Heather Gautney, Ph.D., felt the “Bern.” And now she wants to share what she learned from it.

In her just-published book, Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement (Verso, 2018), Gautney, an associate professor of sociology at Fordham, detailed what it was like to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as he campaigned for the 2016 Democratic party presidential nomination. Gautney had previously worked for Sanders when she was an American Sociological Association Fellow during the 2012-2013 academic year and joined his campaign in 2015 as a researcher.

She described the book as half policy analysis, half op-ed, with a particular emphasis on the lessons the Democratic Party should take from Sanders’ surprisingly strong showing in the primaries and the triumph of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Although Sanders ultimately lost the nomination to Clinton, Gautney said his candidacy exposed what she called the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s platform for the last four decades.

Shifting Attitudes Among Voters

“What his campaign did was expose that at least half of the Democratic Party are really people who identify as progressives or support a progressive agenda, and since he ran, I think we’ve been seeing a real shift toward supporting that agenda,” she said.

As evidence, she pointed to proposals to expand Medicare to all U.S. citizens. Sanders has been promoting the idea for years with little success, but this past year, the plan had 16 co-signers, including Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

To some extent, Gautney said she feels that the fact that Trump won is evidence that the party should reconsider issues that Sanders and Democratic leaders butted heads on, such as trade, free education, and universal healthcare.

A “neoliberal agenda that promotes growth, prosperity for all, the wonders of globalization and consumerism and the high-tech future” has left many people behind and cost Democrats voters in places like Wisconsin, she said.

“There’s been lots of glossy language about the wonders of free trade, and yet this was a huge issue in 2016 for people [who opposed it]in Midwestern states,” she said.

A Revival for Ideas Past

Gautney said she was as surprised as anyone else that Sanders got as far as he did and viewed his popularity with millennials as proof that the time is right to promote his agenda. This would have been true even in the event of a Clinton victory, which Gautney assumed would be the case when she started writing the book. To those who say the notion that free education is a radical idea, she noted that City College of New York, her alma mater, was once tuition-free.

“These are things that in some way or form have existed, so Bernie’s goal has been to say that. We are the wealthiest country on earth, we can achieve these things, and we can take care of our people,” she said.

“We can rebuild the middle class in this country. It’ll be like the middle class that existed in the 1950’s, except this time it’ll be a more diverse middle class, and women and people of color will be included.”

Gautney devoted a chapter to the schisms between the Sanders and Clinton camps that were never fully healed. In another, she elucidates the difference between social movements and elections. She also delved into the outreach efforts that Sanders embarked on after the November election to help him get a better handle on why former Barack Obama voters in battleground states then voted for Trump.

It was sobering, she said, because so many of the promises that Sanders had campaigned on—like more money for social security and stronger support of Medicare and Medicaid—were ones Trump embraced as well, and these voters chose to support Trump. She contends that class has a lot to do with it.

“Over the last three or four decades, a class perspective has increasingly been taken off the table, and one of the things that this 2016 election did was put it firmly back on. I argue that class is really a fundamental organizing principle of this election season, on both the right and left,” she said.

The takeaway of the book should be of interest to partisans on both sides of the aisle, she said.

“I think it’ll be interesting as a sort of historical accounting for this kind of moment, and one that reaches back into the 1970s and then reaches forward to 2020 and maybe even beyond.”

Gautney will discuss her book with Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West on May 16 at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. For more details, visit the event website.

These were some of the questions addressed in a wide-ranging conversation held on April 5 at Fordham Law.

“Fake News & Twitter Wars: Media & Politics in the Trump Years” brought together Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies and author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Zephyr Teachout, associate professor of law and author of Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United, (Harvard University Press, 2016).

When it comes to political campaigns, the speakers noted that some politicians run campaigns that decentralize tasks while others’ campaigns decentralize power. However, the traditional structure has changed very little, consisting of a finance director, a communications shop, and a political/field operations area. This arrangement caused endless conflict when the internet became a tool of campaigns, and hasn’t entirely abated.

“In 2008, ‘digital’ was under communications in almost every single campaign. In 2010, it was still under communications in almost every campaign. Even where they started to have their own fourth pillar, the [two]would fight constantly,” Baldwin-Philippi said. “And it continues. Most campaigns still have those three pillars.”

Baldwin-Philippi said that when she began researching her book in 2010, campaigns were painstakingly fact checking to prove their points. It was, she said, a short-lived phenomenon, however. Today, Americans need to become more adept at recognizing propaganda if they are to be a well-informed citizenry.

“Traditionally, we’ve measured being informed as knowing there are three branches of government, and knowing who the vice president is. I think we really need to move beyond these ways of measuring and pointing to good citizenship,” she said.

Teachout cautioned against the rise of media outlets that are ostensibly conservative but are “actually nihilistic.” There’s some merit to the saying that politics and the truth have never had a good relationship, she said—but at the same time politics cannot exist without a belief in the possibility of facts.

“Skepticism is one thing. But a radical cynicism actually makes conversation extremely difficult because then there is no final reference to which one can go to,” she said. “This kind of postmodern approach is incredibly dangerous for our discourse.”

Both speakers said that corruption was a central theme of the 2016 presidential election. Many voters chose Donald Trump because they felt the entire system was corrupt and wanted to throw it all out and start fresh.

Teachout noted that we can’t actually tell if another person is corrupt, or using public power for private, selfish ends, because we can’t look into another person’s heart. However, we can enforce laws that prohibit selfish behavior.

She criticized President Trump for refusing to separate himself from his businesses while in office, which she called a clear conflict of interest.

She also had harsh words for Hillary Clinton. When questions were raised about connections between The Clinton Foundation and her service as Secretary of State, Clinton simply said there was no “smoking gun” that proved obvious quid pro quo transactions.

“[The statement] suggests we should only be concerned about those circumstances, when we can see a smoking gun,” she said. “It actually pushes on a heavy legalism, which our current president has adopted and exaggerated.”

“It’s important that we respect conflict-of-interest norms,” she said.

The event, which was moderated by Eric Sundrup, S.J. associate editor of America magazine, was the second in the Maloney Law Library’s Behind the Book series, which brings together scholars to discuss their research on contemporary issues and the publishing experience.

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“Soul-Searching on the Eve of the Election: Religion and the Future of American Politics,” a panel discussion held by the Center on Religion and Culture, tackled everything from Catholics’ role in the 2016 election to the silence surrounding ISIS’ genocide of Christians and Yazidis.

A large part of the night was devoted to discussing white evangelical voters’ support for Donald Trump. David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, said that in 2016, race, gender, and partisan identity are more influential than religion. Levels of social capital and age are also a factor, as white evangelicals who are younger and have more social networks are resisting their leaders’ embrace of Trump.

Eddie Glaude Jr., the author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016), said in the black community, religion still has a place in the political arena. Bree Newsome, the woman who climbed a flagpole in June 2015 to remove a Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, recited Psalms 27 as she was alighting from the pole.

Tom Reese, S.J., columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, pointed out parallels in the decline of both religious and political groups. In 2014, 39 percent of Americans identified politically as independents. Likewise, the number of people identifying as having no religious affiliation (“nones”) has increased to about 25 percent of the U.S. population.

Panelists criticized the Obama Administration’s inattention to religiously motivated killings. Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom, said that in March, the administration correctly labeled the killing of Yazidis by ISIS as a genocide, yet has done little to publicize the issue since then.

Perhaps due to her Methodist background, Hillary Clinton seems uncomfortable talking about her religion, said Father Reese. Her campaign is trying to simultaneously appeal to Hispanic Catholics, black Protestants and most importantly, young people who identify as “nones.” Push religion too hard, he said, and they risk alienating nonreligious voters.

“The Democratic party is quite conflicted when it comes to how they want to talk about religion. They’ll talk about  [it]one way in the black community and with Hispanics, but with a different crowd, it’s just not an issue,” he said.

When it comes to Catholic voters, Father Reese said, although they traditionally lean Republican, it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll vote this year. The primary exit polls only asked if a voter was evangelical; not if they were Catholic.

What is clear, he said, is that many religious leaders have become like “generals without troops.” Black religious leaders championed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but then switched their support for Barack Obama when Obama started winning votes on the ground in primaries. In this election cycle, white evangelical leaders supported Ted Cruz, yet their followers backed Donald Trump.

Blankenhorn said the Church of Latter Day Saints is a rare exception. Its leaders and followers traditionally vote Republican, but are both shunning Trump in such numbers that Trump may lose the state of Utah. It’s not a coincidence that the church is growing, and members have high levels of social capital.

“One thing that’s interesting to me is this trend where a few groups take a different path,” he said.

Video of the discussion can be found here.

While psychologists have used the test extensively, it’s never been used by political scientists to gauge how those characteristics might affect the way people vote—until now.

A new book by Monika McDermott, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science, explores the subject in Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016). Based on part on a study of more than 800 participants, the book delves into how political behavior can be influenced by gendered personality traits. It also demonstrates that biological sex does not necessarily dictate gendered personalities or partisan preferences as traditionally believed.

McDermott had heard the idea that certain gendered traits are associated with particular political parties, with the Democratic Party believed to hold a compassionate, feminine nature to the Republican Party’s tougher, more masculine nature.

“I started thinking of this in 2012 when I taught a class, Women in Politics, and we covered the idea of masculine and feminine voting—as opposed to biological sex,” said McDermott. “Most political science research involves biological sex. This is separate from that.”

Given that the course she was teaching focused on women, McDermott said the class roster skewed toward women. But when she administered the Bem test in class, she found that some of the women possessed more masculine traits, such as aggressiveness and competitiveness, than the feminine traits, such as compassion and gentleness.

“These were college-attending, career driven women in New York City,” said McDermott. “You have to have elements of competitiveness and strength to even come here.”

McDermott acknowledged that there is some criticism of the Bem inventory’s categorizations, but the categories still help define perceived differences between the two dimensions, she said.

With the results of the Women in Politics class in hand, McDermott began to distribute the Bem questionnaire to all of her political science classes—a more biologically diverse group. There she found that masculine characteristics often aligned with Republicans and feminine characteristics aligned with Democrats.

It was then that McDermott began to contemplate a nationwide study. She designed a questionnaire that merged the Bem questions with questions on political attitudes and activities. That questionnaire forms the basis for her book.

“This is completely intuitive stuff, but we applied a quantitative method,” she said, adding that her students helped inspire the research. “It’s amazing that no one has applied it to political activity. Pundits talk about this, but there’s no one who has checked it out.”

McDermott said that her next study would be on how candidates’ gendered personalities may have an effect on voters—a topic she says is ripe for the upcoming election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“You have people who have very obvious masculine traits, which is what we look for in a political leader, but there’s a cognitive dissonance for voters if the candidate is a woman,” she said.