The Cheapest Way to Win the Democrats’ ‘Strange New Respect’

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

 

In politics, there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing your own preferred shibboleths mouthed by your former political enemies. The pronouncement doesn’t even have to be sincere. Sure, a genuine conversion experience is gratifying, but it can be even more pleasing to watch your opponents endorse your own political views even if they are not persuaded by them. The principle at issue is irrelevant. What enlivens is the display of abject supplication.

 

For Republicans who are courting “strange new respect” from their erstwhile Democratic adversaries, there’s no better pathway to relevance and acclaim than to confirm Democrats’ worst suspicions about their GOP counterparts. The historical record is glutted with the tales of onetime right-wingers who suddenly discovered the virtues of left-wing policy prescriptions. We’ve also seen many newcomers to the American right who’ve taken their progressive preferences with them into the Republican Party.

 

But making politics about politics — public policy, legislation, elections, and the like — is self-limiting. Increasingly, the business of politics as entertainment treats public administration like a recondite fixation of a monomaniacal few. No, to get maximum play across the spectrum of left-of-center media venues, a convert’s critique of the Republican Party should be based in identity.

 

You don’t have to know anything about public policy if the subject at hand is identity. Your accidents of birth alone guarantee you entry into that conversation — one that courts a much larger audience than a policy-related controversy could. Thus, nothing so thrills the left as a onetime Republican who is willing to accuse her former comrades of sexism, racism, homophobia, or any of the many prejudices for which the left is ever vigilant. The potential for that criticism to reach a broad and engaged audience is high.

 

So it’s no surprise that some of the Republican Party’s most outspoken women are accusing Republican leadership in Washington of misogyny. They and their accusations are getting all the flattering attention they set out to secure.

 

Take Marjorie Taylor Greene. The outgoing Georgia representative has been on a whirlwind media blitz ever since she endorsed the Democratic Party’s rationale for the government shutdown — the rising costs of Obamacare and the need to preserve pandemic-era subsidies for its health insurance plans in perpetuity. But since the issue has faded in relevance, MTG has transitioned into a critic of the Republican Party’s alleged hostility toward women.

 

“It is extremely frustrating as a rank-and-file Republican member and in our majority, our Republican majority, that many of us women are not taken seriously, and our legislation is not taken seriously,” Greene complained in a recent appearance on CNN.

 

Greene’s grievances include her allegation that Speaker Mike Johnson in insufficiently anti-trans, because he failed to bring to a floor vote her proposal to “protect any child under the age of 18 from gender-affirming care.” In addition, Johnson has balked at Representative Anna Paulina Luna’s proposed ban on congressional stock trading. (For his part, Johnson recently implied that Luna’s interest in the issue was shallow and opportunistic, and New York Times reporter Annie Karni notes that Democrats aren’t backing Luna because they “feel burned” after she “flaked” on the effort to allow proxy voting for new parents).

 

But it’s not just Greene. South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace made a splash in the Times’ opinion pages this week by mounting an attack on the supposed misogynists in the House GOP’s leadership.

 

“Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath,” Mace wrote, adding:

 

Since 2013, the Republican conference chair position has gone to a woman. It’s the token slot, the designated leadership role for the top woman in the conference, while the real power lies in other offices.

 

I’m sure Lisa McClain, the current chair of the House Republican Conference, is a wonderful cook. I’d wager she’s an even better legislator. But we’ll never know, because that’s not the box she’s been assigned.

 

That’s not the whole of Mace’s argument. It’s not even most of it. Rather, most of her op-ed is devoted to a reasonable critique of the amendments process for bills and of leadership’s failure to restore regular order. That’s all well and good, but Mace’s argument wouldn’t have hooked the Times’ editors if it wasn’t accompanied by pointed criticisms of the GOP’s sexism and unctuous flattery for Nancy Pelosi’s speakership.

 

Even Elise Stefanik has dipped her toe into these waters. She picked a public fight with Johnson earlier this month in which she alleged that the speaker’s hold on his job was tenuous at best. Maybe her concerns are genuine. Perhaps she’s angling for an anti-Washington angle as she embarks on a campaign for governor of New York in a year when voters are inclined to favor Democratic candidates. Either way, the game was given away when a “senior Republican congressional aide” told the Times that Johnson had insulted Stefanik by giving her “a fake job and a fake title.”

 

On that score, Stefanik’s grievance is with the President Trump, not the speaker. Trump plucked Stefanik out of the House Republican Conference to serve as his head of the U.S. mission to the United Nations. He abruptly withdrew that nomination in March, forcing Stefanik’s House colleagues to create a new quasi-leadership role for the onetime House Republican Conference chairwoman.

 

This is catnip for the press, and you cannot blame them for responding to the incentives they themselves encourage. “Republicans have long struggled with elevating women,” NBC News reported. In that dispatch, the outlet cited unnamed female GOP lawmakers who insist they’re being passed over for committee chairmanships.

 

The New York Times accused Speaker Johnson of being a neanderthal. Women in the lower chamber of Congress just cannot get him to “listen to them” or “engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues.” Indeed, they suggested that “doing so was a cultural challenge for Mr. Johnson — an evangelical Christian who has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society.”

 

“Even when women rise in the ranks of Johnson’s GOP, they are treated with condescension,” The Nation’s Jeet Heer remarked. As evidence, he cited Johnson’s lighthearted praise for GOP conference chairwoman Lisa McClain as the member he’d most trust with handling Thanksgiving dinner. “Johnson clearly prefers women as cooks rather than as colleagues,” Heer wrote. McClain seems to disagree. “Driving an unnecessary divide over gender is a Democrat tactic,” she told NBC News, “and Republicans would be foolish to give in to this left-wing framing.”

 

Chances are, unless you’re a political junkie, McClain’s name doesn’t ring a bell. She’s one of the 31 voting female Republican House members, most of whom avoid the limelight. By contrast, Johnson’s critics are aspiring household names. Stefanik, Mace, Greene, Luna — it cannot be a coincidence that those who are leveling these allegations are also actively seeking to raise their political profiles. If that was their goal, it worked. It always works.