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      Incarcerated Californians can’t vote. A prison held an election anyway

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      An estimated 4 million US citizens are barred from voting because they have a felony conviction. That includes most Americans serving prison sentences.But last week at San Quentin, the 172-year-old prison in the San Francisco Bay Area, residents had a rare opportunity to weigh in on a US election where so much is on the line.As incarcerated residents jogged on the yard and played pickleball, dozens stopped by the prison’s education department and slid paper ballots into a locked metal box with an American flag and the word “vote” painted on it.The voters were participating in a mock election, organized by Juan Moreno Haines, a journalist incarcerated at San Quentin, and Mount Tamalpais College (MTC), a liberal arts institution based at the prison.“It’s important for me to have a voice, especially if it’s being heard on the outside,” said Michael Scott, 45, who is due to be released next year after having been incarcerated for more than two decades, before casting his vote.California, like most US states, prohibits incarcerated people with felonies from voting, affecting more than 90,000 people in state prisons. The US is a global leader in its incarceration rate and an outlier in its sweeping disenfranchisement; a recent report identified more than 70 countries with no or very few restrictions on voting based on criminal records. Roughly 1.7% of the US voting-age population can’t vote, with Black Americans disproportionately excluded and restrictions potentially affecting election results.For San Quentin’s election, MTC, which recently became the first US accredited college exclusively operating behind bars, directed incarcerated students in its American government class to design ballots, choosing which races and initiatives to poll.MTC sent all 3,247 residents a ballot. After a week of voting, 341 ballots had been returned, representing 10.5% of the population. Fifteen volunteers from MTC and the League of Women Voters tallied the results: Kamala Harris won 57.2% of votes, and Donald Trump won 28.2%. Claudia De la Cruz of the Peace and Freedom party, a socialist ticket, won 3.5% of votes; the Green party’s Jill Stein won 2.6%; Robert F Kennedy Jr won 2.1%; and Chase Oliver, a libertarian, won 0.3%.View image in fullscreenIn the California senate race, Adam Schiff, the Democratic candidate, defeated Republican Steve Garvey with 33.7% of votes, though nearly half of respondents left this question blank. Nearly 60% favored Prop 5, which would boost affordable housing funding; 78% favored Prop 32, which would increase the minimum wage; and 57.2% rejected Prop 36, which would increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes.Prop 6 would change the state constitution to abolish forced prison labor, making it a high-stakes measure for incarcerated people. Just more than 77% of respondents backed it.The state of California, like most others in the US, allows for incarcerated people to be forced to work against their will. California profits from this form of involuntary servitude, with residents providing vital services for negligible wages. Most people in prison currently make less than $0.75 (£0.58) an hour for their jobs.Prop 6 is meant to allow incarcerated people to choose their jobs and prohibit prisons from punishing those who refuse an assignment. Dante Jones, 41, said he wished he could vote for Prop 6 on 5 November: “We’ve got legalized plantations … They say they want us to be citizens, they want to rehabilitate us, but then they don’t do anything that allows that to happen. Technically, by the constitution, we’re slaves and they can whip our backs.”Jones said he hopes if Prop 6 passes, incarcerated people can earn better wages to afford commissary, including food.Jones’ assessment of the presidential race was grim: “I think we’re losing either way.” He reluctantly supported Harris despite her prosecutorial record and reputation for harshly punishing Black defendants: “She ain’t for her people. Do you know how many Black and brown people she put in prison? … She’s gonna be like a Bill Clinton, a conservative Democrat who is tough on crime.” Despite those misgivings, he couldn’t stomach supporting Trump: “Since he’s been in politics, he’s been courting racist white people who think that people who aren’t white are taking their country.”Jaime Joseph Jaramillo, 53, said he supported Trump, appreciating his promise of mass deportations to “get rid of the drug cartels” and favoring him on foreign policy: “I want him to bomb Iran and drill, drill, drill.” He expressed sympathy for Palestinians, but said: “I want him to take out Hamas.”Nate Venegas, 47, said he, too, favored Trump because “our system needs somebody who’s not a politician”. He thinks Trump could be more swayed on prison reform, citing the former president’s decision to pardon a woman’s drug offense after lobbying by Kim Kardashian while he was in office. But he also called Trump a “clown” and said he disliked his vigorous support of capital punishment: “I don’t believe there should be a death penalty. I don’t believe a man should kill another man.”Scott voted for Harris “because she gives me something to look forward to. Trump hasn’t given me anything that he plans to do, except lock down the borders. We have problems with homelessness, jobs and climate change.”Gabriel Moctezuma, 32, said he considered Harris “the lesser of two evils” and supported her on reproductive rights and immigration: “I think there would be a lot of progressive changes. There have been a lot of human rights taken away from people and she’ll bring some of those policies back.” But he worries about divisions in the country: “No matter who wins, this country is going to be split and I’m really hoping that there’s not the same amount of violence as January 6.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenOn their ballots, some offered handwritten notes about why they voted:“We have not always had the right to vote. So I would like to cast my vote for each of my [African American] ancestors that was denied access.”“I only ever voted once in my life and I want to do so again.”“Democracy is at stake.”“I want to feel like I am a part of history.”“[I’ve] been in prison for 29 years and never had an opportunity to vote.”Vermont, Maine and Washington DC are the only places in the US where all incarcerated people can vote.Amy Jamgochian, the chief academic officer at MTC, said the disenfranchisement of incarcerated people was a reminder that the US is “very confused as a society about what incarceration is for”.“Is it for depriving people of humanity and rights? Will that help them? Are we trying to help them? Or are we just trying to warehouse them? If [the goal] is rehabilitation, then I don’t think we want to dehumanize them. We want to actually deeply respect their humanity, including giving them the right to vote.”Venegas, who has been incarcerated for 25 years and is part of a civic engagement group at San Quentin, said he did feel society’s views on the purpose of the criminal justice system are shifting. He noted how, 20 years ago, the system was primarily focused on punishment, with little interest in getting people ready to come home.Last year, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, renamed San Quentin a “rehabilitation center”, pledging to turn the prison into a complex resembling a college campus focused on programming and re-entry.It’s just another reason why efforts like the mock election matter, Venegas argued. “People are starting to listen to us and care about having us as neighbors when we get out,” he said. “So our voices really matter … and I’d give anything to be able to vote and have a say.”

      Juan Moreno Haines is an incarcerated journalist at San Quentin and editor-in-chief of Solitary Watch. Sam Levin is a staff reporter at Guardian US More

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      Do Democrats have a ‘men’ problem? – podcast

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      The Harris campaign, which has been praised for how it has managed to reach out to women, is now having to balance their attention and pitch some policies that would appeal to men.
      But is it too little too late? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Gloria Oladipo, a breaking news reporter for Guardian US, about why men could decide this year’s election and why both campaigns might be taking them for granted

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      God knows we need an antidote to all the lousy men in the news – and I think I’ve found one | Emma Brockes

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      For the past month, every woman I know has been having versions of the same conversation, roughly opening with: for the love of God, how rapey is the news? No period of history has been free from accounts of male sex-offending. But the present roll call of alleged offenders – Diddy, Fayed, the French rapist and his endless accomplices, various scandals in broadcasting, and last week, new charges for the man who keeps giving on this subject, Harvey Weinstein – is particularly grim. For just one day, I would like to turn on the news without having to hear a presenter struggling to find a way to say “lube” in a BBC voice. So let’s talk about something else: Doug Emhoff.Doug Emhoff! Kamala Harris’s husband and consort, a man very possibly in line to be the first first gentleman of the United States and, as far as we can tell, an antidote to lousy men everywhere. This week, I heard Emhoff referred to as a “wife guy”, which made me smile – wife guy being simultaneously a nice term of affection for men who unreservedly support their wives, and also a reminder that no word for a female equivalent can exist. (What use the tautology of being a “husband chick” when, for straight women, embedded in the definition of the word “wife” is total, unwavering support of your husband).Anyway, Emhoff – what a rare beast. A former entertainment lawyer, a music person who named his kids after jazz legends, a man extremely adept at playing the lovable goofball, which doesn’t rule out the possibility he’s a lovable goofball, and a husband seemingly completely happy to promote, support and cheerlead his high-profile wife. To my eye, Emhoff, who is 59, has Dan Aykroyd, or maybe John Goodman, energy: the American every-dad who can rock a plaid shirt at the weekend, and on Monday whip up a quick lawsuit to vanquish your enemies.Exactly how Emhoff has nailed this vibe comes down to a mixture of things. The fact he’s called Doug definitely helps. Has there ever, in public life, been a bad “Doug”? (No.) Doug is easygoing. Doug is dependable – but not boring! Doug shows up. Doug quit his job when his wife became vice-president so he could give her his all. Doug is a mensch, although on the subject of his Jewishness, opponents of leftwing positions around Israel assert that Doug has overplayed his heritage for political gain. This sounds perilously close to Donald Trump’s observations about Harris’s background, but anyway, it’s all part of the 360 degrees of Doug Emhoff. After all, Doug isn’t perfect!I mean, he really isn’t. Earlier this year, Emhoff acknowledged that the end of his first marriage to Kerstin Mackin in 2008 was messy and that he had been unfaithful. It’s not ideal, I know. It is telling, however, that Emhoff’s first wife, who has kept his name, has been extremely active promoting Harris’s bid for the presidency. When JD Vance went after Harris for not having biological children – a sentence it still seems wild to have to type – Kerstin Emhoff popped up to defend the Democratic candidate, calling Vance’s remarks “baseless attacks”. She told CNN that, “for over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I”. She was, she said, grateful to have her as part of their blended family.Which brings us to the Emhoff kids. To anyone’s knowledge, has there ever been a hipster first son or daughter in the White House? Of course, go back enough years and who knows; maybe in 1798, Abigail Adams was riding around the West Wing on a penny farthing drinking mojitos out of a teacup. But in recent memory, ranging back over Trump’s children, the Obama kids, the Bush twins and Chelsea Clinton, every one of them looked perfectly primed for a postgrad internship at Goldman Sachs or a nepo arrangement in Hollywood. Ella Emhoff, by contrast, is a designer specialising in knitwear, who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She turned up at the Democratic convention earlier this year covered in tattoos and wearing pebble glasses and a vintage frock.There are other wife guys out there, although you have to search quite hard to find them. A friend suggests Alexis Ohanian, husband to Serena Williams and millionaire co-founder of Reddit. Ohanian has his own thing going on, which doesn’t guarantee that a man won’t resent his wife’s success. But in public, Mr Serena Williams always seems over the moon to be by her side. There’s an argument for Prince Harry as wife guy. You’ve probably got to rope Denis Thatcher into this conversation. I’m sure there are others.But this is about Doug Emhoff, who, to the extent that we can ever know anything about other people’s relationships, offers further proof of Harris’s good judgment. She could have had anyone, but she chose Doug, and there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Whoever they may be, find your Doug Emhoff – possibly on the second go-around, just to be safe – and run for the biggest job you can imagine.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      The American dream is dead for many. Social democracy can bring it back | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      I love the United States. My parents came here from Trinidad and Tobago the year before I was born, and they and my four siblings eventually became citizens. My parents struggled for many years to get established here, but it has offered us everything – security, belonging, opportunity.Yet for many Americans, particularly those who have been in this country for generations building the foundations of American prosperity, the American dream is not alive and well.This point can’t be debated with measures of the United States’ relative affluence; it’s what American workers are telling us, both through how they respond to polls directly on the question and through the political views they increasingly hold. The question isn’t if the American dream is dead, it’s how we go about reviving it.By the time the writer James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase “American dream” in the 1930s, it had already existed as an ethos for generations. Despite the country’s brutality towards Black and Native people, there is a reason why masses of workers saw the United States as a place without the leftovers of feudalism and aristocratic privilege holding people back. Even Karl Marx himself looked to the world’s “most progressive nation” to lead a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes after the triumph of Union forces in the civil war.Today, however, few at home or abroad hold such hopes for our country.Since it’s just a broad idea, we can’t measure the American dream in empirical terms. If it’s alive, it would be found in the minds of ordinary citizens who feel like they’re part of a project that is rooted in both their individual advancement and national advancement as a whole. And simply, the American dream is dead because ordinary Americans say it’s dead.Only 27% of people polled this year said “the American dream holds true.” Just 13 years ago, it was double that number. This doesn’t just reflect increasing cynicism in general: a majority of Americans say “the American dream once held true but doesn’t any more.” What’s happened to change so many of our minds?That polling isn’t uniform and correlates closely to both income and education, both proxies for social class. Among Americans who don’t have four-year college degrees only 22% say that American dream still holds true, half the mark of those with postgraduate degrees. Our national crisis of confidence is mostly a working-class problem.Americans as a whole, critics retort, are wealthier than ever. But, rather than argue with them, if we want to figure out why people don’t feel like they’re staying above water, we need to examine issues of income disparity and social wealth.The widening life expectancy gap between poor and rich Americans, which now averages more than 10 years, is perhaps the most dramatic example of a basic point that most of us take for granted: a kid growing up in a wealthy area is likely to have a wildly better life outcome compared to one growing up in a poor one.By most measures, the US has among the lowest rates of social mobility of any rich country. And our income disparity is even more stark when considering not just pre-tax wages, but the more expansive “social wage” provided in other countries. The Harvard economist Raj Chetty has shown the depth of the problem. By his measure, US absolute mobility – the chance a child will earn more than their parents – has fallen from 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The problem isn’t just that growth rates have declined. Chetty and his co-authors note that an economy that maintains our current income disparity but restores growth to booming 1940s and 50s levels would only increase absolute mobility to 62%.This problem of social mobility is compounded by issues of social welfare owing from our poorly designed entitlements, which are unable to deliver results as well as universal welfare states in Europe that offer things like childcare for new families, guaranteed national healthcare, and free vocation and trade schools.Another key difference between the US and northern Europe? The role of trade unions and other forms of working-class representation. In 1983, over 20% of Americans belonged to a union. That number is 10% now, compared with almost 70% in countries like Denmark and Sweden.The loss of good union jobs, particularly in manufacturing, persistent poverty and hopelessness have fueled social ills in communities across the country.To name just a few of their consequences: we face a serious problem with drug use and overdoses, with 107,543 people dying last year alone. Alcohol abuse has gone up dramatically, as have alcohol-related deaths. Between mass shootings and ordinary crime, people don’t feel safe, and our politicians seem to accept as natural fact that we’re destined to be a country with eight times the murder rate of Germany or where children need to pay attention during “active shooter” drills.Taken together, it’s obvious that you’d have a better chance of living the American dream in Europe than you would in America.Of course, some of the pessimism that people feel is inflamed by ideological actors. From parts of the left, earnest attempts to right historical wrongs might have fueled an excess of negativity about the progress we’ve made in recent decades. On the right, a much more dangerous tendency is built around the idea that immigration – a key component of the American dream and our economic progress – is a social ill that needs to be combated.Thankfully, the United States has a rich, dynamic economy. That’s a good thing and it allows us to support well-designed universal programs to improve the social mobility and material wellbeing of our poor and working classes. We can pursue taxation policies that better redistribute wealth and create greater state support for health care, childcare, housing and job training. We can shift the funding of K-12 education away from unequal property taxes and to a more equal base of federal support. We can also support worker unionization and expand policies to revitalize domestic manufacturing.As for concerns over immigration, a key part of Donald Trump’s appeal, we can support native-born workers feeling pressure in the job market from immigrants without elevating their situation to a zero-sum, existential battle in which either new Americans or established Americans will survive.We also, however, need to rally behind a vision of politics to go with these social-democratic policies. A vision of politics in which we assert the moral worth of every American and strive together to build a healthier and more optimistic society.We can’t pretend like things are going great in our country. But we also must reject the pessimism that says things must stay like this.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      The forces of loneliness can cause political instability. And threaten democracy | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      I have been thinking about fascism long before I even knew I was thinking about it. I lived for years inside the mind, the home, the terror of my tyrannical father who used violence as the methodology to sustain his power over every aspect of our existence. In order to achieve that power he separated and divided us. He isolated us, used us against each other and made us lonely.Hannah Arendt wrote about loneliness in the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”In 2023, the US surgeon general declared that loneliness was the most serious mental health crisis facing Americans. This loneliness is a form of existential dislocation. It creates persistent anxiety, depression, depersonalization and distrust. It is not unlike an ongoing, low-level collective panic attack. A constant buzzing of unrest. Enemies are lurking everywhere. The ecosystem in which we live, the culture feels poisoned and uninviting. We no longer recognize the world as our world. We become withdrawn, estranged, feeling helpless and abandoned. Mainly all our time and energy is spent protecting ourselves, proving we have a right to be here, living defensively. It occupies our attention, our creativity. It’s exhausting.I think of what Toni Morrison wrote of racism: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”I wonder what is the specific psychological impact of Project 2025 – of knowing there are fascist forces who openly and proudly devised a 920-page “policy bible” meant to undo every hard-earned right, every safeguard that protects women, African Americans, workers, elderly, the infirm, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants, Muslims – essentially everyone.What happens to our hearts and our capacity for connection and trust when we are encased in a field of malevolence and hatred which daily threatens our stability and peace? To know people mean to harm us, that they have no shame putting that desire on paper. What does this do to our psyches? How do our bodies process such hate, violence and cruelty? Who do we have to become in order to survive?Indigenous people and Black people have lived for hundreds of years in this landscape of precarity, capture, terror and violence. Now we are in late-stage patriarchy, where autocrats are being born and bred at the speed of light; where workers’ rights are being dismantled and child labor laws are weakened; where diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory programs that protected civil rights are being annihilated; books banned and history erased; where genocide is an acceptable practice to maintain domination; where rape is celebrated and bragged about as a form of control; where women are being pushed back into the dark ages (the 50s) and all the regulations that protect the Earth, the air, the water are unraveled.Fascism is a society-wide mental affliction. It’s in the culture, on the streets with Nazi gangs and raging men wrapped in American flags, in the new draconian laws passed by a rightwing supreme court denying voting rights or giving the president extreme powers. It’s in the outright lies being told by Trump scapegoating Black and brown immigrants, accusing them of crimes they never committed. On college campuses where students are arrested for protesting against the slaughter of women and children in Gaza. It’s in in the 64,000 babies born of rape last year in America because their mothers were denied abortions by states demanding more and more control over their bodies.The antidote to fascism is consciousness and education, which is why they want to terminate the Department of Education. We must learn the nature of fascism, what it is, how it operates now in 2024. Then we must name and expose it, call out the oppression, the hate, the misogyny and racism as it is happening. This can be terrifying, which is why we cannot do it alone. For so long our movements have been siloed and divided by hunger for scant resources, a feeling of powerlessness and invisibility, a hierarchy of suffering and a lack of vision and understanding that everything is interrelated and interdependent.Community and solidarity are our most powerful tools to fight fascism. They create a safe context for us to share so we can know that what we are witnessing and experiencing is real. They catalyze our strength to refuse the forces unraveling our freedoms. They propel us to fight for another way where people are treated with dignity, justice, respect and care.We have a vision of what 2025 should be like, too – it will be when we finally come together, united to end these forces of loneliness and hatred that have been dividing us all along.

      V is a playwright, author and founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against all women and girls and the earth and One Billion Rising. Her latest book Reckoning is just out in paperback. She guest edited this series on fascism. More

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      Donald Trump is backing free IVF? You can practically smell the desperation | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Would you like to do your bit to curb population decline in the west? Fancy a home full of babies with very high IQs and extremely blond hair? Well, let me introduce you to the Donald J Trump Insemination Institute. On a sprawling ranch in New Mexico, women can be impregnated, free of charge, with Trump’s sperm, ensuring that future generations, on Earth and Mars, are blessed with a steady supply of very stable geniuses.Sorry if I turned your stomach there, but I’m afraid I’m only half-joking. It was actually Jeffrey Epstein – who used to party with Trump – who was besotted with the idea of a ranch where 20 women at a time would be impregnated, in order to seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk, who is obsessed with babies and Trump, may harbour similar fantasies. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that Musk has “volunteered his sperm” to help seed a colony on Mars. (Musk has denied these claims.)While Trump hasn’t announced plans for a baby ranch of his own yet, he is suddenly a big fan of artificial insemination. Last week the former president announced that he would support free in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments if elected again. “We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said during a town hall campaign event in Wisconsin. He didn’t provide many details about how this would work other than saying that either the government or insurance companies would pay for everything.Another fuzzy detail? How government-sponsored IVF would coexist with the Republican party’s 2024 platform, which supports states’ rights to pass foetal personhood laws. It is impossible to support widespread access to IVF while also supporting the idea of foetal personhood, which holds that an embryo is a person and destroying one is homicide. I am fairly sure that Trump has no idea how IVF actually works, so here is a little explainer: you typically fertilise multiple eggs because you have no idea how many of them will develop into viable embryos. You could fertilise 20 eggs and end up with no viable embryos or end up with 20. The only way to control how many embryos you create is to harvest a single egg at a time, which is hugely expensive, inefficient and emotionally exhausting. In short: Trump seems to be running on a platform where IVF would be free but also effectively illegal.While it may be half-baked, Trump’s free IVF policy makes it clear that he is desperate to woo female voters. Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every US presidential election since 1980 and now – for obvious reasons – they are leaning heavily towards Kamala Harris. I’m not sure a last-minute IVF policy is going to cancel out the fact that abortion rights are a key issue in this election and Trump has boasted about being the guy who overturned Roe v Wade. Nor will it cancel out the fact that Trump is a legally defined sexual predator who can’t stop himself from saying every misogynistic thought that creeps into his little head. During a recent rally in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump praised his male supporters for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them.While Trump is clearly trying to appeal to women with his IVF policy, you also have to wonder whether his buddy Musk – one of the most influential voices in the US’s growing pro-natalist movement – has a hand in this. If the billionaire did get a position in a Trump administration (a possibility that has been repeatedly floated) one imagines Musk would encourage the US to emulate Hungary’s pro-natalist policies, which stem from a racist desire to encourage births and repopulate the country with the “right” (AKA white) kind of children. “We want Hungarian children,” Viktor Orbán said in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.”Free IVF may sound like a progressive policy on the surface but, for many on the right, it is linked to a belief that women are nothing more than baby-making machines designed to pass on the legacy of men. A future Donald J Trump Insemination Institute may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine | Nesrine Malik

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      A woman without biological children is running for high political office, and so naturally that quality will at some point be used against her. Kamala Harris has, in the short period since she emerged as the Democratic candidate for US president, been scrutinised over her lack of children. The conservative lawyer Will Chamberlain posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be president” – apparently, she doesn’t have “skin in the game”. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, called Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies miserable at their own lives”.It’s a particularly virulent tendency in the US, with a rightwing movement that is fixated on women’s reproduction. But who can forget (and if you have, I am happy to remind you of a low point that still sticks in my craw) Andrea Leadsom, during the 2016 Conservative party leadership election, saying that Theresa May might have nieces and nephews, but “I have children who are going to have children … who will be a part of what happens next”. “Genuinely,” she added, as if the message were not clear enough, “I feel that being a mum means you have a real stake in the future of our country, a tangible stake.”It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that “free” service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidised rights depend on. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elderly care would become profoundly visible – “disorienting and disturbing” – if that service were removed.“Motherhood,” writes the author Helen Charman in her new book Mother State, “is a political state. Nurture, care, the creation of human life – all immediate associations with mothering – have more to do with power, status and the distribution of resources … than we like to admit. For raising children is the foundational work of society, and, from gestation onward, it is unequally shared.”Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a “useful fantasy”.It is a binary public discourse, obscuring the often thin veil between biological and social actualisation. Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded. A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life.But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in “the future”, in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labour that props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilising and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Young women are the most progressive group in American history. Young men are checked out

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      View image in fullscreenWhen Donald Trump strutted on to the stage at the Republican national convention last month, it was to a raucous cover of James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World. The song credits men with inventing cars, trains, lights, boats, toys and commerce. The message was not subtle. At least, not to Melissa Deckman.“This idea of America needing someone who is a strong masculine figure – I think the Republican campaign this year is doing it even in a more pronounced and overt way than it did in 2016,” said Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. “You have a lot of younger men admiring the strength of Trump – or what they think is strong.”Deckman would know. In her forthcoming book The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy, she dives into the deep political divides between gen Z women and men and explores how they feel about growing up in the Trump era. Based on interviews with roughly 90 gen Z political activists, numerous focus groups and extensive polling, Deckman has identified what she calls a “historic reverse gender gap”.View image in fullscreenShe has found that gen Z men are becoming more conservative as well as increasingly indifferent to politics, bucking longstanding trends, dating back at least to the 1970s, that saw young people across the board voting liberal and men being generally more involved in politics than women. Meanwhile, gen Z women have not only become the most progressive cohort in US history but are also expected to outpace their male peers across virtually every measure of political involvement, such as donating money, volunteering for campaigns, registering people to vote – and, of course, voting.Young women were outstripping men on political engagement well before Joe Biden stepped aside in favor of Kamala Harris, setting the internet ablaze with memes and teeing up yet another presidential contest between Trump and a woman. Now, with Harris the presumptive Democratic nominee, a generation already riven by a canyon-wide political gender gap is watching a contest between a woman who could become the nation’s first Black and south Asian female president and a man who likes calling women “nasty”.“For me, the question come November is gonna be: to what extent do attitudes about gender influence the vote for Trump?” Deckman asked.Polls indicate that young men’s views on gender, femininity and masculinity are rapidly shifting. In 2022, 49% of gen Z men said that the United States had become “too soft and feminine”, Deckman found. Just a year later, 60% of gen Z men said the same. Deckman found that those who agreed with the statement were far more likely to have voted for Trump in 2016 – even after controlling for political party.No matter their age, women have long voted at higher rates than men – but that is the only political activity where they have consistently exceeded men. Men historically donated more, volunteered with campaigns more and otherwise participated in political life more. This year, Deckman believes young women will surpass young men not only at voting, but in all political activities. Democrats have historically had a firm grip on voters under 30 – a grip they may now be losing. Gen Z men, Deckman noted, have “reverted to the mean of men”: while they’re not necessarily more conservative that most men, they are more conservative than their millennial counterparts.Not all menThese trends are even more pronounced among white gen Z men. If you combine the number of independent gen Z men who lean Republican with those who identify as Republicans, Deckman said, young white men “look very conservative compared to even older white men”. She believes Trump will probably win young white men.In 2020, 49% of white men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Biden, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Meanwhile, 42% voted for Trump.The damage that could do to Harris, however, is mitigated by the fact that white men make up a shrinking segment of gen Z. About half of gen Z is white, making it the most diverse generation in US history. Several polls have suggested that Trump could win among young Black and Latino men – a claim that Deckman eyes with suspicion, especially since Harris has entered the race and the GOP seems unable to stop themselves from making racist comments about her. Some Republicans have started calling Harris the “first DEI president”.Deckman’s surveys have found that gen Z men are less likely than their female counterparts to say that racial equality is important to them, but 45% do believe that it’s important, including 52% of Black gen Z men.“If Donald Trump uses misogynistic, racist language toward Kamala Harris, I think the net effect for young men will be more off-putting than not,” Deckman said. “The end result for him is a net negative. It’s also, of course, wrong.”‘They don’t care’Another mitigating factor could help Harris: young men don’t seem all that interested in politics, period.“They don’t care,” Deckman said. In surveys, “I asked them: what are you passionate about? What issues are critically important to you? There’s like 20% gaps between young men and young women on everything.”In addition to caring more about issues like LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, as might be expected, gen Z women care more about economic issues like inflation, jobs and unemployment, which are typically thought to be more important to men. (LGBTQ+ zoomers also cared equally or more about every issue than straight zoomers.) Even men who agree that the US is too “soft and feminine” don’t feel more motivated to act. Instead, it is Democratic women who reject that notion who tend to get more involved in politics.While young men fall behind women in political engagement, women have, over the last few decades, gone to college and joined the workforce at higher and higher rates. These trends are not unrelated. The more education and money you have, the more likely you are to be invested in politics.Feeling like your rights are under “direct threat” also increases political involvement – and in the age of Trump, #MeToo and the fall of Roe v Wade, plenty of gen Z women feel like their rights are under threat. Gen Z men just don’t feel the same urgency.Surprisingly, there is one area of political involvement where young men and women feel similarly: they are both deeply uninterested in running for office. Women have long been less interested in running for office than men. But as of 2022, Deckman found, only 6% of gen Z men said they definitely planned to run for office, while 4% of gen Z women said the same. Despite women’s political enthusiasm, zoomers as a whole remain unconvinced that joining government is worth it.“Gen Z is far less likely to be confident in the federal government, in the media, in organized religion, in the police, in the criminal justice system,” Deckman said. “This is just endemic to a generation of young people who have grown up in one crisis after another.” More