in 2026. and I think in part because Donald Trump is president and because misogyny has been so widely embraced and because we're having so many conversations about masculinity, we are beholden to this idea that it's dangerous when they do it, it's necessary when we do it and it just seems to be bleeding into our party.

13:57Can you give some specifics of how you see this working? There seems to be something about this that is quite reminiscent of MAGA world. language attitudes of violence and dismissal, comments on women's physical appearance, if they're not attractive enough or too attractive. And it seems maybe this is a phenomenon of the online world only, but it seems to be playing a real, a powerful force. And you see it in many, many of the primary contests of the 2026 season. I agree with that. I mean, I thought in, you know, in 2016, we would all be on the same page that it was important to finally have a woman president, that Hillary Clinton was perhaps the most qualified person who'd ever run in our nation's history, and that men, particularly on our side, would be supportive of that.

14:44And instead, what we saw was a lot of backlash, a lot of criticism. You know, as we all know, sexism, misogyny means that women can never be qualified enough and never smart enough, never attractive enough. And again, I think that's sort of expected. Or possibly too smart and too attractive. That's also better. That as well, right? It's the double bind. The tension that I've seen very specifically is that if women are allowed to be ambitious, strategic, flawed, but most of all pragmatic, women are not allowed, you know, women are the backbone of the Democratic Party and particularly Black women, and they're very well known to be moderate, to be pragmatic, to understand and be able to tolerate incrementalism, which is such a dirty word.

15:32It used to be just sort of between the younger and the older generations, but now I see it between moderates and centrists and what is called the left. And this idea that we are letting perfectionism be the enemy of good and that you have to be ideologically perfect and pure in order to be accepted and appreciated. Now, that said, the interesting part of this is I think you could make that argument about someone like AOC. And yet, recently, she has been under attack by people on the left, mostly men, who see her as having betrayed them for even being 10 % less ideologically pure than they are.

16:15You know, I will just say that I have been shocked to watch my party embrace what I believe is blue MAGA. And the amount of hate and vitriol I have endured on lying on X because of my opposition to Graham Plattner, that has been equally shocking to me. this man is clearly immoral unethical he's untrustworthy he's untested he's unvetted and he is not qualified I believe in redemption as much as any other person I believe that when someone says they're sorry when someone has regrets that we should support them and that they have another chance to make amends and to live a good life that doesn't mean they deserve a seat in one of the most powerful political bodies in the world.

17:08But I just, I'm so, I think for me, this was the true wake-up call that the Democratic Party was in significant trouble, is in significant trouble. And to disagree with this person who has become, you know, the candidate is as though you are committing treason or you are a traitor to the party. And, you know, I've been told, again, you read my introduction. I started the largest nonprofit in the nation. I raised$11 million for Kamala Harris. I'm a lifelong Democrat who's never voted for a Republican. I'm significantly to your left. I'm basically a leftist, but do not want to be a part of that wing of the party.

17:52And yet I'm being told I might as well become a Republican. Well, I lived through this very much in the Republican world in the days of the Tea Party. And I wrote a blog post on the day that the Affordable Care Act passed the House and was on its way, therefore, to the Senate and to the president's signature. One of the points I made in this article was we have a rule in the Republican Party of 2010-12 that the far right can say anything it wants about the non-far right. And there are no limits on their tactics. And they can primary them. They can do anything. But there's no reciprocal right. and not only that but this is the thing that got me to a lot of trouble that that you can't even say to them your tactics were misguided um because there was this big argument at the time should you negotiate over the affordable care act and try to get i mean obama was signaling he was prepared to give away a lot of stuff to get the signature measure through the senate and house should you negotiate with that or should you fight to the to the end and the the argument was made fight to the end and the argument failed and they got nothing and uh the affordable care act passed and remains the law of the land to this day with many subtractions of funding by the Trump administration, but it's still there.

19:02Who made this rule that the criticism can go one way but never the other way? And that seems to be very much what is going on in the Democratic Party. I mean, it's not treason for Graham Plattner to challenge Janet Mills. He's allowed to do that. And for the people who like Janet Mills better, either for pragmatic reasons or moral reasons to say, we don't trust you and we don't like you. Oh, well, now the ratchet has closed and you owe us a duty of loyalty that we would never give to you. I think that's what's so interesting about what we're seeing. And we don't know if it'll work yet. I suspect that it won't.

19:34But as the saying goes, politics is a game of addition and not subtraction. And the left is so rabid on its insistence that we support these unqualified, untested primary candidates and their vitriol is pushing people away. In particular, I believe it's pushing women away and even more specifically, women who are my age, right? Women who are over 50, women who are swing voters, women who will, by the way, determine the election outcome in Maine. And I don't know how you bring a party together. I don't know how a person wins if their whole strategy is to alienate the most important voters and then angrily expect them to vote for them in the general election.

20:27And, you know, to your point, democracy depends on self-restraint. And if our argument is that, you know, by copying Donald Trump's anti-institutional behaviors, learning from his strategic strengths, that's fine. But I think the central idea here is whether Democrats can be more forceful the way that Donald Trump is while still preserving the norms and institutions that they say are worth protecting. But I guess I'm starting to question that. Yeah. As you and I speak, Vice President Vance has just released a new memoir. I don't have a copy of it yet and I haven't read it. But according to the reports that I've seen, he has expressed some measure of regret, self-criticism, maybe self-criticism more than regret for his remark that women who didn't vote Republican were childless cat ladies.

21:16And I remember when he made the, this is before he, I think, entered the Senate. He was doing a lot of right-wing podcasts. And one of the things I watched him say it, one of the things that struck me is just the cruelty of the remark that there are a lot of childless people who don't want to be childless. And I mean, there are many childless people who do, but there are many who don't. And it reflects some kind of medical tragedy or personal tragedy or the loss of a child in some way or the loss of a pregnancy. And it's not something that people who seek political office would normally make a joke about or demeaning joke about.

21:48So why would you make fun of this? But he did because that's maybe less his nature than what he cynically judged the nature of the audience he wanted to be. Well, I'm seeking the votes of cruel people, so I perform cruel. And then I'll get the votes of cruel people. And indeed, it has worked out for him. Now he has his eye on a higher audience where there are fewer, where the cruel people don't have the decisive vote. And so he retracts the remark. But that instinct, that kind of behavior, that's not unique to any one political faction in the country. No. And, you know, as Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark astutely pointed out, every single focus group she does about J.D.

22:24Vance, the one thing that comes up among conservative and progressive women alike is that comment that he made. And it's sort of indelibly, I think, in all of our minds, certainly to me as a woman, disqualifies him from being president. I don't think the apology is heartfelt. I think it's pragmatic. I'm the mom of five children, four of whom are now grown women, ages 29 to 37. None of them are married. None of them have children. They're all very successful, bright, happy people. and they were incredibly insulted. They're not even that politically active. And yet, you know, that resonated with them, this idea that they were less than or unhappy or not equal citizens because they don't have children, because they don't have partners, was incredibly offensive.

23:18And I do, I think it will be so fascinating to watch because obviously Donald Trump won. And so these behaviors, these comments, didn't necessarily impact him, even with Republican women who voted for him. But the more we see this play out, the more it infects our society, the more it becomes a problem in both parties, the more I wonder if there will be a backlash. And what do you mean by that? Finally, women saying, this is enough. You're talking about taking away our right to vote. You're talking about valuing trad wives. You are talking about going back to sort of, you know, 1950s ideals for what and who women are.

23:57And that's just not going to resonate in this day and age. I'm hopeful we'll see that, you know, in each voting election. I'm particularly disappointed about how white women vote. but I think as women get more power and become more disgusted by the fact that this isn't just political it's becoming part of our mainstream it's infecting our families and our workplaces because it was allowed and it started off as something that seemed like a joke or seemed like an extreme part of the culture has actually become more embedded in the fabric of our our society. Yeah. Well, it may be that there are things that are just, they're bigger than politics.

24:44So, you know, in, in, in the world of 1955, when there's still lots of jobs in steel mills and, uh, and, and assembly lines and factories and the rewards to physical strength were great. Um, and the rewards to education were comparatively low. Even if a woman finished high school and got some college and her partner did not, he still could get a unionized job in a factory that paid more than her job as a file clerk or a teacher maybe. And so the man offered more economic clout. The woman would offer soft skills, would offer agreeableness. The man didn't have to be so agreeable and the partnership worked or it didn't, but the partnership was formed.

25:23And I think as we've seen, the returns to education are rising and women are succeeding better at getting the education. And the age of artificial intelligence, I think probably what will rise even faster are returns to soft skills. Agreeableness will become, the computer will be able to answer all our questions, but it may not do so in a way that other human beings want the questions answered. And so the ability to work in groups and to work well with others. And again, these are classically, and I think probably more fundamentally, excellences at which women have fared better than men. And as men lag behind, progressive men feel the shift in the sexual marketplace just as much as conservative men do.

26:01Yeah, I agree with that assessment. And I also think that women have become, if you look at female power, women power, that liberal women in particular have become influential more so than maybe on the conservative side in media, in philanthropy, in nonprofits, in academia, advocacy organizations, electoral politics. And I think ultra-progressive men are just so deeply suspicious of institutions and power structures. And so when women become visible leaders in these institutions, they become these symbolic targets. But I think what we've seen on the left is that this ideological purity becomes the source of social capital.

26:44When you publicly criticize prominent liberal women, it's a way of signaling your credentials, your moral seriousness. And it's not necessarily about the woman itself. I think it functions as a performance for an audience, which brings us to the other point, which is there is something in 2026 that there wasn't in 2016, which is an economic incentive to behave this way online. I think Hasan Piker is a perfect example of this. He has said some of the most outrageously misogynistic, bigoted, racist, dangerous things, and he's rewarded for that. and when you get rewarded for that, for likes, for clicks, for money, whatever that is, I think it's very damaging and corrosive.

27:35And who builds these systems to reward this kind of behavior? It's a great question. I mean, look, obviously it's male leaders, whether they're in our country, something I learned while working in gun safety is that a lot of the chaos created online is by foreign entities who know the buzzwords to get us arguing amongst ourselves, including guns, including abortion, that those things just become sort of this way to outrage and anger people. And then again, the people in our own country who are funding those things, everyone from Elon Musk to other prominent people, both on the right and left, right, who are investing in what's now called the manosphere.