The term “witch hunt” has renewed cultural and political resonance, largely because it’s one of President Trump’s preferred strategies for deflecting criticism and mobilizing his base. Since assuming office, Trump has tweeted some variant of the phrase “WITCH HUNT!” more than 120 times in response to the Mueller investigation and critics including the “Fake News,” congressional Democrats, Hillary Clinton, various intelligence agencies, former President Obama, and “leakers” within the administration itself.

These tweets reflect the modern usage of the term — as a metaphor that delegitimizes an investigation by calling out the partisan biases and ideological motives underlying accusations of wrongdoing.

But the use of the term “witch hunt” is more than just partisan maneuvering. It contains a gender dynamic that’s often overlooked, particularly when a man in a position of power identifies himself as the target of a witch hunt. Trump’s witch hunt cross-references other historical and contemporary witch hunts, where the role of gender and power is more visible and more explicit. Placing his witch hunt in this broader context shows that the witch hunt is still a tool used to shore up gendered notions of authority, power, and legitimacy.

Is witch-hunting woman-hunting?

Historian Christina Larner posed this question in response to estimates that about 80 percent of those accused of witchcraft in the European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were women. In other medieval witch hunts, like those taking place in Russia, the proportion of women was higher — between 95 and 100 percent. At the same time, the witch hunters, the clerical and secular authorities presiding over inquisitions and tribunals tasked with identifying and eliminating witchcraft practitioners, were overwhelmingly male.

Why did early witch hunts play out along such clearly demarcated gender lines? Historians attribute much of the focus on gender to the world’s definitive witch-hunting manual the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, which established a strong link between womanhood and witchcraft.

In a chapter titled “Why is that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil superstitions?” the book’s Catholic authors draw on stories of Eve’s role in the fall of man to argue that women are the weaker sex and thus more susceptible to demonic influence and more inclined to form a sexual pact with the devil.

The Malleus Maleficarum also set forward detailed legal procedures to follow for the identification and prosecution of witches that relied primarily on religious and political authorities. As a result, most of the key players tasked with witch-hunting were men. Of course, women participated too — they made accusations, testified against other women, and suffered dramatic spectral possessions at public trials (as famously depicted in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) — but their roles were relatively circumscribed when compared to men. Women were ancillaries to the prosecution side in formal witch hunt proceedings.

In practice, these witch hunts tended to single out particular kinds of women, namely gender-nonconforming women, who threatened a social system characterized by rigid gender roles. As Larner put it: “Witches are conspicuous. The women who went to the stake during the witch hunt went cursing, often for the crime of cursing.”

Overt sexuality, displays of ambition (i.e., “lust” for power) and failure to behave in a circumspectly feminine manner were taken as evidence of witchcraft in women. Because of this focus on weeding out gender-nonconforming women, many historians agree that the witch hunts of the early modern period were a tool for reinforcing male-dominated systems of authority.

McCarthy-era witch hunts

The term “witch hunt” entered the American political lexicon in the 1950s, during the second Red Scare. Anti-communist sentiment ran high after World War II, and a number of political elites, notably Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), speculated that Americans faced communist “enemies within.” This sparked large-scale efforts to root out communists from the US government, organized labor, higher education, media, and the entertainment industry.

Historians estimate that between 1947 and 1965, 5 million federal employees were subjected to loyalty tests, which resulted in about 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations. Few of those investigated turned out to actually be communists, and McCarthy’s name became synonymous with leveling trumped-up, unsubstantiated accusations of wrongdoing against one’s political opponents in a highly pressurized political climate.

McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts tended to target women. Women were overrepresented among defendants in federal loyalty cases, and agencies that employed a disproportionately large share of women were often singled out for close scrutiny. Historian Landon Storrs notes that evidence presented against female defendants took on a distinctively gendered tone. For example, keeping one’s maiden name, “needlessly” holding a high-paying job while married, and having a “dominant personality” were all grounds for suspicion of communist sympathizing, ostensibly because communists eschewed traditional gender roles.

This focus on women came on the tail of a large shift in the gender composition of the civil service sector that occurred during the New Deal and World War II. By 1947, about 45 percent of federal civil service employees working in Washington, DC, were women, making it the most integrated employment sector of the time.

Some conservatives feared that women would expand agencies and programs in ways that would allow American women more independence and autonomy. In this way, female civil servants represented an economic and social threat to traditional notions of American masculinity tied to breadwinning. Loyalty tests became a mechanism for enforcing norms associated with gender and heterosexual relationships.

Our modern witch hunts

Like the early modern witch hunts and the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, our modern witch hunts are tied up in beliefs about gender, sex, and power. Trump’s presidential campaign was highly gendered; research shows he was successful at activating hostile sexism among members of his base, who responded favorably to his hypermasculine self-presentation.

President Trump’s supporters, including many women, were not deterred by his comments on the Access Hollywood tapes nor by the 22 allegations of sexual assault made against him prior to Election Day. Polling data also demonstrates that Trump’s supporters strongly prefer a masculine national culture — two-thirds feel that American society has grown “too soft and feminine.”

For these reasons, Trump’s victory seemed to many like a national referendum on unapologetic hypermasculinity. Mueller’s investigation, as “the greatest witch hunt in American history,” challenges the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, and in doing so also challenges the outcome of this referendum on American masculinity. 

In historical perspective, Trump inverts the typical gender power dynamic we associate with the witch hunt. Traditionally, targets of the witch hunt didn’t conform to strict norms associated with gender or heterosexuality, whereas Trump strongly adheres to both. Past targets were typically vulnerable and were singled out by people with strong bases of economic or political power. Trump isn’t vulnerable in this way; he’s amassed tremendous personal wealth and sits in the Oval Office. As such, he’s a sharp contrast to the historical targets of witch hunts.

He is also on the wrong side of the mob. If we fall back on our Hollywood tropes of the witch hunt for a moment, we might image townsfolk sharpening their pitchforks and forming a mob to drag the witch to her fate. But we often see Trump presiding over a crowd, and the crowd’s chants have a prosecutorial bent: “Lock her up!”

Many of Trump’s favorite scapegoats are women: Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Dianne Feinstein. He claims to be the target of a witch hunt while mobilizing a mob against his partisan enemies, many of whom happen to be women. In these moments, the president seems to have more in common with witch hunters than with witches.  

This shift in the gender dynamic associated with the witch hunt was also evident among supporters of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he faced accusations of sexual assault during his Senate confirmation hearings — such as the email blast from the Republican National Committee that included the phrase “STOP THE WITCH HUNT AGAINST JUDGE KAVANAUGH”; Sen. Lindsay Graham’s exasperated question, “Why don’t we dunk him in the water and see if he floats?”; and headlines like “Journalism Hits New Lows in Kavanaugh Witch Hunt.”

We can see the same pattern in the way the term is used to register opposition to the #MeToo movement. #MeToo is intimately tied in with Trump’s rise to power and has become a mechanism for women to register their disaffection with the president’s misogyny. Critics of the movement in Hollywood and the media have called it a “feminist witch hunt” that should be “left in the middle ages.”

Characterizing accusations of sexual assault as a witch hunt reframes the traditional power dynamic. Men in positions of authority are accused of sexual deviance or misbehavior, rather than women with comparatively less power. Labeling these accusations a witch hunt suggests they amount to an illegitimate power grab by women rather than a reflection of the widespread abuse of women by men in positions of power over them. In this respect, the term is used to support the status quo when it comes to sexual harassment — one in which sexual harassment is common and the men who harass women face few consequences for their misconduct.

What’s at (the) stake?

While the 2016 election was a peculiar inflection point for the witch hunt, in that Trump’s co-option and usage of the terms affects some things about its meaning and broader usage, it remains a gendered narrative. Like many of the conversations we’re having this election cycle about American politics, the witch hunt is about our collective struggles to navigate tensions associated with gender and power.

Unlike in the past, our modern witch hunts are often invoked defensively by men in positions of power and authority. Recent events show that men with political and economic power can often rely on the idea of witch hunts to work for them, not against them. The witch hunt still uses institutional authority to enforce traditional gender norms and power relations.

Erin C. Cassese is an associate professor of political science at the University of Delaware and an expert contributor at Gender Watch 2018. Find her on Twitter @ErinCassese.

Much has been written about the decline of organized labor across the country. Yet unions are showing surprising recent strength in an unexpected location — deeply red West Virginia — where a nine-day strike involving teachers in all of the state’s 55 school districts resulted in a 5 percent pay raise. Why is this happening there? Part of the story, it turns out, has to do with weak partisanship.

Donald Trump won 68.7 percent of the vote in West Virginia, making the state second only to Wyoming in terms of Trump support. At the more local level, support for Trump exceeded 80 percent in many southern counties where mining has played an important role in local economies.

Many people are familiar with the historic union presence in the state, which organized around the coal mining industry. However, West Virginia recently became a right-to-work state, signaling a weakening of union power in state politics. None of this suggests fertile ground for union action, yet the teachers strike has proven that a large-scale, coordinated collective action campaign can be successful — even under these conditions.

How have West Virginia’s teachers managed to pull off this large-scale collective action campaign? Partisanship is playing an important, but overlooked, role here. Partisanship in the state is in flux. Since 1994, the share of Republicans among the state’s registered voters has held steady at around 30 percent. At the same time, the Democratic share has dropped from 65 to 45 percent, while the independent share has soared from 4 percent to 21 percent.

Because it’s an anomaly in this era of hyperpartisanship, looking at labor in West Virginia is useful for thinking about the limits of partisanship and the cross-pressures that can work against party loyalty. Weak partisanship explains a number of developments in West Virginia politics that have been punchlines for the national media — such as Gov. Jim Justice’s high-profile switch from the Democratic to Republican Party in 2017 — or the source of consternation for Democrats nationwide, like Sen. Joe Manchin’s mixed voting record.

It also explains why a coordinated labor action is possible in West Virginia. People often rely on stereotypes about the region to explain these inconsistencies, but weak partisanship gets us further than redneck jokes and “what’s the matter with Kansas” types of arguments.

Why is partisanship weak in West Virginia? Historically, it’s been a solidly Democratic state, with an entrenched Democratic Party machine. Since 2000, the state has gone to Republican presidential candidates, while Democrats have been more successful in down-ballot races. Democrats held a 14-year trifecta from 2001 to 2014 — controlling the governorship, the House of Delegates, and the state Senate — and as of August 2017, this has shifted to a Republican trifecta.

These changes have led some party scholars to conclude that West Virginia is simply late to the Southern realignment. But the teachers strike points to a more incomplete realignment, suggesting that factors at the state level are working against an increasingly conservative state mood.

One of these factors may be incomplete party sorting. Research shows that party identification is brought in line with issue positions over time, resulting in more sorted or homogeneous parties. Having been until fairly recently a one-party state means that the fit between party and policy preferences isn’t strong or exact within West Virginia.

Mixed signals from party elites are likely a contributing factor. Labor in the state is generally aligned with the Democratic Party. Most of the unions endorsed Jim Justice for governor in 2016, when he was still a Democrat. But there are some key Republicans in the state who are also labor-aligned (such as Erikka Storch from Ohio County), which could contribute to some fracturing within expected coalitions.

Even in one-party states that have remained solidly Democratic, such as Rhode Island and Hawaii, a more conservative faction can gain control of the legislature, meaning that policymaking doesn’t align with party as neatly as one would expect when looking through a national lens.

The strike action was driven most intensely by teachers in West Virginia’s southern counties — in areas that used to be the state’s strongest Democratic base but are now among Trump’s most ardent supporters. Given this rapid partisan shift, it seems plausible that partisanship here is exceptionally weak, even by West Virginia standards. Both parties are activated here, seeing more at stake and facing more economic uncertainty than is present in much of the rest of the country. It’s also notable that the two Republicans who’ve been splitting with their party on some of the key votes surrounding teacher benefits and compensation in the state Senate (Karen Arvon and Kenny Mann) are both from southern counties.

The teachers unions first gained the support of Republican Gov. Jim Justice and the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. Both favored the 5 percent raise and have promised to work out a long-term solution to the health insurance problem. But they faced an uphill battle in the Senate, where Senate President Mitch Carmichael seemed determined not to concede the 5 percent.

Carmichael is likely to contest Justice for the governorship in the near future, and his opposition likely relates to his political ambitions. The conflict came to a head after a chaotic session Saturday evening, in which the Senate accidentally voted to support the 5 percent raise while thinking they were voting on a 4 percent raise, then walked it back. Yesterday, the Senate finally agreed to the 5 percent raise, which is widely viewed as a major victory for the teachers and other state employees, who will also see a pay increase.

The strike has captured national attention, and teachers in Oklahoma (which is also a right-to-work state) may soon follow the West Virginia teachers’ lead. Like West Virginians, Oklahomans have a long history of voting for Republican presidential candidates, but Republican control at the state level has only been consistent since 2010. In addition, four seats in the House and Senate flipped from Republican to Democrat in special elections in 2017, suggesting similar dynamics may be at play in both states.

It is not clear how long West Virginia’s weak partisanship will last or whether it extends to a wide range of issues. It’s possible, for example, that the heightened salience of abortion politics will push some independents into the Republican camp. But for now, the state remains fertile ground for those willing to do some unconventional political organizing. 

Erin C. Cassese and R. Scott Crichlow are associate professors of political science at West Virginia University.