Can we stop treating this lie seriously once and for all? We all know what’s really going on. The Republican attack on Pelosi is about conservative identity politics, full stop. It’s partly the same kind of ugly misogyny that has driven conservatives for years, and that comes out whenever the prospect of a woman wielding genuine power rears its head. Women who display ambition are judged harshly, particularly by conservatives; it’s no accident that Bernie Sanders, whose policy ideas are much more opposed to conservatism than Pelosi’s, inspires nothing like the venomous loathing on the right that Pelosi and Hillary Clinton do.


And it’s partly the us-versus-them conflict that has animated every Republican campaign for a half century. Democrats, they tell voters, aren’t like us. They don’t share our values; they’re elitist and alien and threatening. Those ideas can be expressed through issues, but what they’re about is cultural affinity: The Republican candidate is one of us, and the Democratic candidate is one of them.

Unfortunately, many reporters fall into the trap of believing the ludicrous claim that the attacks on Pelosi are at bottom disputes about whether there should be more tax cuts or what kind of health care system we should have, just as they believe that if the GOP is airing a thousand ads attacking Pelosi, then it must be working. Yet, there’s no evidence for that either. If you ask for such evidence, the answer that you’ll get is, “Well don’t you remember that race that the Democrat lost after Republicans ran all those ads featuring his picture alongside Pelosi’s?”

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Republicans will continue to attack Pelosi from now until November, because they have few better ideas for how to convince voters to send them back to Congress. In some places it might work to get their base to the polls; more often, in all likelihood, it won’t. But either way, we shouldn’t buy for a second that the reason they do it is because they’re trying to say something about policy.