Gendered Parties, Gendered Conventions, Gendered Performance, Gendered Trajectories

comparing the unspoken emotional coding

What follows: you can find counterexamples. My argument is that I’m about to describe a general difference, not two invariable absolutes. But the trend seems pretty clear.

First, the Republican National Convention.

Mike Pompeo:

JD Vance:

Tucker Carlson:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders:

Tim Scott:

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice brought his dog, and he used this incendiary far-right language of rage and grievance (they didn’t quite nail the transcription, because he said that she makes us smile):

The Republican National Convention was emotionally cool, relaxed and delivered at a low pitch, even when they talked about Trump getting shot. A governor brought his dog. The one person who did rage-performance was a professional wrestler, and his “angry” face was camp. He was kidding. If you turned down the sound on the Republican convention, you’d think it was the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast at the Palm Springs Country Club. So he goes to tee off, right, and then suddenly he realizes that he spilled his drink, and so Don Rickles says to him….

Now, the Democratic National Convention.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel very briefly started like this:

…then abruptly time-for-my-performance-face transitioned to a whole bunch of this, the Official Facial Expression of the 2024 Democratic National Convention™:

No, really.

If you’ve watched three nights of this, you’ve instinctively checked to see if your pillow and blanket have been moved to the couch.

Here’s one of the party’s more obscure speakers, brought in well after prime time on the first night for a less-watched night owl address:

Here’s Hillary Clinton, promising that Kamala Harris will deal with our domestic enemies:

Tim Walz, who has a remarkable instinct for making this exact facial expression:

There were people who laughed and smiled at the thing. But overwhelmingly, the whole performance has been a grinding downer, like listening to the drunken aftermath of a marital conflict: And another thing Trump does that I hate is….

The Democratic National Convention has been emotionally cold, with little weird non-sequitur bursts that have been stagily emotionally hot.

If you took the two events and fuzzed out the words so you couldn’t hear exactly what anyone was saying, but just listened to the tone and watched the facial expressions, you’d be left with two radically different flavors of emotional coding, at a level that I suspect has been habit and instinct rather than a plan. No, we’re not upset, okay, we just need you to come into the longhouse so we can explain what you’ve done wrong.

So. This:

…seems to be happening at the level of cultural performativity and social herd instinct at least as much as it’s happening on the level of ideological divergence. Which means that there’s no political argument that fixes it.

To be continued. A lot.