Elizabeth Warren endured sexism at every step of her campaign

A woman cannot be elected president. If that statement was not true when Elizabeth Warren announced her intent to run, on New Years Eve 2018, it has become true now. With her exit from the race, the last serious female presidential candidate has now dropped out, and what was once a historically diverse field has narrowed to two very old white men, the former vice-president Joe Biden, 77, and the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, 78. The next president, it is now assured, will be a man. Again.

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The bruising contest has left the party divided and rancorous, with the result being that no matter who the Democratic nominee is, he will face not only the formidable resources of a moneyed Republican opposition, but also intense internal enmity within his own party. The internal factionalism and wild hatred within the Democratic party makes either candidate, be it Biden or Sanders, much more likely to lose in November. And the advanced ages of both of the two remaining major candidates means that even if one of them wins the presidency in November, it remains a real question whether they can feasibly run for a second term. And so, win or lose, the long, contentious and often hateful Democratic primary cycle will be repeated in four years for the 2024 cycle, further fracturing and handicapping the party, no matter what.

All of this could have been avoided if the media and the electorate were less blinded by cynicism, sexism and fear and more willing to see Warren for who she was – the most capable, competent and kindest candidate in the race.

As a woman, the Massachusetts senator always faced an uphill battle of double standards and misogynist resentment. She had to be competent but not condescending, cheery but not pandering, maternal but not frumpy, smart but not haughty. As she rose in the polls last summer and fall, she came under the kind of scrutiny that male frontrunners are not subjected to, and faced skepticism about her claims and character that male candidates do not face.

This is the fate of a lot of women who come close to attaining power, and empirical data backs up the phenomenon: writing in the Washington Post, the Cornell philosopher Kate Manne cited a 2010 Harvard study that found that women are viewed more negatively simply by seeking office. “Voters view male and female politicians as equally power-seeking, but respond to them quite differently,” Manne writes. “Men who seek power were viewed as stronger and tougher, while power-seeking women provoked feelings of disgust and contempt.”

As a result, all of Warren’s virtues were recast as vices in the public eye. Her impressive credentials and superlative intellect became out-of-touch elitism. Her joyousness and enthusiasm were cast as somehow both insincerely pandering and cringingly over-earnest. This kind of transformation of neutral or positive character traits into negative ones is not something that happens to men in similar positions. Sanders can aestheticize his practiced cantankerousness for laughs and sympathy without anyone asking if its a put-on. Biden can use slang from the 1930s without anyone ever questioning whether the ostentatious folksiness of his “no malarkey” messaging might be just a tad affected. But for Warren, every smile was interpreted as a sign of concealed hatred, of secret, nefarious motives.

Her policy efforts, too, were cast as a repudiation of her principles rather than as steps toward realizing them. Her attempt to transform Medicare for All from a symbolic rallying cry into a substantive, workable and affordable policy change that can be made in our time brought, paradoxically, accusations that she was less serious about the policy for trying to make it a reality. Her plans to break up tech monopolies, repair the damage to black wealth done by historic redlining policies and reshape massive federal spending projects to make them environmentally sustainable were all cast as signs of duplicity and lack of commitment to her stated values. Meanwhile, male candidates who did not have substantive plans to implement such policies were believed, largely uncritically, when they told the public that they would put them in place.

In this race, men’s statements – about who they are, what they value, what they would do as president – have largely been taken at face value, even when male candidates have made false or exaggerated claims or contradicted themselves. But Elizabeth Warren was never given the benefit of the doubt. Her flaws and missteps were magnified, and interpreted in ways disproportionate to their significance, while comparatively greater mistakes by male rivals were all but ignored. When she referred to her father as having worked as a janitor, a days–long news cycle asked why, if he was really a janitor, her brother had once referred to him as a “maintenance man”. That these are effectively the same did not matter: the irrelevant non-story was interpreted as a sign of her constitutional untrustworthiness.

Warren was said to be not really running for president, but running as a spoiler; not really happy to meet voters, but shamelessly pretending with her long selfie lines; not really committed to economic inequality, but merely devoting her life to it as some sort of long con. None of these accusations made much logical sense, but that didn’t matter, because they were backed up by the force of feeling – a very strong feeling, held by many men and women alike, that a woman seeking power and status just can’t be trusted.

The epistemic philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this tendency to disbelieve women, and to believe powerful men, “testimonial injustice”: the harm done to speakers when prejudiced listeners discount their credibility. Women face testimonial injustice in particular when they challenge or contradict men, as cultural tropes that depict women as conniving, scheming, and selfish can be mustered to make her seem less credible, him more believable. Fricker doesn’t apply her concept of testimonial injustice to gender conflict exclusively, but it is an obstacle that many women recount in their own experiences of gendered injustice: the sense that they cannot be believed, that they cannot achieve equal credibility and moral footing with men in the minds of their peers, that they will always be assumed to be either stupid or dishonest. Branded as dishonest even as she told the truth, duplicitous even as she kept her promises, Warren faced testimonial injustice on a huge scale, and it ultimately doomed her campaign.

Which brings us to the real moment, I think, that effectively killed Warren’s chances at the presidency: not the botched communications rollout of her Medicare for All plan, as many pundits have said, but her conflict with Sanders. In January, CNN reported that Warren and Sanders had met privately in late 2018 before announcing their candidacies, and that Warren had told close associates afterwards that Sanders had said something rude, inconsiderate and sexist to her: that he did not think a woman could defeat Donald Trump. Sanders says that’s not what he meant, but the two candidates’ accounts of the conversation are not incompatible. When Warren confirmed the report, the story both pointed to the troublesome misogyny of Sanders supporters and incited it: they began a gruesome, hateful and organized attack against Warren and her supporters. They called her a liar. They called her a snake, and made excessive use of the snake emoji. The online conversation veered from the typical competitive snarkiness into something darker and more hateful. Many of the things Sanders supporters said in response to this incident were deeply sexist and deeply cruel. A few of the things they said were threatening.

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In the aftermath, it became difficult, if not impossible, to say that you believed Warren about the conversation: any public statement of support for her or belief in her account was met with fierce harassment. Perhaps this is why few of them were made. The public consensus quickly became that she was lying about the conversation with Sanders, and that he was not lying. It is plausible, to me, to think that a white man in his late 70s, comfortable in his privilege and out of touch with his time, said something condescending and sexist to a woman in private. I find Warren’s account more plausible than the alternative offered by Sanders’ supporters, that a woman invented the story and leaked it to hurt an innocent man. But to those that make it, the feasibility of the accusation is not important. What is important, again, is that the accusation is backed up by feeling, the feeling that Warren owes something to this man, that she betrayed him, that she can’t be trusted.

Many people believed Warren was lying when she said that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t be president, and in politics, what gets believed is effectively indistinguishable from the truth, whether or not it has any bearing on fact. Maybe this is why powerful men, given so much credibility and so much benefit of the doubt, seem to have a strange power of pronouncement. They declare that a woman is deceitful and people stop trusting her; they declare that a woman is unelectable and people stop imagining the country she would shape; they say, even allegedly, even third-hand, that a woman can’t beat Trump, and people nod along, believing. And then they vote for a man.

Warren events became famous for the selfie lines, the sometimes hours-long rally-after-the-rally in which waiting voters and supporters could chat with campaign reps about the candidate, talk to one another about the issues they cared about and ultimately get a picture with Warren herself. By the time she dropped out, Warren had taken more than 100,000 of these pictures. The events developed a particular ritual, and one aspect was what Warren did when she met a small girl: she would kneel down to the child’s eye level and offer her a pinkie promise. “I’m running for president, because that’s what girls do,” she would tell them, and then ask them to remember.

The message to the children was that women can do anything, that when they grow up their talents won’t be ignored, their intelligence won’t be mocked, their horizons won’t be narrowed because of their sex. But if anything, Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy proved that this is not true. There is no way for a woman to be enough to overcome misogyny – there is no amount of smart she can be, there is no amount of good she can be, there is no point at which she will be so overpoweringly hardworking and so obviously qualified that people who do not want women to have positions of prominence and authority will have to give her one anyway. What happened to Elizabeth Warren is proof that women’s lives are still constrained and narrowed by sexism, that women’s talents and ambitions still matter less than men’s.

I don’t think that Elizabeth Warren lied very much during this campaign. I don’t think she lied about her principles, or her policy agenda, or about Bernie Sanders. If she ever lied, it was to those little girls.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist